Why are Republicans the GOP?

The Republican Party was originally founded to promote the policy of slavery containment. In 1860, the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidential election because the Democratic Party split their vote between three different candidates. After Lincoln was victorious in the American Civil War, the Republican Party became the respected competitor to the Democratic Party and former Whigs moved into the Republican Party.

The party continues to exist because in the aftermath of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's promotion of left-wing economic policies to remedy the Great Depression in the 1930s and President Lyndon B. Johnson's promotion of Civil Rights in the 1960s, the Republican Party became a repository for those who opposed the increasing left-ward direction of the country. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan served to effectively demarcate the conservative vision that would define the Republican Party until the mid-2010s. At that point, the Republican Party was effectively hijacked by the Trump Nativist Movement.