Because the soft-money delegates comprised an overwhelming majority of the delegates, it appeared that all they had to do was adopt a free silver plank when the platform was brought before the convention. In that sense, the strategic situation was deceptively simple. Among the several things complicating the calculations of the silver leaders, the most important was whether preferences with respect to the monetary issue would change during the course of the convention. Because both gold and silver preferences seemed to be strongly held and, in many cases, bound by pledges imposed by the state conventions, they appeared to be stable as long as the monetary issue was isolated from other decisions. The problem was that other issues threatened to intrude.

The primary reason for this intrusion was that many men wanted to link their own interests to the silver issue. For this reason, measures that might safeguard the silver majority also created situations that might confer an advantage to one side or another in other decisions that would come before the convention. These advantages created links between preferences on the monetary issue and these other decisions. While some of these links would (rather pointlessly) strengthen preferences favoring silver, most would probably weaken silver sentiment in some way. Thus, the problem facing the managers of the silver movement was to find ways of safeguarding their majority without destabilizing the all-important silver preferences on which the majority rested.