Question: if fusion voting has been used in New York for decades without breaking the two-party doom loop, what is the argument that having other states use fusion voting will succeed where it has not in New York?
Ultimately, if there are only two major parties why would it matter if one candidate (like Mamdani in New York's recent race) was on the ballot more than once? The major party primaries would still be the filtering mechanism reinforcing the two-party doom loop. Even if neither major party candidate garners an additional endorsement, third-party candidates would remain in at best a "spoiler" role as long as plurality (highest total wins, even if not close to a majority) elections are used.
A system like Alaska's (Top-4/completely open primary where ALL voters participate and the top four vote getters are all on a general election ranked choice ballot) allows multiple de facto parties as a potential starting point. For example, in the 2022 Alaska Senate election there were effectively three parties--MAGA (Tshibaka), GOP Classic (Murkowski) and Democratic (Chesbro). That is similar to the functional "de facto four party system" Dr Drutman points to in "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop".
John - we're working on just that in Massachusetts with the All-Party Primary ballot initiative (headed to Nov 2026 ballot) that contains "aggregate fusion" https://coalitionforhealthydemocracy.org/
I see the potential benefits of this strategy. It acclimates the electorate to differentiating between ballot lines, legislative factions, and party organizations on one hand, and candidates on the other. And in a way that they can see the effects (in official ballot documents, in messaging, in organizational activity, etc). It cultivates a prerequisite change in culture, whereas so many reform efforts seek to impose a top down solution, which if we could do, we certainly wouldn’t impose some half-measure that nibbles around the edges of the problem.
3 seat PR with droop quota wd suffice for US house of Reps if we also introduced 1/3rd Reps. Then, if we used 3 seat PR with a hare quota for state reps elections, it wd likely trickle up to make the 3rd seat in natl reps elections become competitive.
Why not hybridize rcv and fusion voting? Let people vote as if it still were fptp and have local party leader determined lists of candidates that would be by default used based on the party of a voter's first ranked candidate?
Also, i developed an idea to reduce yet retain the power gap between centrists and activists, not unlike Mamdani, in the Democratic party based on how rcv helped the GOP win the Virginia governor race 4 years ago.Are there Really No Magic Bullets for 2026? https://share.google/DNsxsLe5sZusMcO8R
Question: if fusion voting has been used in New York for decades without breaking the two-party doom loop, what is the argument that having other states use fusion voting will succeed where it has not in New York?
Ultimately, if there are only two major parties why would it matter if one candidate (like Mamdani in New York's recent race) was on the ballot more than once? The major party primaries would still be the filtering mechanism reinforcing the two-party doom loop. Even if neither major party candidate garners an additional endorsement, third-party candidates would remain in at best a "spoiler" role as long as plurality (highest total wins, even if not close to a majority) elections are used.
A system like Alaska's (Top-4/completely open primary where ALL voters participate and the top four vote getters are all on a general election ranked choice ballot) allows multiple de facto parties as a potential starting point. For example, in the 2022 Alaska Senate election there were effectively three parties--MAGA (Tshibaka), GOP Classic (Murkowski) and Democratic (Chesbro). That is similar to the functional "de facto four party system" Dr Drutman points to in "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop".
Is fusion voting incompatible with open primaries and RCV?
John - we're working on just that in Massachusetts with the All-Party Primary ballot initiative (headed to Nov 2026 ballot) that contains "aggregate fusion" https://coalitionforhealthydemocracy.org/
I see the potential benefits of this strategy. It acclimates the electorate to differentiating between ballot lines, legislative factions, and party organizations on one hand, and candidates on the other. And in a way that they can see the effects (in official ballot documents, in messaging, in organizational activity, etc). It cultivates a prerequisite change in culture, whereas so many reform efforts seek to impose a top down solution, which if we could do, we certainly wouldn’t impose some half-measure that nibbles around the edges of the problem.
3 seat PR with droop quota wd suffice for US house of Reps if we also introduced 1/3rd Reps. Then, if we used 3 seat PR with a hare quota for state reps elections, it wd likely trickle up to make the 3rd seat in natl reps elections become competitive.
Why not hybridize rcv and fusion voting? Let people vote as if it still were fptp and have local party leader determined lists of candidates that would be by default used based on the party of a voter's first ranked candidate?
Also, i developed an idea to reduce yet retain the power gap between centrists and activists, not unlike Mamdani, in the Democratic party based on how rcv helped the GOP win the Virginia governor race 4 years ago.Are there Really No Magic Bullets for 2026? https://share.google/DNsxsLe5sZusMcO8R
Fusion voting already exists in some places and it doesn't change anything