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Within the discipline of Anthropology, the analysis of national level politics has often received less focus than politics at the local or regional levels. This thesis seeks to redress this by exploring the Mexican presidential election of 2006 through the lens of F.G. Bailey’s neo-processual model of gamesmanship and strategy, in doing so this thesis looks at the use of normative rules as symbolic weapons. This thesis explores the phenomenon of symbolic competition for political legitimacy and notes that when normative rules are used as resources for symbolic competition they take on one of two particular forms: the informal normative rule and the formal normative rule. This thesis explores the use of the informal and formal normative rules and their effect upon the overall strategy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and Felipe Calderón of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) during the 2006 Presidential election.