14 Facts About Republican Party

1. The Democratic Republican Party has typically held an overall edge in party identification since Gallup began polling on the issue in 1991.

2. In 2006, the White House supported and Republican Party-led Senate passed comprehensive immigration reform that would eventually allow millions of illegal immigrants to become citizens, but the House did not advance the bill.

3. The Republican Party-controlled House of Representatives failed to muster the two-thirds majority required to pass a Constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.

4. From that time on, the Republican Party joined the Democratic Party as the two main parties in the country.

5. The Republican Party held power for the better part of the next thirty-six years outside the South, interrupted only by Woodrow Wilson's two terms as president.

6. The Republican Party emerged directly out of the Free Soil Party in the North, a movement embraced at various times by such Democrats as Martin Van Buren, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency on the Free Soil Party ticket in 1848, and David Wilmot, a member of the US House of Representatives.

7. The Republican Party has gone against candidates of other political parties, such as the Libertarian Party and Green Party.

8. The Republican Party is based in Washington, DC A mostly Republican state is sometimes called a "red state".

9. Historically, the Republican Party has included a liberal-wing made up of individuals who like members of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party believe in the power of government to improve people's lives.

10. The Republican Party was at the center of Andrew Johnson's impeachment in 1868.

11. The Democratic Republican Party was largely controlled by pro-business Bourbon Democrats until 1896.

12. The Republican Party's transforming leader by 1980 was Reagan, whose conservative policies called for reduced government spending and regulation, lower taxes and a strong anti-Soviet Union foreign policy.

13. The early Republican Party had almost no presence in the Southern United States, but by 1858 it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.

14. The Republican Party has long depended on blatant appeals to racial fear and resentment.