An Analysis of the 2004 Republican Presidential Campaign
Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800 as a Republican, but the party which supported him was a far cry from today's G.O.P (Skopitz 1). He espoused liberalism, reducing the national debt and military expenditures, and was an avowed deist who rejected identification with any Christian denomination.
This liberal Republican Party elected Presidents James Madison and James Monroe in the next two decades. But it ran aground in 1824 when Federalist John Quincy Adams was elected by the House of Representatives after an Electoral College snafu.
The Republican Party then became identified with Abraham Lincoln after he freed the slaves and won the Civil War. But by the time Republicans had held a lock on the White House through the end of the 19th Century they focused less on in Southern Reconstruction and black civil rights due to political expediency. Support for laissez-faire economics (governmental non-interference in business) and corporate interests became a major plank in their platform, and has remained so to the modern day. This set up a potential conflict between Wall Street and Main Street. The concentrations of wealth in the nation's financial centers are often seen as the benefactors of Republican politics and these are often at odds with the interests of the small town middle class who have traditionally been necessary to Republican electoral success (Skopitz 2).
World War I and the ensuing Depression saw a swing back to the Democrats under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt until the victory of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. An increasingly anti-communist right wing in the party resented Eisenhower for neither undoing FDR's New Deal nor smashing world communism militarily. The fact that some Republican politicians sided with the racist Democratic demagogues of the South after the President's support for court-ordered desegregation when the Brown vs. Boar...