In the run up to the Democratic National Convention, set to begin at the Chicago Coliseum on July 7, 1896, no candidate was seen as an overwhelming favorite for the presidential nomination. The leading candidates were former Missouri congressman Richard P. Bland and former Iowa governor Horace Boies. "Silver Dick" Bland was seen as the elder statesman of the silver movement; he had originated the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, while Boies' victories for governor in a normally Republican state made him attractive as a candidate who might compete with McKinley in the crucial Midwest.