 | U.S. presidential election 1840: Encyclopedia II - U.S. presidential election 1840 - Nominations
U.S. presidential election 1840 - Nominations
U.S. presidential election 1840 - Democratic Party nomination
Van Buren, the incumbent, was renominated in Baltimore in May 1840.
U.S. presidential election 1840 - Whig Party nomination
For the first time in their history, the Whigs held a national convention to determine their presidential candidate. It opened in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on December 4, 1839, almost a full year before the general election with the three leading candidates being William Henry Harrison, a war hero and the most successful of Van Buren's opponents in the 1836 election; Winfield Scott, another general, active in skirmishes with the British in 1837 and 1838; and Henry Clay, the Whigs' congressional leader and former Speaker of the House.
Clay led on the first ballot, but circumstances conspired to deny him the nomination. First of all, the convention came on the heels of a string of Whig electoral losses. Harrison had managed to distance himself from the losses, but Clay, as the party's philosophical leader, could not. Had the convention been held in the spring, when the economic downturn had led to a string of Whig victories, Clay would have had much greater support. Secondly, the convention rules had been drawn up so that whoever won the majority of delegates from a given state would win all the votes from that state; this worked against Clay because he had almost the whole of Southern delegations, which meant that he didn't capture many votes from his opponents in the South, while he had large minority support in Northern delegations, which meant that his opponents poached many delegates from him in the North. Finally, several Southern states which supported Clay had abstained from sending delegates to the convention. As a result, the nomination went to Harrison.
Because Harrison was a Northerner, the Whigs needed to balance the ticket with a Southerner. They also sought a Clay supporter to help unite the party. After being turned down by several Southern Clay supporters, the convention finally found a Southern nominee who had faithfully supported Clay throughout the convention and who would agree to run: Senator John Tyler of Virginia.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Nominations", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
