What Fusion Politics Could Mean for Third Political Parties Today (Lisa Disch)

Political fusion, also known as “cross-endorsement” or “multiple-party nomination,” refers to a system that allows a single candidate to receive the nominations of more than one political party and to run in the general election on more than one ballot line. In the nineteenth century, prior to the adoption of the Australian ballot, fusion candidacies were “commonplace,” and typically took the form of “cooperation between a minor party and a major one.”¹ Back then, fusion politics helped to sustain a more complex party system that was more representative of voters’ ideologies and preferences and increased the competitiveness of the electoral system.²

This essay revisits the rich history of fusion politics in the late nineteenth century to show how widespread beliefs about two-party politics are historically contingent. Both the significance of the fusion practice, and its benefits for representative democracy, are difficult to appreciate from the vantage point of the present. Today, the two-party system strikes its opponents and champions alike as an inherent, inescapable, and desirable outcome of single-member plurality voting. Political science textbooks promote this system as “one of the oldest political institutions in the history of democracy,” a duopolistic pattern of political conflict that was consolidated only in the first decades of the twentieth century.³

In 1933, populist historian John D. Hicks took a first shot at this package of misconceptions that discredited third political parties and rendered the practice of fusion unfathomable. He called attention to “something peculiarly sacred about” two-party competition, whose cultural status he (ironically) compared to the “decalogue, or the practice of monogamy, or the right of the Supreme Court to declare a law of Congress unconstitutional.” “Right-minded citizens never question the wisdom of such a [binary] division of political forces,” he wrote, but see in it “a sort of guarantee of good government.”⁴

Two-party democracy looked very different to third-party voters in the final third of the nineteenth century. When antifusion laws were first introduced, one Michigan Populist vigorously protested that the legislation “practically disfranchises every citizen who does not happen to be a member of the party in power.” He rightly predicted that, absent fusion, dissenters would be “compelled to either lose their vote (as that expression is usually understood)” or else to join forces with the least objectionable major party. To this Michigan Populist the reform would have a strange and appalling consequence: "There could only be two parties at one time."⁵

To the fusion voters of yesterday, today’s two-party system is neither a sacred political inheritance nor a foreordained outcome of single-member plurality voting. They identify it as a legislative contrivance, the product of protectionist ballot and election reforms that major-party dominated legislatures appended to the good government initiatives that swept the nation from the mid- to late 1890s. Third parties, which were leaders in election reform during this period, advocated for these reforms even though they proved to put an end to fusion politics and to third parties as the nineteenth century knew them: robust grassroots political organizations that won majorities in state legislatures and enacted meaningful reforms.

In the final third of the nineteenth century, the fusion option ensured that a third-party vote was much more than a gesture of protest. When fusion was legal, citizens could cast a ballot for a third political party without the risk of “wasting” a vote or contributing indirectly to the victory of their least favorite establishment party candidate. Fusion nominations and the strategies they enabled made third-party voting a consequential force in what we think of as the U.S. “two-party system” and a crucial agent of small-d democratic economic and political transformation.

Fusion politics had a well-documented impact on the electoral system. In 1870, 250 fusion candidacies took place in congressional and gubernatorial races in more than 20 states. In 1890, 210 fusions occurred in 30 states.⁶ From 1874 to 1892, minor parties received at least 20 percent of the vote in one or more elections in more than half of the non-southern states. Even when their vote share was smaller, they continued to play a critical role because during this period the two major political parties were closely matched. “Between 1878 and 1892 minor parties held the balance of power at least once in every state but Vermont, and from the mid-1880s they held that power in a majority of states in nearly every election.”⁷

Do not be misled into dismissing the importance of fusion politics because these successes occurred largely in state-level elections. During the era of fusion, state legislatures possessed far more power over economic and infrastructure development than they do today. In the nineteenth century, a third-party vote was much more than a gesture of protest. Fusion nominations and the strategies they enabled gave third-party legislators the ability to create change in important areas of public policy, particularly regarding economic development and basic political rights. Small-d democrats used fusion to fight racist, corrupt, and elitist political institutions in the late nineteenth century.

“Fusion nominations and the strategies they enabled gave third-party legislators the ability to create change in important areas of public policy.”

In North Carolina, fusionists overthrew the conservative Bourbon Democrats for a brief period from 1895 to 1901 and achieved democratic victories “obtained in no other Southern state”: promoting a “resurgence” of Black political participation and office holding; instituting a fair and impartial election system; fighting voter suppression by repealing obstructionist election laws; and constraining anti-democratic police and employers to secure the voting rights of “tenant farmers, sharecroppers, [and] city workers, white and Black.”⁸

In Kansas, where fusion voting established People’s Party control over both houses of the state legislature, that third party passed major progressive legislation regulating railroads, stockyards, and banks; protecting laborers and unions; and liberalizing public education and criminal justice.⁹ Populists in the Kansas Senate also successfully “voted down a harsh bill for capital punishment,” while a Populist in the House anticipated today’s most advanced sexual harassment laws by introducing “a bill making it a felony for any employer ‘to make improper advances to any woman working under his charge.’”¹⁰

Contrary to Duverger’s Law, the end of this vibrant period of third-party activity was not foreordained by single-district plurality voting. Nor did third parties bring it on themselves by their unpopularity or lack of political skill. Major political parties used adoption of the Australian ballot at the end of the nineteenth century to implement ballot qualification thresholds and to prohibit multiple listings of a candidate’s name. These antifusion regulations cloaked a major-party power play under the guise of good government reform. Fusion historian Peter H. Argersinger emphasizes how antifusion law changed the culture of political possibility: Once its political effects “became evident, [antifusion] law became so widely adopted in other states—and so useful politically to the dominant party—that its provisions came to be seen as logically necessary and unexceptionable.”¹¹ Antifusion law transformed a competitive political system where fusion made sense into a duopoly where fusion, if it happened at all, could be spun as deceptive and fraudulent.¹²

Fusion provides a means of representing policy differences within the two “Big Tent” major parties. In New York, where fusion is commonly practiced, third parties make fine distinctions between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives within the Republican parties. Such specificity can be a positive political force as it makes voters feel that they are casting a meaningful vote in a conflict that is particularly important to them; interest in a conflict is one of the principal forces motivating citizens to vote.¹³ Fusion candidacies, like third-party candidacies generally, can boost voter turnout through grassroots campaigning. Research found that in a 2000 special election for a seat in the Nassau County legislature, sustained organizing by the Working Families Party six weeks prior to the election, including door-to-door canvassing and telephone banking, induced people to come to the polls who would not otherwise have voted; that third party produced an increase in turnout and a net gain in votes for their endorsed candidate.¹⁴

Most powerfully, fusion offers a weapon against widespread representations of “sorted” or “red v. blue” America because it provides an electoral vehicle that works by representing the points of consensus that major political party voters share rather than exaggerating the gulf between them. Former U.S. Representative from New Jersey and would-be fusion candidate summoned his prospective constituency in November 2022, calling out to “Democrats of all stripes, independents, and moderate Republicans,” voters who do not want to abolish the police or demonize immigrants, who support clean energy and closing corporate tax loopholes, and whose views “defy tribal party stereotypes.”¹⁵ A 2022 poll of New Jersey voters conducted by New America found that 68 percent of 800 respondents believed that fusion voting would better express their views than two-partyism, which further entrenches polarization and other partisan dysfunction.¹⁶