Jackson Michigan

Wisconsin And Michigan: Republican Party Beginnings And Ultimate Battleground In 2024 Presidential Election!

The Republican Party was founded in 1854, in the upper Midwest, with its founding on March 20 in Ripon, Wisconsin, and its first party convention held in Jackson, Michigan on July 6.

It was a reform oriented party, opposed to the expansion of slavery, and would dominate in the United States over the next seven decades until the rise of the Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Interestingly, the Republican National Convention in July will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so in a sense a return to the roots of the party of 170 years of history.

However, the Republican Party of history basically can be seen as dead, gone, unlikely to be revived in a form reminiscent of the party’s history, as Donald Trump and his MAGA followers have totally destroyed the roots and the base of the historical Republican Party!

This is the ulimate battleground in the Presidential Election of 2024, as whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins the upper Midwest ultimately will determine who is elected to the Oval Office!

Two Different Directions: Wisconsin State Republican Party And Nevada State Republican Party

The internal battle over the future of the Republican Party is in full swing, as we come up to the 160th anniversary of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, which actually took place on March 20. with a formal organization in Jackson, Michigan, on July 6.

For a long time, the Ripon Society has existed as an organization for “liberal,” mainstream Republicans, but of course, there is no such thing anymore known as “liberal” Republicanism. Even those who might consider themselves “liberal,” avoid use of that term like a plague!

The Wisconsin GOP, which once included “Mr. Progressive” Robert La Follette, Sr., and his brilliant sons Robert La Follette, Jr. and Philip La Follette, now, however, has become an extremist group on the far right, under Governor Scott Walker and Senator Ron Johnson, and the proposal is to add to their state party documents the concept of the right of the state to promote “secession’ if felt necessary, a sign of the old, ugly language that led to the Civil War and the loss of two thirds of a million men in combat, the greatest single tragedy in the nation’s history!

At the same time, the Nevada State Republican Party has made the decision to remove from its platform for 2014 two issues that the Christian Right has been promoting since their rise in the party apparatus nationwide since the late 1970s—abortion and gay rights and marriage. No longer will the party promote government intervention in the lives of women and their personal decisions about their bodies and reproductive rights. And no longer will they get in the way of a person’s happiness, as to his or her basic human rights, including marriage, and the right to one’s sexual orientation without any discrimination by government!

In the long run, what Nevada Republicans are doing will, if pursued elsewhere, lead to a long term revival of the GOP, while if Wisconsin is followed, it is the death knell and demise of the party of Lincoln, TR, and Ike!