A broad consensus exists among political experts that American democracy is in a brittle and threatened place, with an increasingly dysfunctional government that has lost the trust and goodwill of the American people. Though there are certainly many causes for this moment of crisis, the overwhelming balance of expert judgment places hyper-partisan polarization at the core.

The reasons why hyper-partisan polarization is a threat to the stability of democracy are straightforward and simple to understand. Democracy depends on a shared foundation of fairness around elections. Winning parties must win graciously and not use their newly acquired powers to prevent their opposition from effectively challenging them in the next election. Losing parties must acknowledge that they have lost and acknowledge the legitimacy of the election. When this shared sense of fairness and fair play breaks down, violence or the threat of violence becomes the alternative. One pithy definition of democracy is that it is a system in which parties can lose elections.¹ Democracies die when one side believes that winning the next election is so important that it is willing to use extra-democratic means to achieve its goal.²

A core problem with hyper-partisan polarization is that it has a reinforcing feedback quality, what I’ve called “the two-party doom loop.”³ That is, as the parties move further apart from each other, they engage in more aggressive hardball tactics and rhetoric. These aggressive hardball tactics and rhetoric further push them away from each other. This occurs both at the elite level and the mass level, both of which feed back on each other. The more partisan elites demonize their opponents to win elections, the more partisan voters punish leaders who compromise with “the enemy.” The less compromise, the more that the trust, goodwill, and cooperation necessary for governing break down. All of these processes feed on each other in an escalating spiral of tit-for-tat. What may begin as a small slight can reverberate through intensifying grudges and retaliations.

Democracy depends on all participants accepting the legitimacy and fairness of core democratic processes. What distinguishes the current moment is not simply the intensity of disagreement, but the systematic erosion of confidence in the institutional mechanisms that have historically resolved disputes. This erosion follows a predictable pattern: Hyper-partisan polarization creates “doom loops” in democratic institutions through escalating cycles of tit-for-tat retaliation, where each party’s actions—whether actual or merely perceived—justify increasingly aggressive countermeasures by the opposition. Each escalation becomes evidence justifying the next, and appeals to norms or procedural fairness lose traction when both sides believe the stakes are existential.

Two domains illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity: election administration and legislative redistricting. Both reveal how hyper-partisan polarization transforms routine governmental functions into battlegrounds where unilateral restraint equals political suicide, yet mutual escalation corrodes democratic legitimacy itself.

The 2020 presidential election shattered the professional norms that had historically insulated election administration from partisan warfare. The systematic campaign to overturn the results, culminating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, represented not merely an assault on a single election outcome, but an attack on the institutional legitimacy of election administration itself.

The tactics deployed in 2020 have become permanent features. Between 2020 and 2024, at least 35 county election officials across eight states voted to refuse or delay certification of election results.⁴ In 2022, 22 county officials in battleground states voted to delay certification.⁵ Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative documented approximately 170 election-related incidents of threats or harassment targeting officials nationwide.⁶ The human toll: 39 percent of local election officials left their positions between 2018 and 2024, compared to a 28 percent baseline.⁷

Simultaneously, state legislatures engaged in a legislative arms race. Between 2021 and 2024, states enacted 79 restrictive voting laws and 202 expansive laws.⁸ Red states pass restrictions claiming to prevent fraud; blue states respond with expansions claiming to protect access; and each side cites the other’s actions as justification.

This creates a challenge for election administrators. Following established procedures exposes them to primary challenges, death threats, and accusations of partisan bias from their own party. But bending to partisan pressure destroys their credibility and invites retaliation from the opposing party. Both sides see themselves as victims of the same issue, even if the situations are not entirely equal. Republican election officials who certified Biden’s 2020 victory faced extraordinary pressure and threats. Democratic election officials who implement voter ID requirements face accusations of voter suppression. Both parties perceive the other as ruthlessly wielding election administration for partisan advantage, and both perceptions contain elements of truth.

Both parties aggressively gerrymander when they control the process, both cite the other’s gerrymandering as justification, and both recognize that unilateral disarmament constitutes political suicide.

Following the 2020 census, both parties produced gerrymanders that independent analysts graded as constitutional failures. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project assigned “F” grades to Republican-drawn maps in Texas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and to Democratic-drawn maps in New York, Illinois, and Oregon.⁹ State courts struck down partisan gerrymanders by both parties. In North Carolina, Republican-drawn districts virtually guarantee a 10-3 congressional delegation in a 50-50 state. In Illinois, Democratic-drawn maps reduced Republicans to fewer than four seats for the first time since before the Civil War.

Multiple Democratic-controlled states voluntarily adopted independent redistricting commissions, believing procedural fairness might prove contagious. No Republican-controlled states followed suit. In Colorado, the independent commission produced a map that resulted in Republican election-denier Lauren Boebert winning by fewer than 600 votes—a district Democrats could have eliminated.¹⁰ In New York, courts struck down the Democratic gerrymander, and court-appointed maps made three Democratic districts competitive.¹¹ Republicans won four seats by five points or less in 2022.

The escalation reached a new level in 2025. Texas Republicans passed mid-decade redistricting seeking to shift five congressional seats.¹² California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed retaliatory redistricting: “If we don’t do it, they will do it, they’ve done it, and they will continue to do more.”¹³ New York Governor Kathy Hochul echoed: “Texas, knock it off, we’ll knock it off, and let’s get back to governing.”¹⁴ Virginia codified tit-for-tat retaliation in a constitutional amendment.¹⁵

Virginia State Senator Scott Surovell, defending his state’s 2025 constitutional amendment allowing retaliatory mid-decade redistricting, argued that maintaining fair processes could “amount to unilateral disarmament.”¹⁶ Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog historically opposed to all gerrymandering, announced it would not “call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarian efforts.”¹⁷

The two-party “doom loop” operates through mutual perceptions of ruthlessness grounded in reality. Democrats correctly perceive ruthless Republican gerrymandering. Republicans correctly perceive aggressive Democratic gerrymanders. Each party views the other as willing to abuse power, while seeing itself as merely responding in self-defense. Both beliefs can be true at the same time.

This creates a subversion dilemma: When both parties believe the other will break democratic norms, unilateral adherence to the rules becomes a sucker’s game. But when both sides color outside the lines, trust in the system erodes and institutions lose legitimacy. The dilemma runs on perception—it matters less whether the opposing party is actually subverting processes than whether substantial majorities believe they are. This changes procedural questions into existential ones. “How should we draw district lines?” becomes “Will my party survive if I don’t rig the map?”

For election administrators and secretaries of state, this creates an impossible situation. You cannot unilaterally fix the problem by being scrupulously nonpartisan. You watch your colleagues engage in behaviors you consider destructive, while your own coalition pressures you to respond. You face threats whether you resist these pressures or accede to them. The professionalization you have built has become politically coded rather than neutral.

The fundamental problem is that hyper-partisan polarization transforms institutions dependent on mutual restraint into arenas of mutual defection. Neither party can unilaterally step back without suffering electoral consequences that seem existential. The doom loops are structurally embedded: Escalation begets escalation, and the people operating within these institutions cannot fix this through individual virtue.

In earlier times, a large enough number of moderate representatives and senators would have pushed back against these radicalizing tendencies to keep them at bay. These moderates served as the core of a broad cross-partisan governing coalition able to work out compromises on important and pressing policy concerns. But the slow and steady collapse of the political center has decreased the number of compromise-oriented moderates in Congress (and in many state legislatures) to hold back the forces of extremism and conflict.

To understand why structural changes are necessary, we need to understand why the current two-party system cannot and will not self-correct without institutional changes. And to understand that we need to first explore how and why the political center has collapsed.

The collapse of the political center is a well-known but poorly understood development in American politics over the last four decades. It is well known because everyone knows that “moderates” in elected office have disappeared. But it is poorly understood because few people have a compelling explanation for why it happened, and even fewer understand why there was moderation to begin with. Most common explanations focus on epiphenomena of the changes, such as changes in the culture of Washington, or the failure of individual members to get to know each other's families and spend time together as people. But these changes are downstream from the simple fact that in an earlier era, the parties were overlapping coalitions in which considerable bipartisanship emerged from the fact that many representatives and senators held shared views that crossed party lines, and the parties were so ideologically diverse and heterogeneous that it was impossible for any one person to impose a “party line.”

The simplest way to understand this transformation is that we went from something more like a four-party system (with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) into a two-party system (with just liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans). In the four-party system, coalitions were flexible, issue-dependent, and thus multi-dimensional, with few permanent enemies and many possible allies on all issues. In the two-party system, there were only two coalitions, locked in a zero-sum struggle along a single “us-vs-them” dimension.

In essence, the American two-party system is now the purest version of itself, a two-party system in which the two parties are distinct, non-overlapping coalitions that offer extremely distinct alternatives to the American people. However, contrary to expectations of a previous generation of political scientists who lauded this as a vision of “responsible party government,”¹⁸ the reality is that the pure two-party system has been a disaster. It has been a disaster both because of what it does to our brains (it triggers very primal friend-vs-foe mental hardware that shuts down reason and openness to alternatives¹⁹) and because of its poor fit with our political institutions, which are specifically designed to force broad compromise by spreading power across competing institutions each of which is chosen by a separate electorate on a separate timeline. The result has been an unmitigated disaster for American democracy.

Though the conventional wisdom of an earlier generation of scholars was that the two-party system was a stabilizing force in America, they failed to understand the time-bound conditions on which this stability depended and they failed to appreciate that the reason the system worked was that the two parties themselves contained overlapping factions in what in retrospect looks much more like cross-cutting multiparty system within a two-party system. It is understandable that scholars of a previous generation would make these oversights, since the underlying conditions had been stable for many decades.

Thus, in assessing the contemporary challenges of American democracy, it is crucial to understand that the collapse of the multi-dimensional four-party system into the uni-dimensional two-party system was the consequence of three interrelated and reinforcing developments in U.S. politics over the last several decades within the context of single-winner elections and two political parties: 1) the geographical sorting of the political parties; 2) the nationalization of American politics; and 3) continued close national elections.

Because these three trends are not reversible (we have no Superman to spin the earth backward to go back in time), the conditions that previously supported a large political middle in a functioning two-party system cannot be recreated. This is why the system will not correct on its own. Instead, it must be recalibrated through active but carefully considered intervention. Let me say more briefly about each of these political developments.

In 1960, in one of the closest elections in American political history, Democrats and Republicans were able to compete in most places because both parties had liberal and conservative factions. In 1960, the parties were overlapping coalitions, and at a national level, they were both broadly moderate and centrist, even if they both had some representatives at the political extremes.

In this earlier era, neither party took a strong stance on social and cultural issues because the coalitions of both parties stretched across the country, and the divisions within the parties between socio-cultural liberals and conservatives reflected the larger divisions in the country. In this respect, it is crucial to know that the Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 both passed with super-majorities in both chambers, and Republicans were actually slightly more supportive (on balance) than Democrats.

But the civil rights revolution of the 1960s set in motion a significant realignment of American politics. As the Democratic party came to “own” the issue of civil rights, the South shifted from solidly Democratic to increasingly Republican, first in presidential voting, then in congressional voting. As cultural and social issue fissures continued to develop in the 1970s around the Vietnam War, drugs, women’s rights, abortion, and other issues, both parties began to take clearer national stances on these issues.

The 1970s were largely a period of political dealignment, in which many citizens began to reconsider their allegiances to the two major parties.²⁰ During this period, many voters split their tickets, voting for one party for president and the other for Congress, and more than ever, voted for the candidate, not the party. In political science terms, elections had become “candidate-centric,” with incumbents cultivating “the personal vote.”²¹ Practically, it meant that individual representatives had the freedom to build their own brands, and in Congress, many entrepreneurial representatives built their own cross-partisan coalitions to tackle various issues that didn’t fit a simple left-right divide.

But by the 1980s, as “culture war” politics became increasingly central to U.S. partisan conflict, the parties took increasingly clearly differentiated stands at a national level. As southern conservatives moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, the Democratic coalition became more socially liberal, and the Republican coalition became more socially conservative. Northern and coastal liberals moved more solidly into the Democratic Party at roughly the same time. Put simply, ideological liberals and conservatives sorted themselves into political parties, and less ideological partisans updated their beliefs to match their parties.²²

As the Republican Party became more socially conservative overall, it became harder for Republican candidates to compete in more socially liberal places. As the Democratic Party became more socially liberal overall, it became harder for Democratic candidates to compete in more culturally conservative places. Because of the nature of single-winner elections, once Democrats/Republicans fell below a competitive threshold in many parts of the country, it made less and less sense for them to compete at all for voters by investing significant resources in candidate recruitment, advertising, and voter mobilization. This led Democrats/Republicans to give up on large parts of the country, narrowing their base of support even further.

With the parties now more homogeneously split on the culturally conservative/liberal divide, the U.S. two-party system became the purest version of itself: a uniquely and historically divided two-party system with no overlap. With the Republican wave election of 2010 sweeping out the last of the Southern conservative Democrats, the four-party system almost entirely vanished, save a few legacy vestiges. A fully sorted two-party system had arrived, drawing in a new generation of candidates eager to engage in partisan warfare, and discouraging the kinds of more moderate, compromise-oriented liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who might have entered politics in the past.²³

Though historical analogies are never perfect, there is only one other time in which the U.S. party system was so clearly divided by geography and ideology: 1860.

The second major change that began in the 1960s was the nationalization of American politics. The remarkable growth of both social and economic federal regulation made control of Washington, DC, much more important. In short, the federal government today has a lot more power over many more areas of American life than it did 60 years ago. Before the expansion of the federal government in the 1960s and 1970s, states had much more autonomy, which meant that control of state power was often more important.

Additionally, because the Supreme Court became more important as an arbiter of social issues (notably abortion, gay marriage, and the role of religion in public life) and many conservative evangelicals felt as though their way of life was under attack by an intrusive liberal government, control of the winner-take-all presidency in particular became much more salient.

As parties became more sorted and U.S. politics nationalized, voters had a clearer sense of the consequences of Democrats or Republicans controlling Congress and the presidency. This meant that rather than voting for the candidate, it became more important to vote for the party. The watershed moment in this development was the 1994 House election. Newt Gingrich had noticed that while Republicans kept winning presidential elections, Democrats had controlled the House majority for 40 years. So rather than individual Republican candidates for the House campaigning against individual popular incumbent representatives who happened to be Democrats, they campaigned against Bill Clinton and nationalized the election. Though both parties had been doing more through their coordinated congressional and Senate campaign committees and attendant networks of campaign consultants to standardize their messages, the 1994 election marked a monumental shift in American politics. Congressional and Senate elections became more about the parties and control of Congress, and voters responded accordingly. The number of split-ticket states (for Senate) and districts (for the House) has declined steadily since.

In the Senate, only three split-delegation states remain—Maine, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the lowest number since direct election of senators began in 1914.²⁴ In the House, only 16 districts split their tickets in 2024, voting one party for president and the other for Congress—the same historically low number as 2020, and among the lowest in over a century.²⁵ All 16 crossover districts had presidential margins under 10 points, reflecting the near-total collapse of split-ticket voting outside competitive terrain.²⁶ Similarly, state and local candidates now emphasize national issues, and voting for all levels of government closely tracks sentiment toward the party in the White House.

The nationalization of the media is also an important part of this story. With the rise of cable news in the 1990s and the internet in the 2000s, local media began to lose share to national media, and national media became more divided to cater to competing partisan audiences, largely because conservatives built an entirely new media infrastructure to appeal to a national conservative audience.²⁷ Media consumption polarized. Again, there is a reinforcing feedback process here. As the stakes of national elections increased, national politics became more salient. As local media diminished, more citizens eager for news were further drawn to national media, and the more they were paying attention to national (as opposed to local) stories, which further diminished their interest in local media and local politics.²⁸

The pattern of close national elections has persisted since 1994, with control of Congress and the presidency regularly changing hands. This creates powerful incentives for the party controlling government to act aggressively while it can, knowing that political winds may shift in the next election cycle. The result is an escalating spiral of partisan governance that has accelerated dramatically in recent years.

The pattern is clear: Each party, upon gaining unified control, uses that control more aggressively than its predecessor, justifying its actions by pointing to the other side’s previous behavior. Each party, when in opposition, signals that it will not cooperate with the governing party and aims to throw them out of power in the future. In 2010, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explicitly stated that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” signaling unprecedented obstruction. Democrats responded by passing the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. When Republicans gained unified control in 2017, they used budget reconciliation to pass tax cuts and attempted ACA repeal through the same party-line process. When Democrats regained control in 2021, they passed the $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan with zero Republican votes.²⁹ In 2024, a Republican House impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—the first Cabinet official impeached in 148 years.³⁰

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 accelerated this dynamic to an unprecedented degree. In his first year back in office, Trump issued 225 executive orders—the most since Franklin Roosevelt’s first year in 1933, and more than his entire first term.³¹ These orders systematically attempted to reshape American governance in ways that provoked immediate legal challenges and institutional resistance.

Trump and Republicans claimed the aggressive actions were justified by pointing to Democratic actions during the Biden administration. Trump cited Biden’s executive orders on immigration and climate as precedent for his own expansive use of executive power. His defenders argued that if Democrats could use reconciliation for major legislation and Republicans faced impeachment proceedings, then Republicans could use all available constitutional tools when in power.

Both parties are now governing with an eye toward what the other side did last time, and the result is an escalating cycle of constitutional hardball. Both parties believe they are responding to the other’s provocations; both believe the other side would do worse if given the chance. The structural incentive is to use power maximally while you have it, because you don’t know how long you’ll have it.

When elections are persistently close and partisan polarization is extreme, the party in power faces overwhelming pressure to act aggressively. The alternative—restraint in hopes the other side will reciprocate—looks like unilateral disarmament in an environment where the other side has already demonstrated willingness to push constitutional boundaries.

But bad faith begets bad faith, and demonizing and refusing to compromise sends strong signals to partisan voters that compromise is illegitimate, and that compromising moderates must be punished.

The second consequence of constantly close elections is that it makes electioneering higher-stakes, more intense, and more aggressive. When control of power in Washington is always at stake, electioneering becomes a fevered pitch of high alert, in which the “other side” is on the verge of gaining total power that they will use to enact a radical agenda. This agitated state of high alert leads voters and politicians to demonize their political opponents even more, and to silo themselves even more in informational echo chambers, thus further deepening hyper-partisan polarization.

We have now reached the stage in this doom loop where the basic foundations of free and fair elections have become a partisan issue, and partisans on both sides support aggressively rewriting election rules, though in different directions. Moreover, if you believe the other side is trying to rig the rules in their favor through inappropriate means, this gives your side license to hit back even harder. After all, as the saying goes, only a fool brings a knife to a gun fight.

The crucial point is that none of these mechanisms are self-correcting. Rather, they are self-reinforcing.

1. The Geographical Sorting of Parties

Currently, the Democratic Party is very strong in urban and cosmopolitan parts of the country, and very weak in rural and traditional parts of the country. Because Democrats are unable to get anywhere close to the necessary 51 percent in rural districts, they do not bother to contest elections in these places. Because elected Democrats overwhelmingly come from socially and culturally liberal parts of the country, Democratic leaders take very progressive stands on cultural and social issues, which makes the Democratic Party seem even more threatening to voters in more conservative and traditional parts of the country. The same is true for Republicans, but in the reverse.

The problem here is that it is extremely difficult for parties to move to the political center when their coalitions lack any meaningful overlap, as they did in an earlier era, in which the two-party system functioned well enough because it contained a multi-dimensional four-party system inside of it.

Some political observers have noted that after Democrats lost a series of presidential elections, they moved closer to the center by nominating Bill Clinton in 1992. Bill Clinton had been the four-term governor of Arkansas, a relatively conservative state. Today, Democrats are deeply underwater in Arkansas. They have no conservative coalition within their party, just as Republicans lack an internal liberal coalition.

When the four-party system existed, Democrats had many conservatives within their party coalition who could balance out the more liberal representatives, pulling the party closer to the center. These conservatives came primarily from the South and rural areas. Republicans had many liberals in their party who could also move the party closer to the middle. These centripetal forces have now been replaced by centrifugal forces. Compromise is now punished by the threat of a primary challenge, and would-be moderates do not bother to even run.

2. The Nationalization of Politics

Though many advocates of localism and federalism argue that some polarization could be fixed by returning some power to the states and localities, the reality is that the concentration of power in Washington, DC, is difficult to reverse. When Democrats are in control in Washington, they do not like to let Republican states decide policy and so impose their own mandates. When Republicans are in control in Washington, they do not like to let Democratic states decide policy and impose their own mandates.³² In the areas where states do make policy, Republican-controlled states tend to focus on issues that are nationally salient and all move in the same direction on these issues. Democratic-controlled states similarly focus on nationally salient issues and move in tandem in the opposite direction. The divergence around abortion, guns, or climate policy is an example of this phenomenon.³³

And given the power that the federal government has to impact policy in almost all areas, it is unclear how a truce would emerge within the current state of binary hyper-partisan polarization. The doom-loop continues: Hyper-partisan polarization has a strong nationalizing pull, and the nationalization of elections increases hyper-partisanship.

3. The Closeness of Elections

Finally, national elections have been extremely close for three decades now, cycling back and forth between unified government for one party, to divided government, to unified government for the other party, to divided government, and back again through the same cycle. Despite a steady stream of think pieces promising a permanent majority for one party or the other, thermostatic public opinion and cycles of engagement and cynicism keep the parties revolving in and out of power,³⁴ with a perpetually dissatisfied and angry electorate and a split country. It seems unlikely that this cycle will end with one side winning a decisive victory, largely because so much of the country is solidly safe for one party or the other. Instead, the close elections will continue to make negative campaigning nastier and nastier, because the best way to unify and mobilize your side is always to turn up the threat of the other side winning.

4. The Bottom Line

A political center existed when the four-party system provided a large space for overlap between the two parties, with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats providing the necessary cross-partisan bridges to make the American political system function. As liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats vanished, the center collapsed, and hyper-partisan polarization began to feed on itself. This reinforcing cycle of distrust, hatred, and escalation shows no signs of stopping on its own.

Most voters are dissatisfied with the state of U.S. politics, and in particular, the hyper-partisan polarization, the gridlock and failures of government, and the anxieties it generates. But they lack a mechanism to express that frustration within the two-party system. The most obvious challenge is that they can only send a very crude signal: Democrat or Republican. There are rarely third-party options. Most of the third parties produced by our current system do not offer viable, moderate choices. Put simply, voters cannot clearly signal, through voting, that they want less hyper-partisanship.

Imagine a long-time Republican voter who is unhappy with their party moving towards a more extreme end of the political spectrum. This voter also sees the Democratic Party as very extreme and unrepresentative of their views. What should this voter do? A vote for an extreme Republican means that the Republican Party will only become more extreme. A vote for a Democrat helps extreme Democrats hold power. Voting for a third party is a wasted protest vote, assuming a third party even mounts a candidate in this particular district. Not voting because neither candidate is appealing is giving up this voter’s greatest power—the right to vote. In short, a voter who views both parties as too extreme is effectively powerless in this system.

In theory, political parties should select more moderate candidates capable of appealing to the broadest electorate. This is often known as the “median voter” theory, which posits that in a two-party system, both parties should converge on the political middle in order to maximize their vote share.

However, since three decades of parties pulling away from the center have contradicted this theory, a simpler explanation is that the theory is either wrong, or it depends on particular conditions that no longer hold. In reality, the political science consensus is now turning against the median voter theory. Some critics argue that it was at best an overly simplistic model that could hold under very specific assumptions; others believe it was simply wrong because the specific assumptions it stipulated about party and voter behavior were largely fantastical.³⁵

Whether or not the median voter was a useful construct, it is nevertheless true that many voters still prefer moderation and compromise to implacable extremism. But as parties move to the extremes and refuse to work together, it is hard for voters to tell which party is more moderate, and their judgments are likely impacted by their previous allegiances. An option to vote for a moderate party that occupies the “middle ground” would, by definition, allow and amplify their preference for more moderation in civic life.

But no such party exists, and for a reason that any sensible person will immediately understand: in America’s plurality-voting, single-member district (PV-SMD) system, a vote for a third-party candidate is either a “spoiler” vote or a “wasted” vote.³⁶ Neither is a constructive way to participate in elections, and citizens properly understand this. Because third parties are spoilers (or just irrelevant) in our elections, all political ambition and money flows through the two major parties. This keeps third parties as marginal actors in politics: they struggle to raise money and legitimacy, are unable to recruit credible, viable candidates, and they exist only on the political fringes. Thus, even when voters want to support a third party, they’d be foolish to do so.

Thus, the fact that a moderate third party has not emerged is not because nobody has had the idea. It’s because the reality of actually building such a viable party under the current election rules makes it the longest of long shots.

How might one get out of the self-reinforcing cycle of hyper-partisan polarization and create a compromise-oriented, multi-party democracy that would welcome the emergence of new and constructive political parties?

The answer lies in our own history of “fusion” voting. Once legal in all states, fusion allows and even encourages cross-party coalitions and alliances. A world in which the binary, winner-take-all, two-party system has essentially eliminated any incentives for cooperation and collaboration cannot help but make the multi-party cooperation and coalition inherent in a fusion-legal system all the more attractive, even imperative.³⁷

Fusion refers to a system in which a candidate wins the support of more than one party—usually one major party and one “minor” party—in a marriage that is both principled and practical. Each party nominates the same candidate, and the candidate appears twice on the ballot under two distinct party labels. The votes for the candidates are tallied separately by party, and then added together to produce the final outcome.

Fusion voting does a few things at the same time: (1) It eliminates the “wasted vote” or “spoiler” dilemma that plagues minor parties in our plurality-voting, single-member district system; (2) It allows a new minor party the chance to develop an identity with voters because it is not pretending it can win elections on its own—it needs an alliance with a major party; (3) Its signals to candidates and elected officials from the other, usually larger party that some portion of this new fusion-party vote carries a distinct meaning, and a competent elected official will welcome that information; and (4) It encourages principled, positive-sum coalition-building amongst the parties which are fusing on the same candidate.

Imagine an election contest between a Democratic centrist and a hardline Republican—or the reverse, in which a Republican centrist faces off against a hardline Democratic leftist.

In the case of a candidate running as the fusion nominee of both the Democrats and the Moderates, it is easy to see what the Moderate Party would say to its members and supporters:

“We have evaluated the two major party Congressional candidates in our district on their commitment to bi-partisanship, civility and the rule of law. And we're recommending Jane Smith. She is also the nominee of one of the major parties, in her case the Democrats. As you know, the Moderate Party includes citizens who are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, and after due consideration feel that Smith is far the superior candidate on the issues of bipartisanship and civility and the rule of law. If you agree that these values are important, we urge you to vote for her under the Moderate Party label. It counts the same as a vote on the major party line, but it lets her know that these values matter to you.”

Election Day rolls around and Smith gets 45 percent on the Democratic line, Jones gets 48 percent as a Republican, and the last 7 percent is cast for Smith on the Moderate line. The votes are tallied by party and then added together to produce a 52 to 48 percent victory for Smith, the Dem-Mod nominee.

The Moderate Party can claim, with merit, to have produced the “margin of victory.” The minor, fusion party will now have a modest claim on Smith as she takes office. She’ll be more attentive to her own “home” party (Democrats in this case), but she will also make sure she stays in close touch with the Moderates and takes their advice sometimes. But even more importantly, it sends a loud-and-clear message to the hard-right Republicans that they cannot win without the Moderates’ support. Rather than disappointed voters going back and forth between Democrats and Republicans in hope of elusive moderation, voters can now tell their family, friends and colleagues to vote on the moderate party line as well.

In sum, fusion not only avoids the traps of the spoiler or the wasted vote, it gives voters the ability to cast a constructive, expressive vote. And in doing so, it pushes against extremism and in favor of coalition and compromise.

Whether voters like political parties or not, scholars of democracy consider it axiomatic that political parties are the central institutions of modern mass democracy. That’s because parties organize political conflict into manageable coalitions and programs, and they mobilize and engage voters in the service of winning elections. Without political parties, politics becomes chaotic. This is why every stable modern democracy has strong political parties.³⁸ Were fusion in place, moderate voters could find an identity in a center party (of whatever name) by voting regularly on that line, even if they were voting for candidates aligned with one or the other major party.

Of course, fusion wouldn’t be limited to a moderate party. Other parties could emerge, and likely will. And there would be tremendous value. Parties on the extremes might emerge as well, but since fusion is voluntary, only candidates who wish to be associated with more extreme positions will accept such nominations. Just as a moderate party label will convey information to a voter, a communist party label or a Q-Anon party label would convey information to voters. Most political candidates would reject these nominations as counter to their interests.

The history of fusion candidacies is clear on this point: it does not lead fusion to a proliferation of fringe parties because fringe parties cannot get the candidate to accept their nomination. New parties that offer valuable endorsements to either incumbents or challengers will emerge, and those that command genuine support will last. In both Connecticut and New York, the number of active parties has rarely exceeded five. Most modern democracies have at least five active parties (and some have many more) and citizens around the world seem to manage just fine.

Additionally, fusion could make more districts competitive because of the path for moderate parties to fuse with the less popular of the two major parties. Both more choices and more competitive elections would almost certainly increase voter participation and turnout, since the lack of choices and the lack of competition are the main reasons why the United States has low voter turnout compared to other democracies.³⁹ The United States is unique in having just two major parties, and one of only a handful of democracies that use single-member districts, which tend to generate few competitive districts even when districts are drawn through independent commissions (this is because parties tend to have geographical bases, and partisans cluster in different places).⁴⁰

From the perspective of elected officials, the moderate party label becomes meaningful as a way to communicate moderation. In an era of nationalized politics, Republicans and Democrats are tied to their national parties, and typically, to the most extreme elements of their parties. Candidates can say that they are a different kind of Republican or a different kind of Democrat, but it is almost impossible to communicate this fact to voters, given that they have very few opportunities to break from their national parties, and most voters pay very limited attention to politics and largely rely on party labels.

The core problem here is that our highly nationalized political environment forecloses other more candidate-centric solutions because, under nationalized politics, parties matter to voters more than candidates. Voters may like individual candidates of an opposite party, but in competitive districts they are told repeatedly that they are not voting for a candidate; they are voting for which party gets control of the majority in Congress. And even more centrally, they are voting for or against the president, a force that individual members of Congress have no control over.

Under fusion, a moderate party could reward and incentivize moderation and compromise because it has real leverage. Unlike parties on the extreme, who have much less leverage because they are only taking votes from one side, a moderate party has much more leverage because it will almost surely endorse candidates from both sides.

Finally, from the perspective of potential candidates, the ability to run with a moderate party endorsement could conceivably attract a new generation of more moderate candidates. One of the reasons why the two parties have become more extreme is that more moderate candidates have chosen not to run. Scholars have identified three primary reasons why moderates do not run. First, because they do not see themselves “fitting” with either of the two parties given who represent the two parties in Congress.⁴¹ Second, because they do not wish to endure the gauntlet of running for office when they have many other career opportunities.⁴² And third, because local party leaders are more encouraging of more extreme candidates as opposed to more moderate candidates, since party leaders tend to be extreme. ⁴³ By opening up an alternative path to office and the ability to gain support from a moderate party, such would-be moderates might be more inclined to run for office.

Though the geographic sorting of parties, the nationalization of politics, the close national elections have both been key drivers of hyper-partisan polarization (see above), all three of these forces have made the two-party system extremely friendly to recalibration through fusion.

The rigidness of the two-party system in this moment means that a small but thoughtful reform such as fusion could realign the U.S. party system in productive ways that could get us out of the doom loop, and reestablish a new version of the moderate cross-partisan politics that previously existed and which allowed our system of government to muddle through. It must look different now than it did in previous times because the underlying conditions no longer hold. But we cannot simultaneously have a rigid and polarized two-party system and vibrant political middle at the same time. Since a vibrant political middle is essential to the functioning of democracy, modest changes (like the restoration of fusion balloting) that can break the rigidity of the current hyper-polarized two-party system and restore a political center would have profoundly positive effects on the health of American political life, and the functioning of the U.S. government.

American democracy is in a dark and dangerous place right now, but it doesn’t have to be. The escalating hyper-partisan doom loop is a consequence of changes in the party system, its geographical bases, the nationalization of American politics, and the close national competition for control of government. These are all relatively recent developments that have, over the last several decades, transformed the American system from a multi-dimensional, compromise-oriented four-party-within-two-party system to a one-dimensional, combative, hyper-polarized true two-party system, stuck in an escalating doom loop of zero-sum partisan warfare that shows no obvious resolution.

Fusion balloting is an extremely promising way to break this “doom loop” because it gives voters the ability to clearly signal: “stop the hyper-partisan fighting and work together.” Without the ability to vote for a moderate party, voters can only vote for the Democrat or the Republican, but without any direction. Because of the single-member system with plurality voting, a moderate party is unlikely to emerge on its own. Only fusion balloting can give that party an opportunity to represent the growing number of homeless voters in the political middle, who can then leverage their power in key elections.

The American political system has survived this long because of the ability of its citizens to creatively reform and recalibrate it in times of crisis. Supporters of fusion balloting are working in this supremely American tradition, bringing continued innovation to our continued democratic experiment, when it is most urgently needed.