Most people agree that the 2016 election marked a turning point for the Republican Party.

Whatever the impact of this election is a long term, the changes we've seen today are part of a longer historical trajectory that took the GOP from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Donald Trump.

So how did it happen? How did a party that was despised in the American South in the 1940s come to dominate the region a few

decades later. And where do great presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower,

and Ronald Reagan fit with him this story? In today's episode, we're joined by Dr. Heather

Cox Richardson of Boston College to get the answer.

I'm Ben Sawyer.

I'm Bob Crawford, and this is the Road to Now.

That's right, and today's Road to Now has me back in Nashville, Bob back in his home in

North Carolina, and in the new year, and with a great episode today, talking to Heather

Cox Richardson about the history of the Republican Party.

Something that's been very important to Ben and I since we began this show in May was a way of looking at the evolution of the Republican Party from the 1850s to present day.

The president-elect, Donald Trump, is a Republican,

but he's a very different Republican than Abraham Lincoln was,

and he's a very different Republican than George W. Bush was.

And so in the media and in culture,

we tend to look at Donald Trump as a character, as a, you know, for lack of a better expression, a lot of the country and the world looks at him almost as a cartoon character.

So it's important for us to put him into a historical perspective and look at him as a historical character because he is

about to be the 45th president of the United States.

That's right. And it's interesting because a lot of times we looked at this and I think a lot

of us saw the Republican Party as being in crisis this year. And we saw the Democratic Party

is kind of consolidating its power.

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