Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants
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Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism ...

Chapter :  Introduction: Presidential Aspirant James K. Polk
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Conventions, 1831–2000, described the Democratic contest's climax as follows:

With a deadlock developing, sentiment for a compromise candidate appeared. James K. Polk, former speaker of the Tennessee House and former governor of Tennessee, emerged as an acceptable choice and won the nomination on the ninth ballot. It marked the first time in American history that a dark-horse candidate won a presidential nomination.

Upon reading this, questions abound. How did “sentiment for a compromise candidate” appear? Who is responsible for promoting “a compromise” among the delegates? How did Polk “emerge” when he was not in attendance? Further, how does an aspirant—prior to their formal selection (in a caucus, convention, or primary)—become “an acceptable choice” of their party?

The party development literature provides few insights into these questions because its focus tends to be on who participates in the nomination decision. Marjorie Randon Hershey, writing in a widely used undergraduate text, Party Politics in America, provided a fairly typical account:

For the first 110 years of the American republic, candidates for office were nominated by party caucuses and later, by party conventions. In both cases, it was the leaders and activists of the party organizations who chose the party's nominees, not the rest of the voting public…In the early years…Caucuses of like-minded partisans in Congress…nominate[ed] presidential and vice-presidential candidates…From then [1832] on, through the rest of the century, conventions were the main means of nominating presidential candidates…The Progressives [in the early 1900s] proposed a new way to nominate candidates. Instead of giving party leaders the power to choose, they suggested, let the voters select their party's candidates.

Although there is nothing inaccurate about this depiction of history, presidential aspirants are the objects of these sentences. As passive players in a selection drama, they seem to be acted upon by their parties. They are not the subjects acting, nor are they the stars of their own narratives.