Lincoln Dinner

A Lincoln Day Dinner (sometimes called Lincoln Dinner) is an annual celebration of the Republican Party and a fundraising event for Republican Party affiliated organizations at the county level. Traditionally, it is held on Lincoln's birthday (February 12) but due the shortage of well-known speakers it can be held any date each year. Its counterpart for the Democratic Party, is the annual Jefferson–Jackson Dinner.

The event is named after Abraham Lincoln, the first elected president of the Republican Party who helped found and shape the party, and is famous for having issued the Emancipation Proclamation which freed all slaves. Subsequent to the election of Ronald Reagan (1980), the most popular Republican president since Lincoln, some counties renamed the dinner after Reagan or have added his name to it, resulting in the names Reagan Dinner, Reagan Day Dinner, Lincoln–Reagan Dinner, etc. In particular, this trend is common in the Southern United States, where the Republican Party essentially absorbed what had previously been the Democratic Party's constituency in a process which began in the 1940s and then lasted through the 1990s (most of this process occurred during the 1960s, when White Southerners who had previously been Democrats began to abandon the party, especially in national elections, because of misgivings about the Democratic Party's increased support for African-American civil rights), resulting in the present situation that most of those White Southerners suspicious or disapproving of President Lincoln and sympathetic to the Confederacy have switched from being Democrats to Republicans.[1] Commenting on this difference in 2005, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joked, "We don't do Lincoln Day Dinners in South Carolina. It's nothing personal, but it takes a while to get over things," referencing the fact that Lincoln's election led to the secession of South Carolina and other states, which caused the American Civil War.[2]