New Dog, Old Trick
The new mayor of New York City and Abraham Lincoln have something remarkable in common. Zohran Mamdani was just elected in one of the few places in the country that still allows a once-common practice called fusion voting, a practice that made Lincoln’s presidency possible.
Now largely forgotten outside of New York and Connecticut, fusion figures prominently in American history, having played a pivotal role at a most crucial hour by giving democracy a much-needed boost when preserving the union was at stake.
Fusion voting’s not complicated; it simply allows candidates for office to appear on the ballot as the nominees of multiple parties. The number of votes they receive on different party lines are added together—or fused—to arrive at the final tally.
Fusion voting was once used in every state in the nation including Wisconsin. It’s now widely banned. When it was allowed, fusion voting created political competition, so much that 171 years ago abolitionists were able to use it to put a major party out of business, replacing it with a new anti-slavery coalition.
Prior to the Civil War, there were two major parties in the U.S., but not the ones we have today. At that time, there were Democrats and Whigs. Both parties were at peace with America’s original sin. Lincoln was a Whig, but grew increasingly frustrated with his party’s dysfunction, its ongoing accommodation of slavery, its inability to unify around a principled position on the issue.
Abolitionists couldn’t stomach either pro-slavery Democrats or the slave-tolerant Whigs, and formed anti-slavery parties like the Liberty Party and Free Soil Party, among others. None gained much traction.
On March 20, 1854 a small contingent of alienated souls assembled in a one-room schoolhouse in a Wisconsin settlement named Ripon. Some who entered the room were Whigs, some northern Democrats, others Free Soilers. Some identified as Know-Nothings, or Know-Somethings, or Anti-Nebraskans, or simply abolitionists. They entered the room splintered. They left fused, all calling themselves Republicans.
The Whig Party collapsed after a 20-year run because of the abolitionists’ fusion strategy. A new party was born, the offspring of fusion, in that Wisconsin settlement advertised to this day as the birthplace of the Republican Party. Not quite nine years later, a charter member of this new party, Abraham Lincoln of neighboring Illinois, issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
After the Civil War, fusion voting expanded across the nation, and citizens who felt their interests were being disregarded by the two major parties could—and did—build impactful minor parties. So impactful that by the late 1890s, Republicans in Michigan moved to ban fusion voting. Yes, Gilded Age Republicans came to fear the influence of minor parties so much that they voted to outlaw the very tool that was used to build their party in the first place.
Southern Jim Crow Democrats joined in, and within a couple of decades, most states had copycat fusion bans in place. With fusion gone, minor parties were defanged. Today, candidates running under minor party banners are regarded as nothing more than “spoilers,” votes for them are considered wasted.
All these years later, in one of the only places in the U.S. still permitting fusion voting, Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York City, against the wishes of establishment Democrats, appearing on the ballot twice as the nominee of two different parties. Democratic insiders were so spooked by his candidacy that they urged voters to back the state’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani’s fusion strategy enabled him to best Cuomo for the Democratic nomination and then fend off Cuomo’s independent bid in the general election. Mamdani got more than 878,000 Democratic votes and over 157,000 votes on the Working Families Party ballot line, pushing his fused vote total over a million—more than 50% of all votes cast, giving him a clear mandate to govern.
Putting an exclamation point on his insurgent challenge to political orthodoxy, Mamdani let it be known that he voted for himself on the Working Families Party line.
At a time when most voters are intensely dissatisfied with both major parties, with the public’s frustration boiling over, voters nearly everywhere in America are denied a better choice, forced to hold their noses and try to decide which is the lesser of two evils, or opt not to vote at all. There is a way out of this trap. Worked for Abraham Lincoln way back when, worked for Zohran Mamdani just the other day.
I’ve labored to protect and fortify democracy for decades, have supported a wide variety of reforms over the years. Won some, lost some, watched hard-fought gains one year turn into gut-wrenching setbacks the next. Bringing about lasting change is devilishly difficult. There must be a thousand barriers to success. One of the biggest is having to convince officials who’ve gotten where they are under the current system to pass laws changing the system.
This reality I know so well is what makes the idea of bringing back fusion voting so appealing. No law has to be passed legalizing it. It can be re-legalized by getting fusion bans struck down in court as unconstitutional. A lawsuit aiming to do just that has been filed in Wisconsin, arguing that preventing parties from freely nominating candidates of their choice infringes on rights to equal protection, freedom of association, speech and assembly guaranteed under Wisconsin’s constitution.
The liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck a blow for electoral competition less than two years ago, tossing out rigged legislative maps and ordering fair district boundaries to be drawn. In doing so, the state’s highest court reopened a door that power-hungry politicians had locked, creating a new opportunity for the voters’ will to be done. The justices could further empower the citizenry and help nurse a badly ailing democracy back to health by re-legalizing fusion voting.
If things break right, Wisconsin could once again be home to a new birth of freedom. What’s old could become new again.