The Senate slogged through a tense overnight session that has now dragged into Tuesday morning, with Republican leaders ...

The 19th-century Whigs present an appealing prototype for moderate Democrats seeking a way out of their paralysis and for Republicans impatient with, or horrified by, the Trump ascendancy.

Some Whig Party postelection recriminations may sound familiar to modern ears. Many Whigs, Holt notes, blamed “Democratic fraud and demagoguery” for their loss.

Six years later, the Whig Party was no more, and the familiar Democrat-versus-Republican contests became the norm. In subsequent decades, the two major parties cemented their hegemony.

Instead, the Whigs mounted the first modern presidential campaign, with nationwide rallies and speeches, that used the attacks to catapult “Granny” Harrison into the White House.

Alex Wilde, a 20-year veteran of the Army National Guard who served two tours in Iraq, said he was drawn to the Whig party by the high rate of recent veterans joining the Modern Whigs.

Whig partisan William Henry Seward, who would go on to become Lincoln’s secretary of state, was content to let his party die: “Let, then, the Whig party pass.

The Democratic party, though now national, if left to the sole opposition of the Republican, which is a sectional party, must inevitably, sooner or later, itself degenerate into sectionalism.