The impact of presidential coattails on the legislative party system is a highly intuitive idea. The coattails effect is believed to depend on the number of presidential candidates and the size of the presidential prize. This article proposes a different way of understanding this relationship. We argue that the strategic behavior of political parties and the way in which the number of presidential contenders shapes the legislative party system can only be predicted for an intermediate range of presidential power. Outside this range the effect is indeterminate. We test our proposition on democracies with direct presidential elections from 1945-2011. Our results confirm that the number of presidential candidates is an important determinant of the legislative party system and show that whether or not legislative elections are held close to presidential elections has little influence on party-system fragmentation in countries with directly elected presidents.