The correct answer is 3. The Republican Party was dominant from the time of Abraham Lincoln because its policies appealed to a wide variety of constituents, including farmers, merchants and industrialists.
After the Civil War, the most difficult part of the historical process, known as Reconstruction, began, which helped to consolidate the dominance of the Republicans.
Thanks to the reforms of this process, and to the prohibition imposed on the whites of the South so that they could not vote until their past rebelliousness was forgiven and they accepted the legal changes; the republicans gained control of the southern states with the votes of the African-Americans, and that, added to their majority in the northern states, guaranteed them the control of power (almost as a single party). This situation lasted a few years.
When the military occupation of the South ended, and the white southerners regained their right to vote (and the African-Americans lost it in practice, because the white democrats of the South assaulted them so that they did not vote); the Republican Party almost disappeared in the South, but retained the majority in the North and the West. But as the population grew more in these two regions than in the South, the party remained in power.
From 1869 to 1933 all the Presidents of the United States were republicans, with only two exceptions: the democrats Grover Cleveland who ruled from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897, and Woodrow Wilson who ruled between 1913 and 1921. That is, subtracting the 16 years that these two democrats governed, were 48 years of republican government (and a greater and almost uninterrupted control of the Congress).
During this stage of almost absolute hegemony of the Republican Party, the country experienced a great economic expansion.