The solution is called fusion voting and it’s as old as the republic.
Want to avoid a civil war in America? It’s time to remove one of the artificial constraints that keep us locked in the two-party system and make room for Americans who value the rule of law and compromise over the partisan goals of each major party to have a meaningful voice in the electoral process.
Right now, it looks like American politics is heading towards catastrophe. One major party, the Republicans, has been taken over by anti-democratic forces committed to the false belief that the election of 2020 was stolen from President Trump. They are actively moving to change the election rules in states controlled by the GOP, both to make it harder for many people (mostly the Democratic base) to vote and also to give Republican-controlled legislatures the power to determine election outcomes instead of local nonpartisan election administrators.
Meanwhile, Democrats are trying to mightily to enact massive policy changes to upgrade our physical and social infrastructure and deliver meaningful benefits to improve the lives of tens of millions, but they are hindered by a constitutional system that already tilts power toward rural states in the Senate. So while Democrats won the White House in a popular landslide, their hold on Congress is tenuous. As a result, Democratic base voters are dispirited and less likely to vote, while independents are swinging toward voting Republican in 2022 as a check on President Biden’s power.
At the same time, our electoral and media systems both tend to highlight hot-button issues and incentivize politicians to play to their most passionate supporters. And thus we witness last week’s spectacle of nearly the entire House Republican caucus voting to defend one of their own, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, against censure for having tweeted a fantasy video showing him killing Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. We aren’t quite at the point of a pro-slavery Member of Congress brutally beating a political opponent on the Senate floor, as Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina did to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, in 1856. But it doesn’t seem that far away. Brooks, like Gosar, was censured by the House for his act; then he was immediately reelected. That incident is widely seen by historians as the moment when reasoned discourse broke down and civil war became much more likely.
The solution to this moment of real, but artificially intensified, political polarization is an old but venerable one. It’s time for a new centrist political party, one first and foremost committed to the rule of law and the search for practical political compromises, to step into the fray and give a home to voters unwilling to endorse the Republicans’ lurch to the right or the Democrats’ push to the left.
Of course, there’s a hitch. A new party can’t make much progress in America if all it can do is ask voters to throw their votes to a long-shot with little hope of winning an election. It’s technically not that hard to get a ballot line in most states; the problem is that a vote on a minor party line is arguably wasted. Few voters want to make purely symbolic statements with their franchise. And many rightfully worry that a third-party vote can have perverse outcomes, “spoiling” the chances of a major-party candidate that might be their second-choice. Twenty years ago, I wrote about book about third-parties in American politics called Spoiling for a Fight, which surveyed the efforts of people like Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura, and Ralph Nader, to build viable new political efforts in contemporary America. I know how hard and unlikely a project this is.
So I’d like to second the suggestion recently made by Lee Drutman, a political scientist based at New America. It’s time for Congress to legalize fusion ballots for federal races. Fusion, or cross-endorsement, used to the standard in American politics until the late 1800s. Back then, parties printed their own ballots, and thus candidates could run with the support of multiple parties. Elections still went to the person with the most votes, but each party’s total was tallied separately, so voters could express their preference by voting for a candidate on a particular party line. Under this system, America had several viable and vibrant parties, including a minor party, the Republicans, that ultimately replaced one of the major ones, the Whigs.
Today, two states, New York and Connecticut, have fusion voting and regularly see multi-party coalitions form, with Conservative, Right-to-Life and Working Families Parties all playing a role in the ongoing process. If Congress were to legalize fusion, it’s not hard to imagine the handful of independents now in office (Senators Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who caucus with Senate Democrats) welcoming a new cluster of common-sense representatives to their ranks. As Drutman writes:
“Under fusion balloting, a Center Party could form, and choose to endorse either of the Democrat or Republican congressional candidates — whichever candidate it views as more moderate and more committed to the rule of law. If the Democratic candidate is also endorsed by the Center Party, voters could choose which ballot line to vote on. Either way, the vote would count the same. But by voting on the Center Party ballot line, a voter would send a clear signal that they consider themselves part of the Center Party. At the end of the election, if the Democrat won, that candidate would know how much of her support came from the Center Party. The more votes come in on the Center Party line, the more leverage that Center Party could have.”
Such an outcome might be music to the ears of voters who want something in between today’s Republicans and Democrats, and hate being forced to hold their nose and vote for a party they dislike to stop one they hate. It’s not impossible to imagine that the few politicians who now claim that they want to foster more political compromise, like Senators Joe Manchin of West Virgina and Kristin Sinema of Arizona, might support fusion voting as a way of improving on the current voting rights legislation still pending before Congress. Maybe some group of moderate Republican senators, like the thirteen who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, would back it too. The result could stave off an unnecessary disaster.