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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Yet the historical facts reveal Polk's active engagement in securing the nomination, his many strategic maneuvers, and the consequences of his success on the general election. Thus, political science is failing to capture the nature of the selection process and the dynamics of past presidential elections when it generalizes about history. This study attempts a corrective.7

Second, when presidential aspirants are included as “key actors” in party nomination contests, these descriptions focus almost exclusively on the modern “candidate-centered” period, after primaries became meaningful contests and/or after the adoption of the McGovern-Fraser reforms in the 1970s. This emphasis leads to what is almost certainly an incorrect inference about those who have vied for the highest office in American politics—that past aspirants were less ambitious and/or were not as self-interested as today's presidential aspirants. For example, Hershey did not discuss candidates as subjects in Party Politics in America until she arrived at the current nomination process, at which point she then investigated the topic thoroughly:

Every presidential nomination in both parties since 1956 has been won on the convention's first ballot, and since 1968, that first-ballot nominee has always been the winner of the most delegates in the primaries and caucuses. How does a candidate get to that coveted spot?…Almost all serious candidates begin several years before the election to take polls, raise money, identify active supporters in the states with early primaries, and compete for the services of respected consultants. Their aim is to win a place for themselves in the group of candidates who are described by the media as “front-runners”…This process has become so important to the eventual result that it has come to be called the invisible primary or the “money primary.”

Again, even though her multiple-page description is accurate, a gap exists in the literature about what aspirants did before primaries were meaningful. Did they always “begin several years before the election?” Is it more difficult to persuade modern-day journalists of one's “front-runner” status or old-time party bosses? Have the requirements for “front-runners”