Yet this defeat in a presidential election was NOT what killed the Whig Party. Rather it died because its voters decamped to new, non-Whig, anti-Democratic parties in the local, congressional, and state elections of 1853, 1854, and 1855 before the next presidential election in 1856. By that election, the Whig Party was already a hollowed-out shell. A host of splinter parties arose in those off-year contests, but two were most important. Of these, the more well-known is the Republican Party, which emerged in the North to protest enactment of Democrats’ Kansas-Nebraska Act in May 1854.