Introduction

A majority of Americans desire more electoral choice than that offered by our current two-party Democrat-Republican duopoly.¹ That duopoly arises principally from voting rules enacted by those parties themselves, not our Constitution. Among the most important of these rules is a commitment to single-member districts for democratic elections and the award of plenary power of any elective office to whatever candidate wins a plurality of votes. Such a “single-member district, winner takes all” system discourages party organization of candidates with values held by a minority, and voters holding those values will be reluctant to express them at the ballot box—in both cases for fear of “wasting” votes on candidates with no chance of winning or “spoiling” an election by imprudently choosing the “perfect” over the “acceptable” and ensuring victory of their least desired candidate. At times of broad national consensus on national identity and lowered policy differences among the parties, this duopoly can be functional for popular democratic government. When those conditions do not exist, however, and especially when the electorate is roughly equally divided between sharply opposing views of identity, it is a guarantor of everyday dysfunction and unstable swings in policy.²

Current Kansas politics suffers from such dysfunction, along with the representation-suppressing effects on minority political sentiment familiar from the single-member-district plurality-voting-winner-takes-all (SMDPV) system at the root of the two-party duopoly. But it wasn’t always so. For a long stretch of its history, Kansas had “fusion” voting, where multiple parties aligned to nominate the same candidate for office. Without disturbing the basics of an SMDPV system, this device increased the representativeness of the system by removing much of the wasted vote and spoiler problems that otherwise suppress the voicing of minority political values. It also improved the health of the overall system by underwriting multiparty coalition-building of the sort typically needed for effective governance.

Fusion voting’s use in Kansas is particularly illustrative of its potential to foster fluid political association and elevate new and pressing issues to the political mainstream. In the state’s first presidential election, Kansas voters cast almost 80 percent of their ballots for the fusion ticket (“National Union”) of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, and Andrew Johnson, a Democrat. High levels of participatory democracy and voter enthusiasm in Kansas continued in the three decades after the Civil War, reaching its apex in the 1890s with the union of the Populist and Democratic Parties in Kansas, which represents one of the most successful fusions of disparate parties in the nation’s history. In the 1892 and 1896 elections, the fused Populist and Democratic Parties captured Kansas’s entire executive branch, won the state’s electoral votes in the presidential election, elected a majority to the state supreme court, and sent multiple representatives to Congress, including a U.S. Senator. Such electoral success by a minor party went unmatched elsewhere in the United States.

Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, Republican lawmakers—wishing to eliminate political competition—banned fusion and ushered in one-party control. Republicans have governed the state unchallenged for most of the past 120 years, and political evolution or competition has become all but nonexistent. Recognizing this reality, in March 2024, the newly formed political party United Kansas announced its intention to revive fusion voting, pledging to give its nomination to the major party candidate that best represents its values in a given race to “allow new voices and ideas in the political arena.”³ This development presents an opportunity to examine the history of fusion voting in Kansas and its use as a mechanism of political expression and cross-partisan collaboration.

What follows is a narrative of Kansas’s political history and its experience with fusion voting. First, we describe how the more fluid fusion-permissive system of early Kansas allowed for dynamic political alliances and realignments. Such dynamism allowed for a more representative and responsive political system for Kansans. Second, we detail how fusion was codified into Kansas law with the implementation of the Australian Ballot. Third, we explore how the electoral success of fusion led to a calculated attack on its legality by the party, which was defeated by the fusion strategy. The fusion ban ended the dynamic political alliances that had shaped Kansas politics since the Lincoln-Johnson ticket and effectively eliminated the risk of diverse governing coalitions. With fusion outlawed, we then detail the effective one-party Republican state and how supporters of other parties and candidates were banished to the periphery of Kansas politics.