On March 17, Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed SB 13, which moves the petition deadline for newly-qualifying parties to November of the year before the election. Herbert is a Republican. The Republican Party was formed on July 6, 1854, and went on to win a plurality in the U.S. House in the fall 1854 elections. In 2000 the United States State Department filed a protest with Azerbaijan for its new election law that required parties to be in existence for six months before the election.
It is likely a lawsuit will be filed against this new law, perhaps as early as 2018. No reported decision anywhere in the U.S. upholds a deadline for a new party petition earlier than April of an election year. It is true that the lawsuit Stein v Chapman, against the Alabama March deadline, did not result in a victory, but that was because all the plaintiffs’ evidence was excluded due to a technicality.
Your claim about the elections for the 35th Congress are not true, even if you literally limit it to elections held in 1854.
In fact, even if you lump all the different party names that those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act used, the Republicans finished fourth.
81 Democrats
55 Whigs
52 American
46 Anti-Nebraska, Republicans, People’s, Free Soil/Democrat, and Independent Whigs
Professor Kenneth Martis, lead author of “Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the US Congress 1789-1989,” has the 1854 election data on page 109. He shows 100 Opposition, 83 Democratic, 51 American. “Opposition” meant opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and to the Franklin Pierce administration concerning that act. Martis and his team of associates compulsively researched the party affiliations of every member of congress.
The Clerk of the US House agrees exactly with Martis. See history.house/Institution/Party-Divisions/Party-Divisions, page 3.