Had John C. Fremont not run as a Republican in 1856, there would probably would have been no Lincoln in 1860. The Republican Party formed in the 1850s with the collapse of the Whig Party. The central unifying issue Republicans shared was abolition of slavery. It unified people across political parties, bringing them together into something new. In the early 1990s, fueled by a single billionaire's calls for reform, the Reform Party sprang up under H. Ross Perot. He won 18.9 percent of the popular vote. The Reform Party, unlike the Republicans in the 1800s, was one man's party,...