How a simple electoral change could marginalize political extremism

By re-empowering the political center, fusion voting has the power to reorient American democracy away from authoritarianism

The center is not holding.

In the wake of the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, the doom loop of hyper-partisan warfare has intensified. The Trump administration is now cracking down on “the left.” Media companies are self-censoring and canceling critics of Kirk.

Not every Republican voter is on board with the new crackdown on free speech. But in a two-party system, there are only two options. There is no way to protest Republicans without voting for Democrats. And for too many, the Democrats are still firmly in the them category.

A two-party system requires both parties to be fully committed to the foundations of liberal democracy. Compromise is an essential value in liberal democracy. But compromise with illiberal authoritarian leaders who refuse to compromise is one-way capitulation. “Democracy is a system,” in Adam Pzreworski’s famous formulation, “in which parties can lose elections.” When that no longer holds, democracy breaks down.

The problem with a two-party system is that when the stakes become too high and the divisions become too wide, compromise becomes surrender. Voting with the other side is betrayal. This is the logic of a doom loop.

When there are only two sides, would-be dissenters have no easy off-ramp. Plenty of Republicans were queasy about Trump’s MAGA populism in 2016. But their only option was to support Democrats or vote for a third party (which would have helped Democrats). Most Republicans were left with little choice but to update their views to fit with their partisan identity. If Trump was bad, Democrats had to be worse.

But what if there were more than two parties? What if pro-democracy conservatives did not have to choose between being pro-democracy and MAGA? What if partisans did not have to psychologically justify their vote for the lesser of two evils by accepting the propaganda that the other side was truly evil—so evil that they must be crushed?

That would require more viable political parties. And the only way to get more viable political parties is to change the rules that block the formation of meaningful new ones.

Here, something interesting is happening outside of Washington. In three states—Wisconsin, Kansas, and New Jersey—small but serious groups of citizens, including some former elected officials, have formed new parties—United Wisconsin, United Kansas, and the New Jersey Moderate Party—whose aim is to break the hyper-partisan doom loop.

These new parties do not plan to run their own candidates, at least not initially. Instead, they want to cross-nominate major party candidates so they can support whoever is committed to compromise-oriented governing and the rule of law. In our current system of single-winner elections, cross-nominating candidates is the most effective way for citizens to organize electorally. Third parties running standalone candidates is a recipe only for wasted votes.

Specifically, all three new parties are asking state courts to relegalize fusion voting.

Fusion voting is an elegantly simple solution to breaking the binary that has made politics in America so disagreeable. It allows candidates to be nominated by more than one party, which allows voters to cast a more meaningful and impactful vote.

A Common Sense Party voter who supports a moderate Democrat for Congress over a MAGA fire-breather or a moderate Republican over a purity-at-all-costs Democrat is being smart, not wishy-washy. It’s a vote for a viable, major-party candidate but it comes under a principled, minor-party line, and the candidate fully understands that it’s a different sort of vote.

Fusion voting allows a new party with contrarian views to test itself in the political marketplace and to build a base without being trapped in the familiar wasted vote/spoiler vote that makes third parties irrelevant or counterproductive.

If they win their lawsuits (though the New Jersey case is on appeal), these new state parties could play a significant role in reversing the doom loop dynamics that are tearing apart our democracy. Even with the support of a modest 5% of voters for the more moderate candidate, an election that was a 10-point blow-out becomes a toss-up tie. That is a game-changer in today’s knife’s-edge partisan competition.

Fusion voting was once common in U.S. politics. Before the Civil War, the abolitionists used it brilliantly. After, fusion balloting expanded across the nation, creating a vigorous, multiparty system with minor parties for citizens who felt their interests were being disregarded by the two major parties. Those minor parties includes farmers’ parties, labor parties, temperance parties, suffragist parties, debtor parties, and Black parties.

But in the late 19th century, when state governments took over the printing of standardized “Australian” ballots, the dominant parties realized they could introduce rules to shut out competition. In the North and West, the dominant Republican Party detested the alliance of workers (Democrats) and farmers (Populists) that fusion made possible. Similarly, in the South, the dominant Democratic Party detested the bi-racial rural alliance of poor white farmers (Populists) and the even poorer ex-enslaved (Republicans) that was made possible by voting rules that allowed fusion parties to organize. In both cases, the minor party was culturally and sociologically different from its major-party partner; and, in both cases, the rules allowed parties that did not agree on everything to unite (that is, to “fuse”) on the things they did agree on.

It took a quarter-century to snuff out the flame of fusion voting and fusion parties in almost every state. It survived in New York because of a ruling by its highest state court that the ban violated the state constitution. But that was a one-off, and, by the early 1920s, most states had passed fusion bans. The United States, thus, is the only developed nation in which not one meaningful new national political party emerged in the 20th century. Ironically, the very system that allowed the Republican Party to develop when the incumbent parties were failing the nation in the 1850s is no longer available. From irony to tragedy, it seems.

Unless we act. Our problem today is a party-system problem. And a party-system problem by definition requires a party-system solution.

Fusion voting offers a realistic path forward: It hits the sweet spot where impact and feasibility meet. By allowing citizens to vote their values without wasting their votes, it creates space for new political identities to emerge and for dissenting voices to exercise meaningful electoral power. It creates the possibility of a powerful new center in civic and political life.

The emerging state-based parties in Wisconsin, Kansas, and New Jersey represent a crucial, practical step on the road to a multi-party and more proportionate democracy.

Now is the time to revive fusion and escape the trap of our broken two-party system. The center isn’t going to build itself back.

And: For more information on the campaign to repeal the bans on fusion, and break the two-party doom loop, subscribe to The Ticket, America’s No. 1 source of news on fusion voting.

Lee Drutman is the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.” He is a senior fellow at the think tank New America and the co-founder of the Center for Ballot Freedom, which advocates for fusion voting. He writes the newsletter Undercurrent Events.

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