Republican Party
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50 free Republican Party trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Republican Party began in the 1850s as a coalition of people who agreed on one thing: slavery should not spread into the western territories. Within a few years it had put Abraham Lincoln in the White House, and it has been one of the two major parties in the United States ever since. This quiz follows the party from its founding meetings through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the split of 1912, the long mid-century spell out of power, and the landslides, scandals and realignments of the modern era. Along the way it covers the party's symbol and nickname, its presidents and its losing nominees, its trailblazers in Congress and on the bench, and a few famous faces from film and music who ran under its banner. The questions are written as history, not argument, so they suit civics classes, election-night parties and trivia hosts of any political stripe. Every answer comes with a short explanation of the story behind it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal has symbolized the Republican Party since an 1874 Harper's Weekly cartoon?
Elephant
The elephant stood among political animals panicked by a donkey in a lion's skin, a scene the cartoonist borrowed from one of Aesop's fables.
Q 02The abbreviation GOP, a nickname Republicans have carried since the 1870s, stands for which phrase?
Grand Old Party
Grand Old Party grew out of an 1875 line in the Congressional Record praising the gallant party that had defended the Union. A Cincinnati newspaper changed the adjective a year later.
Q 03Which color have US news outlets used for Republican-won states on election maps since 2000?
Red
Red only stuck after the long 2000 count kept the electoral map constantly on screen; until 1996, NBC had colored Republican states blue.
Q 04Which Oscar-winning director spoke to an empty chair on stage at the 2012 Republican National Convention?
Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood largely improvised the routine, with the chair standing in for President Barack Obama, and about 30 million people watched it live.
Q 05Which Republican served as both vice president and president without being elected to either office?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford was a congressman from Michigan when he was appointed to fill a vacant vice presidency in December 1973, and he moved up again eight months later.
Q 06Which suffragist was arrested in Rochester in 1872 after voting a straight Republican ticket for president?
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 at her trial and told the judge she would never pay it. She never did, and the authorities let the matter drop.
Q 07Which Republican president later became Chief Justice, the only person to hold both offices?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft had long sought the job and got it in 1921, eight years after leaving the White House, when Warren G. Harding appointed him.
Q 08Which World War II general won the White House as a Republican in 1952 after 20 years of Democrats?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower went on to sign the 1956 bill authorizing the Interstate Highway System, still the largest road-building program in American history.
Q 09Which Republican president, once a Democrat and a union leader, won re-election in 49 states?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan lost only Minnesota, his opponent's home state, and the District of Columbia in 1984, taking 525 electoral votes.
Q 10Which 1863 document from Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, declared slaves in rebel states free?
Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the ten states still in rebellion, so it left nearly 500,000 people enslaved in the loyal border states.
Q 11In which Wisconsin town did activists meet in a schoolhouse in 1854 and propose the name Republican?
Ripon
Ripon's Little White Schoolhouse, built only a year earlier, is now a National Historic Landmark for its role in the party's founding.
Q 12Which law, opening western territories to slavery by local vote, sparked the Republican Party's founding?
Kansas–Nebraska Act
The Kansas–Nebraska Act scrapped the 1820 line that had kept slavery out of the northern territories, and the outrage in the North pulled the existing parties apart.
Q 13Which western explorer nicknamed the Pathfinder became the first Republican nominee for president in 1856?
John C. Frémont
Q 21Which Tennessee Democrat, elected on Lincoln's 1864 ticket, was impeached by a Republican-led House in 1868?
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson kept his office by a single vote in the Senate, after trying to fire his secretary of war in defiance of Congress.
Q 22Which Union general, who accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender, won the presidency as a Republican in 1868?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant was nominated unanimously on the first ballot, and as president he signed the bill that created the Department of Justice.
Q 23Which Republican faction, led in the House by Thaddeus Stevens, demanded full civil rights for freed slaves?
The Radicals
John C. Frémont had led five expeditions into the West, but the fame was not enough: he lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan.
Q 14Which party, Abraham Lincoln's own while in Congress, collapsed in the 1850s as members joined the Republicans?
The Whigs
The Whigs won the presidency twice, in 1840 and 1848, and lost both men to death in office before the party broke apart over slavery.
Q 15The Republican Party's founders chose its name in the 1850s to echo the party led by which Founding Father?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson called his 1790s organization the Republican Party too, though it is remembered today as the Democratic-Republican Party.
Q 16Which New-York Tribune editor helped found the Republican Party, then ran for president against it in 1872?
Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley may even have coined the party's name, yet in 1872 he was the nominee of both the Liberal Republicans and the Democrats, and lost in a landslide.
Q 17The 1856 Republican platform paired slavery with which other practice Congress should ban in the territories?
Polygamy
Polygamy meant the Mormon settlements of Utah, and Congress banned plural marriage in the federal territories six years later.
Q 18Which Michigan city hosted the first statewide Republican convention, held in an oak grove in July 1854?
Jackson
Jackson's grove stood on the edge of town at the time, and the spot has been known as Under the Oaks ever since.
Q 19Which New York senator led the first ballot at the 1860 Republican convention but lost to Lincoln?
William Seward
William Seward became Lincoln's secretary of state instead, and in 1867 he negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia.
Q 20Which city built a temporary wooden hall called the Wigwam to host the 1860 Republican convention?
Chicago
Chicago had no hall large enough, so the wood-frame Wigwam went up to seat ten thousand delegates, guests and observers.
The Radicals thought Lincoln's terms for the defeated South too lenient, and they went on to fight his successor bitterly over Reconstruction.
Q 24Which Mississippi Republican became the first African American to sit in the United States Senate in 1870?
Hiram Revels
Hiram Revels was a minister who had helped organize two regiments of Black troops for the Union, and the Senate seated him on a party-line vote of 48 to 8.
Q 25Which change to the Constitution, pushed through by Republicans in 1870, barred denying the vote because of race?
Fifteenth Amendment
The Fifteenth Amendment was a compromise: Republicans settled on its wording only after rejecting more sweeping guarantees of the right to vote.
Q 26Which 1862 law, long demanded by Republicans and signed by Lincoln, gave settlers 160 acres of public land?
Homestead Act
The Homestead Act had been blocked for years by Democrats in Congress and passed only after the Southern states left the Union. About 1.6 million homesteads followed.
Q 27Which Massachusetts Republican was caned on the Senate floor in 1856 after an anti-slavery speech?
Charles Sumner
Charles Sumner was attacked by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, and the outrage in the North helped turn the struggling new party into a major force.
Q 28Which Republican president won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt mediated the peace talks held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, four years after becoming the youngest president in history at 42.
Q 29Which nickname did the breakaway Progressive Party of 1912 take from its candidate's boast of strength?
Bull Moose
The Bull Moose ticket outpolled the official Republican nominee in 1912, but both finished well behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Q 30Which Harper's Weekly cartoonist, credited with the modern Santa Claus, gave Republicans their animal symbol?
Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast also popularized the Democratic donkey, and his drawings were instrumental in the downfall of New York's Boss Tweed.