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

past the vice presidential spot to the top of the ticket. To win the nomination, however, Polk had to advantageously meet the moment—make his luck.⁵

This study is about those moments. It is about understanding how presidential aspirants turn political conditions and exogenous events to their favor in order to promote their ambitions. How aspirants game systems, craft rhetoric, and design their political strategies to win, first, their party's nomination and, second, the presidency. How they strive and maneuver—lead factions, start fights, build coalitions, court allies, defeat competitors, and grapple with contingency. In sum, it is about how aspirants learn and play at the game of presidential politics. Broadly speaking, this study extends and refines arguments made in the literature about the perception and creativity of some—but not all—ambitious politicians; the ways in which the political parties are instrumentally (or “functionally”) designed (and altered) to serve the electoral and governance needs of elite politicians; and the intricate connections between time, opportunity, and success in politics. In doing so, it claims that even though the Constitution established the ground rules for the competition, aspirants are primarily responsible for the development of the presidential selection process and the evolution in the ideological trajectories and the coalitional bases of the political parties. Hence, this study views parties as politician-centered coalitions, presidential aspirants as a critically important group of politicians, and presidents as an elite subset of aspirants: winners.⁶

Prior to detailing the organization and claims of this research and its linkages to some of the recent debates in political science, it is instructive to review Polk's thirty-two-day-long sprint down the stretch of the 1844 nomination race, which led to his “dark horse” victory and structured the subsequent election contest against Clay. The reasons for doing this are threefold.

First, much of the literature depicts “dark horses”—Polk especially, because he was “the first”—as nominees chosen by party leaders, as though these aspirants had scant interest or influence in their own selection. For example, Congressional Quarterly's National Party