For the past two years, Tom and his colleagues at Columbia World Projects have been working in partnership with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, focusing on a simple but hard question: How do we fix our democratic system? That made Tom a perfect guest for Micah to talk with.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

The show started with some level-setting. Micah asked Tom, “Is democracy in America in trouble? is this something new or is it something we’ve been through before?” Tom’s response: “Yes, yes and yes.”

Tom explained that America has faced democratic threats before – citing Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy. But these voices were checked by institutions; Coughlin was ultimately subdued by his own church’s hierarchy as well as the radio broadcasters trade association; McCarthyism was ultimately restrained by the U.S. Senate and the free press.

Today, the kinds of institutions capable of providing checks on authoritarian movements have lost courage, standing and power. Tom connects the reduced power of civil society institutions to the decline in membership organizations that inculcated democratic values and skills.

“If you think about unions, for example, at mid-century, one American worker in three belonged to a union. Today it’s one in ten… But it’s not only that. It’s that if you read their literature from, say, the mid-19th century past the mid-20th century, they not only worked to build their membership and to fight for higher wages, but they actually expressed the goal of cultivating the democratic capacities of their members and the ideal of defending democracy itself. And that’s not the case today. The great federated associations, the Elks, the Women’s Clubs, the American Legion, which gathered people and taught them real democratic skills, oriented them toward active civic life, have lost most of their membership after the 1970s, and they’ve never recovered.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

The hollowing out of civil society – and of political parties – has been a running theme on This Old Democracy. We’ve covered the research and perspectives of Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Daniel Schlozman, Didi Kuo and others – all making the case that richer parties make for a more resilient democracy.

Tom argues that the hollowing out has been more substantial on the left than on the right.

“As the union hall, the mainline congregation, the lodge, the local party offices were hollowing out, the need for belonging didn’t disappear with them. When the old rooms closed, people were looking for new ones, and the right built those rooms and waited and invited people in. And what they built were mega churches organized around small group discussions, Turning Point chapters, Moms for Liberty gatherings, and these were often weekly, in-person, meeting people where they already were.”

Tom explains why this matters, and the distinction between the left and the right. These kinds of groups say,

“[J]oin us, sit with us, have fun at our rollicking events, regardless of what you believe. Belonging, as Hahrie Han, the great political scientist, puts it, comes before belief. The politics arrive later, carried by the relationships. And the left offers something very different. Believe in our cause and send $25. Citizens are treated more as its targets, not participants.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

Micah challenges Tom, pointing to social projects on the left like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March and the No Kings marches. Tom says these are different.

“Compare the two parties and how they received their insurgents. The Tea Party was absorbed by the Republican Party, it got remade in its own image, and it remade the Tea Party as well. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, borrows the movements’ language, it spends their energies at election time. But it tends to resist the demands the rest of the year. And someone in our convening put it really provocatively… [T]he Republican Party, this person said, loves its base. The Democratic Party appears to hate or at least fear its own.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

Tom believes we need parties that are thick in two directions. He explains:

“They need to be socially thick. That means present year-round, useful to people between elections, and embedded to a greater degree than they are in people’s routine lives. But they also need to be politically thick with real internal debate, factions, and decision maps that members can win or lose, and live with that losing. That’s really important in a democracy, and we seem to be losing that skill.”

“And then second, we need to wrestle to a greater degree than we have with whether to invite groups that stand adjacent to the parties closer to the inside. So organizations like Faith in Minnesota that did so much of the mobilizing around the anti-ICE movement, or Voto Latino, both of which have a base of their own. They drive voter turnout, but they’re often treated more like vendors than they are treated as if they’re meaningful members of the party.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

Tom says his group’s preliminary report also supports electoral system reforms that present a wider array of choices to “reflect the preferences of voters in a way that they simply do not right now … a wider suite of policy choices that ‘I want to be represented should you win.’”

Going forward, Tom says the Columbia World Projects working group will be exploring the potential for more dynamism at the city and state level and the role that digital platforms have played in changing our political system, as well as the role of influencers.

Listen to the full episode to drink in the nuance of Tom’s critique of our politics and share it with others who follow new thinking about how to repair this imperfect, precious, worn down marvel – otherwise known as this old democracy of ours.

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What We’re Reading

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie recently shared some trenchant observations in a panel discussion with two of his colleagues (gift link) on the roiling political scene. First, in answer to a question from Michelle Cottle about the number of places where Democrats are effectively backing independent candidates for statewide offices by not running anyone on their own party line, Bouie said:

“...my only thought is that it’s just a reminder of how our party system really constrains people’s choices in a way that is unsatisfactory, you know? If the U.S. still had electoral fusion in most states, and this wouldn’t necessarily be an issue, but someone could run as an independent or an independent party, and the Democrats could just nominate that guy too, so he’s on both ballot lines or she’s on both ballot lines, and problem solved. [Emphasis added]

“But what this says to me is that, you know, in places where the Democratic Party, just its brand is in the tank, and there aren’t viable candidates necessarily, in part because of the brand, there’s still political diversity, right? There’s still voters who want a different choice. And so, I think there ought to be real thought given to how we can provide those voters a different choice other than, ‘Oh, you have to choose one of the two…”

Then, as the discussion turned to former Senator Joe Manchin’s recent announcement that he would be looking to encourage more independent, centrist-style candidates to run, Bouie added:

“...my critique of this though, is that if you want to elevate independent candidates, then you have to give people a way to vote without spoiling. You have to let people be able to cast a ballot, knowing that their second choice — or if they’re maybe better aligned, they’re 10 percent more aligned with the independent than the Democrat — you want people to be able to say, “I can vote for the independent without dooming the Democrat.

You have to be able to get rid of the spoiler effect. And I would say — this is like me putting a political science hat on — that if you really want meaningful competition, you cannot just have independent candidates. You have to have viable new parties.

You have to have an actual party organization that can have its own ballot line and can compete. And so, any political reform option that doesn’t foreground — and this is funny because Americans hate parties. Americans have always hated political parties, but you can’t have a functional democracy without them. And if you want there to be more political competition, you really have to be thinking, “How can I incentivize the creation of new parties?” Fusion does [that]. I’m going to make another plug for fusion. Fusion voting does [that]. [Emphases added.]

But you have to do that. Spoiler problem, new party problem — those are the problems you have to solve. Solve those problems, and you can get more nontraditional candidates in there, right? You can get non-Democrats and non-Republicans in there. You could even have situations in states where maybe not every Republican voter wants to support the MAGA Republican.

You could have some other Republican Party faction on the ballot line that they can vote for. Like there’s a lot you can do here, if you begin to tweak the rules a little. But if you don’t tweak the rules, then no amount of independent candidates is really going to change the basic calculation.”

Amen, brother!

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

If you’re new to fusion voting and fusion parties, this Democracy Journal piece is a useful starting point.

Leave a comment

Bagenstos has spent his career moving between scholarship, litigation, and government service. He served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Obama Justice Department, then as general counsel first at the Office of Management and Budget and later at the Department of Health and Human Services under Biden.

Now he’s back in court. He’s representing the Michigan Common Sense Party and the Michigan Libertarian Party in a suit filed in May challenging the state’s 131-year-old ban on fusion voting.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

Context is everything, in life and litigation both, and Bagenstos sets the stage well. In post-Civil War Michigan the GOP was generally dominant, but a coalition of Democrats, Populists, Greenbackers and laborites used fusion to break the GOP’s grip on state government in the 1880s and 90s. This coalition didn’t just win elections for the sake of holding office — they had an agenda and used their time in power to push through labor reforms, consumer protections, and women’s suffrage (along with, he adds dryly, Prohibition–yes, we made that pun up on our own).

Nobody rules forever, and the Republicans clawed their way back to power. By 1895, the GOP was in complete control of state government. They understood that their opponents were a varied lot – by occupation, religion, region, race, ethnicity – and they also understood that fusion was the very rule that allowed different political factions to unite across those differences. The GOP decided to prevent such coalitions from forming rather than have to defeat them once formed. Fusion voting was made illegal, and fusion parties vanished. Change the rules, change the outcome.

For more than 130 years, the fusion ban stood unchallenged. But Bagenstos argues the ban on that kind of coalition-building is newly and perhaps even deeply vulnerable because of how Michigan voters have amended their own state constitution in recent years. A new context has emerged.

In 2018, voters approved creating an independent redistricting commission and added voting protections. In 2022, the same coalition went further, adding a sweeping guarantee of “the fundamental right to vote” that bars anything that denies, abridges, or unreasonably burdens that right.

Layer on top of that a “Purity of Elections” clause in the state constitution that the Michigan Supreme Court has long read as barring the legislature from favoring major parties over minor ones. Bagenstos thinks fusion’s opponents are running out of room.

Ask Bagenstos why this matters beyond party-building, and he discusses the voter’s dilemma.

[W]ithout fusion voting in a first-past-the-post system, what we have for the voter is effectively three really bad choices, right? The voter who doesn't see themselves represented in either political party either swallows their lack of representation and votes for the political party that's closest to them that doesn't really represent them, or the voter votes for a third party, which is at best ineffective in our first-past-the-post system, and at worst likely to lead to actually the worst outcome from the voter's perspective because it will be a spoiler for the major party candidate who is closest to the voter; or the voter just says, look, I'm not represented here, I don't have good choices, I'm not gonna vote.

[WATCH THE CLIP]

That framing is part of why Bagenstos’s client list is such a cross-cutting assortment: the Common Sense Party (mostly ex-Republicans repelled by Trumpism), the Libertarian Party, a Democratic candidate who’d also like a second ballot line, and individual voters from across the spectrum. As he puts it, “I think that we see... this is not about a particular ideology. This is about opening up our democracy.”

The fusion ban's defenders will likely lean on the old argument that banning electoral coalitions between major and minor parties protects political stability — the same reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court used in 1997's Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party to bless Minnesota's fusion ban. Bagenstos doesn't think that argument has aged well:

I don’t know how these justices — who are very smart people — or really anyone else looking around could look at the world we’re living in and say the two-party system has really worked well to stabilize our democracy. The evidence that it’s not is just all around us.

He points to an expert report from political scientist Lee Drutman that has been submitted as part of the plaintiff’s case. Drutman argues that the Rehnquist Court got it exactly backwards: more viable parties, not fewer, is what would actually get us out of the zero-sum “doom loop” that has so degraded politics and governance over the last thirty-plus years. The case now heads to the Michigan Court of Claims this fall, with appeals likely to follow that will ultimately produce a state Supreme Court ruling.

Bagenstos doesn’t expect relief in time for the 2026 election, but he’s hopeful it could arrive before 2028. If Michigan’s courts agree, the ruling could become a template for other states that, like Michigan, have recently strengthened their right-to-vote guarantees in ways the old fusion bans never had to answer to.

Asked how he keeps going, given how much of his own civil rights work is being undone in Washington right now, Bagenstos pointed to the long view — the lawyers who kept fighting through Jim Crow, family members who lived through the McCarthy era and kept going anyway: “We’ve been here before, and we wouldn’t have made the gains that we’d had if everybody had given up.”

And then the more ordinary discipline: reading a novel every night, walking outside, not letting the work swallow the whole of a life.

Share this episode with someone who still thinks the two-party system is just how democracy works. It isn’t. It’s a design choice — one Bagenstos is now in court arguing Michigan got wrong.

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In case you want to get into the weeds, here’s the lawsuit that the Michigan Common Sense and Libertarian Parties filed in the Court of Claims and in the Ingham County Circuit Court.

Also, don’t miss this fun short explainer video from Promote the Vote Michigan about the lawsuits and the benefits of fusion voting.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

If you’re new to fusion voting and fusion parties, this Democracy Journal piece is a useful starting point.

Leave a comment

It appeared between a meme and a hot take about the NFL. And yet — it articulated something that a lot of Americans feel in their bones but that rarely gets a serious hearing in the national conversation.

We have written a fair amount about how the Two-Party Doom Loop has allowed and perhaps even encouraged authoritarian capture of government. The logic is straightforward: in a zero-sum, binary political system, the incentive for both sides is to delegitimize and ultimately destroy the other, not to bargain and compromise. That is a dangerous dynamic for democracy itself.

But today, we want to talk about a different cost of the Doom Loop — one that’s less dramatic, but that affects you every day, whether you’re a business owner, a worker, a parent trying to plan your family’s finances, or just a citizen trying to understand what the rules are.

We want to talk about policy whiplash.

Over the past thirty years, the federal government has swung back and forth on policy at a pace that would make your head spin.

Consider the regulatory agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency has been told to aggressively enforce climate regulations, then instructed to dismantle them, then asked to rebuild them, then ordered to gut them again — all within living memory, and sometimes within a single decade. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in 2011 to protect Americans from predatory lenders, has since been sued, defunded, revived, and hollowed out. The National Labor Relations Board has flipped its interpretation of worker organizing rights so many times that labor lawyers have built a cottage industry just keeping up with the changes. The IRS has been alternately starved and funded, its enforcement priorities reversed with each change in administration.

It’s not just the administrative state. Look at legislation. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 were designed to expire, spawning a decade of uncertainty before a partial extension. The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, has been challenged, modified, sabotaged, and partially reinstated in an ongoing saga that has made health insurance planning a Kafkaesque exercise for tens of millions of Americans. Major infrastructure investments get announced, delayed, defunded, and restarted. Environmental rules on emissions, fuel efficiency, and clean water have gone through so many iterations that regulated industries often face a choice between planning for the rule that’s on the books today or the one they expect will replace it after the next election.

This is not governance. This is a very expensive game of tug-of-war, with the country’s economic and social well-being as the rope.

Here’s the thing: this isn’t just annoying. It has a real cost, and economists have measured it.

The landmark work here comes from Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven Davis, who developed the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index to track uncertainty about government policy. Their research, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that policy uncertainty is associated with greater stock price volatility and reduced investment and employment, particularly in policy-sensitive sectors like defense, health care, finance, and infrastructure construction.

The macro-level numbers are striking. Since 2008, U.S. economic policy uncertainty has remained structurally elevated—typically more than double its historical average–and, in recent years, often reaching three to four times that level. That’s not a blip. That’s a new normal and a costly one.

Why does uncertainty carry such a price tag? The mechanism is intuitive once you think about it. Firms facing uncertainty about future regulations, tax policies, or government spending tend to adopt a wait-and-see approach, postponing long-term investments and hiring until policy clarity increases. Households also respond to policy uncertainty by increasing precautionary savings and delaying major purchases, weakening aggregate demand.

In plain English: when businesses don’t know what the rules will be next year — or after the next election — they don’t hire, don’t invest, and don’t build. When families don’t know whether a tax credit or health benefit will survive the next Congress, they don’t plan. Everyone hedges. The whole economy runs a little colder than it should.

The European Commission recently modeled what lower policy uncertainty would mean for the Eurozone and found that if economic policy uncertainty were to revert to pre-pandemic levels, real GDP could be 1.2% higher than in a scenario where uncertainty stays elevated. A percentage point of GDP is an enormous amount of real human welfare — jobs, wages, goods, services.

Here's what that Reddit commenter understood intuitively: the pendulum isn't a bug of American politics, it's a feature of binary American politics.

In a two-party system like the one we have now, where both parties have self-sorted into clear ideological opposites, when one side wins, it wins everything. The other side is locked out. This creates the incentive to swing as hard as possible in your preferred direction while you have the chance, because you know the other team will swing just as hard in the opposite direction the moment they get the keys back. There's no structural reason to compromise with the other side, to make durable policy, or to build coalitions that might survive a change in power.

That’s not how stable policy gets made. That’s how whiplash happens.

Compare this to most other advanced democracies, where multi-party systems require coalition governments to function. When you need three or four parties to agree to govern, the extreme preferences of any one party get tempered. To win support in the next election, each party needs to deliver in ways that will stick so their constituents stick with them. The result is that policy disagreements tend to stay in a narrower range. Elections still matter. Governments still change. But the pendulum doesn’t swing as wildly, because the structure of the system rewards coalition-building and penalizes unilateral lurches.

Which brings us to where we often end up: election rules.

The good news is that the United States does not need a full transition from a presidential to a parliamentary system to reap the stabilizing benefits of multi-party politics. What it needs is more multidimensionality, meaning more viable parties that would have the structural ability to influence which of the two major parties can govern — and on what terms.

That’s what fusion voting can enable.

Fusion voting allows a smaller party to cross-endorse major-party candidates, letting its voters signal their values without wasting their votes. A well-organized centrist fusion party could become the swing force in close elections. It could make its endorsement conditional on policy commitments: no dramatic reversals of environmental regulation, no blowing up the health insurance market, no sudden rewriting of labor law. In exchange for its votes, it extracts durability. (Lee Drutman offers some plausible scenarios for how much a centrist party (or two) that got just three to nine percent of the vote could shift the current political dynamic on his Substack, here.)

That’s not a fantasy. That’s how politics works when the rules allow for it. In New York and Connecticut, where fusion voting remains legal, smaller parties on both ends of the spectrum have used cross-nominations strategically for decades to pull candidates and platforms in their direction, while centrist parties like the Liberal, Reform and Independence parties used their leverage to boost candidates in the center.

Twenty-eight years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court justified its decision upholding Minnesota’s ban on fusion voting by claiming a state’s interest in political stability: “The Constitution permits the Minnesota Legislature to decide that political stability is best served through a healthy two-party system.” Recent experience suggests that the two-party system is delivering the opposite.

A centrist fusion party wouldn’t stop elections from mattering. It wouldn’t prevent either major party from winning. What it would do is set boundaries on how far policy can swing in any one direction. It would be, in effect, an institutionalized moderate constituency with real leverage.

The Reddit commenter wanted a centrist party consistently in charge. We’d settle for a centrist party consistently at the table — with the structural power to help keep the pendulum steady.

That’s what electoral reform is for.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

If you're new to fusion voting and fusion parties, this Democracy Journal piece is a useful starting point.

Leave a comment

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

McCoy wastes no time getting to the diagnosis. “I think we’re in trouble,” she tells Sifry early on.

“We have extreme political polarization that I call pernicious polarization because it has a harm to democracy... And we have democratic backsliding going on. And basically we have a frayed society, a frayed social fabric that makes it difficult.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

“Pernicious” is the key word. McCoy draws a distinction between ordinary political polarization — which simply presents voters with choices, and can be healthy — and the pernicious variety, which “gets so extreme and uses negative tactics and negative rhetoric that demonizes and belittles the opposition” to the point where compromise becomes impossible and the other side starts to feel like an existential threat. That dynamic, she argues, is exactly what we’re living through, and declining presidential poll numbers alone aren’t enough to break it.

Her proposed remedy is counterintuitive, at least to ears trained on the bridge-building discourse: rather than trying to reduce polarization directly, she argues we need to repolarize — but along a different axis. Instead of the red-vs.-blue, Democrat-vs.-Republican divide that currently structures our politics, she wants to see a new organizing line drawn between top and bottom, or between the interests of ordinary people and a corrupt elite. As she puts it:

“We have one axis of polarization now, and it’s basically defined as red, blue, Democrat, Republican... So what we’re saying is you take that axis and you shift it around, like moving around a clock, move that line around and create a new axis, but one where you’re not dividing into two equal parts, where you can actually galvanize a large group, a large majority, around an idea.”

It sounds theoretical, but McCoy has a concrete recent example: Hungary. This past spring, Viktor Orbán — who spent 16 years transforming Hungary from a democracy into what McCoy calls an “illiberal autocracy,” and who has served as a model for authoritarian leaders elsewhere — lost power in a stunning electoral defeat. The victor, Peter Magyar, was actually a defector from Orbán’s own party, and he succeeded largely by doing exactly what McCoy’s framework prescribes: presenting a new axis of conflict, pitting the nation against Orbán’s “clan” of cronies and corrupt elites. Magyar campaigned everywhere, including rural areas that had long been Orbán strongholds. And because he came from the inside, he was able to preempt the government’s attempts to pin corruption charges on him by simply acknowledging his own past and denouncing the system.

The Hungary comparison leads naturally to a conversation about structural reform. Sifry raises fusion voting and proportional representation as tools for escaping the two-party doom loop. McCoy is an advocate for both.

On proportional representation, she makes the case with precision: it reduces pernicious polarization because it opens up political space beyond the binary. When people only have two options, she notes, they tend to vote against the scarier one — negative partisanship — rather than for something they actually believe in. Proportional systems allow parties to earn seats in proportion to the votes they actually receive, and multi-member districts could, in a state like Georgia, produce a congressional delegation that includes a MAGA Republican, a traditional Republican, a centrist Democrat, a progressive Democrat, and perhaps a Libertarian or Working Families representative. That’s not fragmentation; that’s a politics that more accurately reflects what voters actually want.

And on fusion voting, McCoy is equally warm. She notes what Ticket readers already know: fusion doesn’t require a constitutional amendment. Neither does proportional representation for the House — just a change to a single law passed in 1967. “Proportional representation does not — like fusion voting — neither of these require a constitutional amendment,” she says. “They can be done just with changing legislation.”

The episode closes on the question Sifry puts to every guest: how do you cope? McCoy turns to Buddhist philosophy — “impermanence makes possible transformation” — and to the people around her: colleagues who believe in human agency, students, and younger generations who want something different and are ready to take risks to get it. It’s a grounded kind of hope, the kind that comes from studying a lot of dark history and deciding to stay in the fight anyway.

Give it a listen. McCoy is a rigorous, genuinely comparative thinker who has spent her career watching democracies bend and sometimes break — and occasionally recover. Her framework for understanding what ails us, and what might help, is one of the more useful ones available right now.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

If you're new to fusion voting and fusion parties, this Democracy Journal piece is a useful starting point.

Leave a comment

If you work in or around the field of political reform and the ongoing crisis of democracy in America, you may have noticed a new consensus emerging amidst the current wreckage. It rests on a few shared beliefs:

• The American public is deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. The vast majority of our fellow citizens – voters and non-voters alike – agree in opinion polls that our political system could use “a total overhaul.”

• Hyperpartisan polarization, driven by our winner-takes-all, simple-minded two-party system, keeps pushing both sides toward heightened partisan warfare. It’s more pronounced on the right than the left but regardless it’s everywhere. Most shocking perhaps is a Supreme Court majority that is putting more than just a finger - more like an elbow – on the scale and encouraging power grabs and mid-decade gerrymandering. Its recent Callais decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act makes that crystal clear. The public is sick of all that, too.

• The pathway for new voices and ideas to gain real traction is utterly dominated by big money. (See, for example, crypto).

• Making every election “the most important one of our lives” and then using whatever victory results as a mandate for major policy changes, only to see them reversed scant years later when the pendulum swings the other way, is no way to govern a country. In fact, it is a major source of our inability to use government to solve essential problems.

Where is this leading? At a time of declining trust in government, rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, a decent number of organizers, scholars and even a few politicians are arguing that defeating authoritarianism and restoring the old status quo will simply not suffice. We need rules changes that create the possibility of a deeper democracy that works better and is less subject to capture by forces hostile to pluralism.

Nowhere is the need for a new approach more obvious than on the question of racial representation. The astounding decision by the Supreme Court in the Callais case revealed a disdain for fairness that was breathtaking. But listen to these responses:

–Spencer Overton of the GWU Law School (and former president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies) got it right in this piece in The Hill:

“Our already fragile democracy will grow weaker if our federal, state and local governments become even less representative of our multiracial population.

In response, civil rights groups and other Americans committed to democracy should consider more proportional voting systems that can reduce gerrymandering and make representation less dependent on judicial intervention. Under a typical proportional system, if a group wins, say, one-third of the vote, it could expect to secure roughly one-third of the legislative seats.

Critically, all voters’ ballots could count toward electing a representative — no matter where they live — because politicians could not dilute a community’s political power by spreading them across multiple districts, or by packing them into a single district. In Louisiana, for example, where the population is one-third Black, proportional representation could better enable Black Louisianans to help elect at least two of the six members of the state’s congressional delegation. This is not only about fairer representation for non-white communities, but for everyone. Republicans in heavily Democratic regions like New England, for example, and Democrats in strongly Republican states like Oklahoma would have a meaningful opportunity to elect candidates who reflect their share of the vote.

Rather than enabling entrenched politicians to gerrymander district lines to shut out disfavored voters, proportional systems would translate votes into seats more faithfully, producing legislatures that better reflect the electorate and are more responsive.”

Overton’s use of the word “disfavored” tells you all you need to know about the Roberts Court.

–New York Times columnist Ezra Klein on his May 19 show with our friend Lee Drutman of New America, who made yet again the strong case for multipartyism via fusion and PR voting. Klein isn’t yet sold on fusion, but he said this:

“If I’m just being blunt about my own views, this is why I support proportional representation. In this world, let’s say you’re the Democrats in California. Right now, you have to worry in every single district about getting to 51 percent. But it doesn’t actually benefit you at all to get to 60 versus 51, to get to 70 versus 60, etc. And same thing for, say, Republicans in Louisiana. But all of a sudden, it does begin to matter whether or not you appeal to people who are skeptical of you, who are not totally sold. And conversely, the minority party is not competing ineffectually. It actually matters for them if they get 30 percent of the vote, 40 percent of the vote, 45 percent of the vote. It creates competition for voters who are currently disenfranchised.”

–Cecilia Munoz, the former head of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Obama, writes in Democracy Journal from a Latino point of view:

“A growing body of research strongly suggests that Americans of all types, including Latinos, would benefit from a move to a fairer system for all voters, one that aligns voters’ actual preferences more closely with our electoral outcomes, and where every vote matters. A different electoral system — one used by most other mature democracies around the world — would ensure this: under proportional representation, multi-winner districts are used to allocate votes proportionally so that our elected representatives reflect the actual preferences of voters.”

–Political scientist Seth Masket and data journalist G. Elliott Morris from their latest podcast:

“A system where politicians can’t draw their own district lines has its own advantages, and having third, fourth, and even regional parties could force coalition-building and blunt the worst effects of partisan sorting. Some sort of system that acknowledges the primacy of parties, instead of denying them wholesale, is probably way healthier for democracy in the long run.”

–Political scientist Michael Latner, addressing skeptics of multipartyism on the Election Law blog:

“The two-party system has produced four decades of stalemate punctuated by executive orders that the next administration reverses. As Anthony McGann and I argued in earlier cross-national work on social welfare spending, fragmented party systems do not paralyze policymaking; they generate the bargaining space in which policymaking happens. A two-party system offers exactly one available bargain: the other side. When that bargain is refused, nothing moves. A multiparty system always offers another partner.

…Governing is not a function of how few veto players sit at the table. It is a function of whether there is more than one available deal on the table. The most legislatively productive period in modern American history was not the era of disciplined two-party competition. It was the mid-twentieth century, when the United States functioned as a de facto four-party system — Northeastern Republicans, Northern Democrats, Southern Democrats, and Western Republicans — whose cross-cutting coalitions made possible the New Deal, the interstate highway system, Medicare, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The VRA passed because Northern Democrats could find a working majority with Northeastern and Western Republicans over the objection of the Southern wing of their own party. That bargain is structurally unavailable in a disciplined two-party Congress, which is why the Voting Rights Act would not pass today. Fragmentation, in short, is not the threat to American governance. Its absence is.”

What all these people are saying is it’s time for a more multidimensional and representative party system. A system in which the winner-takes-their-fair-share, and the non-winners do the same.

That’s the North Star.

How we get there, by what systems and in what sequence, that’s the work of CBF and many, many others. Stay tuned.

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Current reading:

Andy Craig and Shikha Dalmia, “Democrats Need to Lead the Second Reconstruction,” The Unpopulist, June 17, 2026.

Micah Sifry, “A Tale of Two Summits: WelcomeFest and Netroots Nation,” The Connector, June 3, 2026.

Lee Drutman, “Why You Can’t Just Ban Gerrymandering,” Undercurrent Events, May 26, 2026.

CBF: “The Centrality of Party System Reform: Proportional Representation and Fusion,” May 2026.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

If you're new to fusion voting and fusion parties, this Democracy Journal piece is a useful starting point.

Leave a comment

Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a professor of law at Drexel University and a nationally recognized scholar of the First Amendment and the law of democracy, has a name for what’s missing. She calls it associational party building, and it’s the subject of both a paper recently released by New America under the title A Model for Associational Party Building and a rich conversation with host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your other favorite podcast platform.

The argument is deceptively simple: parties work best not as top-down electoral machines, but as living, rooted civic associations — embedded in the communities they represent, rich in face-to-face relationships, and accountable in ways that money alone can never manufacture. Abu El-Haj came to this view through an indirect route. She had spent years studying money in politics, but arrived at a sobering conclusion: you can’t take money out of politics. So where does that leave ordinary people?

“What they have is numbers on election day, but to exercise that power requires effective organization.”

She describes the problem with both major parties in terms that will feel familiar to most readers. The two major parties, she says — especially at the national level — “feel very disconnected from what the rest of us experience life as.” They operate, in her telling, at a remove from ordinary people, inside echo chambers driven not just by moneyed elites but by professional ones too.

An associational party is a remedy for that disconnection — one that starts bottom-up, invests in genuine community relationships, and gives ordinary members real encounters with the candidates and elected officials who depend on them.

Here is where the theory connects most directly to election reform. What gives an associational party its distinctive power — beyond what any civic coalition can achieve on its own — is the ability to make its contribution to a candidate’s victory visible and auditable. Without a separate line on the ballot, there’s no way to prove, conclusively, how many votes came from your people. And without that proof, elected officials can always find a reason to take the meeting but ignore the ask.

As we’ve written here frequently, fusion voting allows minor parties to show that proof without asking voters to waste a vote or spoil an election.

Abu El-Haj’s research draws on extensive interviews with organizers who built a new fusion party and experienced the shift from interest group to political party firsthand. The civic group leaders recounted how their relationships with legislators were transformed:

“Before we were a part of the party, we would get access, but it would be like begging…. And then, you know, we would tell them, yeah, we delivered, but they were like, ‘Yeah, we probably could have gotten those votes anyways. We could have hired other people to, it was just a matter of money.’”

Once a party can point to a specific number of votes cast on its line in a specific district, that argument collapses. The contribution is no longer deniable. And from that shift — from invisible to auditable — real accountability becomes possible. The ballot line, she notes, also acts as organizational glue: in any coalition, tensions arise, but members who have tasted that kind of power don’t easily walk away.

Abu El-Haj is careful to note that her primary case study — the Working Families Party’s experience in New York — was founded by unions and community organizing groups with deep roots in relational politics, and that not every new party effort starts from that foundation. But the core insight, she argues, applies broadly: to centrist parties trying to build a home for voters alienated from both major parties, to reform movements working to restore fusion voting, and as a cautionary lesson about what happens when parties don’t do this work.

She points to MAGA’s rise as a case in point: it was able to emerge, she argues, in part because the old Republican elite “was not very well embedded” — and the same is true of the Democrats. “In the Bush-Clinton era,” as she puts it, both parties were “disengaged.”

Churches, PTAs, civic associations, local unions — these are potential anchors for any party willing to do the slow, relational work. The model doesn’t require a particular ideology. It requires a particular kind of commitment.

“I hope that the leaders of those parties, when they get their ballot line in, will think about comparable ways to embed themselves.”

Go listen. It’s one of the more useful conversations we’ve hosted about what democratic power actually looks like — and how to build it.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned. If you're new to fusion voting and fusion parties, this Democracy Journal piece is a useful starting point.

Leave a comment

The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Michael Latner, professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and director of research on democratic reform at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Latner co-authored Gerrymandering in America: The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Popular Sovereignty, and a major article in the Yale Law Journal (co-authored with Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Carlos Algara) titled “Callais Confusion, Power Sharing, and the Inevitability of Proportional Representation“ — published shortly before the Court issued its ruling.

Host Micah Sifry puts that article, and its central argument, to the test over the course of a wide-ranging, substantive conversation.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

Latner walks through the mechanics of the Callais decision with admirable clarity. It isn’t just that the court made it harder to prove discrimination; it’s that the majority essentially declared that the only permissible approach is “racial blindness” — that courts can no longer rely on racial data to identify whether district maps dilute minority voting power. The catch: in a country where 90 percent of Black voters in Louisiana vote for the Democratic Party, the idea that race and party affiliation can be cleanly separated is, in Latner’s telling, “empirically not possible.” States can now gerrymander with impunity as long as they claim they’re doing it for partisan, not racial, reasons.

The fallout has been fast. Louisiana suspended an ongoing primary to redraw its maps and remove one of its two majority-minority districts. Tennessee eliminated its Black congressional district. Alabama, Mississippi — and maybe others are moving. As Latner puts it, states are “acting on the decision even before the ink is dry.”

What does all of this tell us about American democracy more broadly? Latner doesn’t soften the diagnosis:

"We are the only major democracy in the world that seats only two parties in its legislature... many U.S. voters were understandably upset at the Democratic Party in 2024. It was a poorly performing party. There was a leadership crisis. These are things that in normal democracies you would see the governing party replaced with an alternative. The problem in the U.S. is that the only alternative was an authoritarian one."

[WATCH CLIP]

Most proportional systems, he notes, have contained or constrained their authoritarian movements — through coalition governments that collapse when one party overreaches, or through vote-share constraints that limit how much power any single faction can accumulate. The United States is one of the rare cases where a major party has been fully taken over by authoritarian forces and handed unilateral control of government. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural consequence of our electoral system.

This brings Latner to the central argument of his Yale Law Journal article: that proportional representation (PR) is not merely desirable but, given where the courts have taken us, inevitable.

“The short answer hearkens back to Winston Churchill — that the Americans will do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.”

[WATCH CLIP]

The logic runs as follows. If the Supreme Court demands racial blindness, and if the only system that can achieve fair representation without relying on racial data is one where the threshold for winning a seat is low enough that any coherent organized coalition gets seats proportional to its votes — then proportional representation isn't just a reform preference. It is the only legally defensible path to minority representation in a post-VRA world.

“If the Supreme Court is serious and we are now in an era, a post-VRA era where … the use of racial data in order to protect voters of color is not going to be used in operation of protecting voting rights; and if in fact racial blindness, which is what the court refers to as an appropriate approach to protecting voting rights, if that's actually the only option, there's only one type of electoral system where you can truly be racially blind. That is, you don't take account of race when you're designing the rules and the system, and that's proportional representation.”

[WATCH CLIP]

The contrast with the old VRA framework is sharp. Under the Voting Rights Act, the state had to carve out specific districts, count citizen voting-age population, use racial data at every step. Minority representation was protected, but it was also dependent on continuous federal oversight and a sympathetic court. Under PR, you simply set a low enough threshold of exclusion — and then let voters organize themselves.

Micah pushes back, usefully, on the political economy of this shift. The longstanding voting rights community isn’t necessarily ready to let go of the VRA framework. The instinct, understandably, is to try to win back Congress, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and restore what was lost. Latner is sympathetic — but skeptical.

He is candid that the political reform movement has historically done itself damage by acting independently of the civil rights community, and that the voting rights groups he works with regularly are rightfully cautious about new frameworks that haven’t proven themselves. But he thinks the moment has forced a practical reckoning. “The legal community is not just skeptical,” he says. “They’re also pragmatic.” Nobody understands what has happened to the VRA better than the people who have spent careers enforcing it. And they are, increasingly, looking for alternatives.

Where does fusion voting fit in this emerging picture? Latner makes an argument that should resonate with readers of this Substack: fusion isn’t just a stopgap for single-seat offices that can’t be carved into proportional districts. It’s a structurally important complement to PR in a country like ours — and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the U.S. Senate.

Even in a world where the House moves toward proportional representation and more state legislatures follow, U.S. Senate races will remain single-winner affairs. That is not going to change. Still, it is possible to inject proportionality into U.S. Senate races via fusion parties and fusion voting. And in doing so one almost surely strengthens pro-democracy forces competing against anti-democracy or authoritarian actors.

"My view is that fusion voting is actually a really important part of an effective reform movement in the U.S.... The U.S. Senate is the clearest case of where, once you've got multiple coalitions competing in a state, whether it's a right wing and a center right party or a green party or multi-dimensional politics... you're still going to have a single candidate and you want those smaller parties to have an influence."

He points to New York City as a living example where third-party lines play a real role in electing candidates from single-member districts. Fusion, in that sense, is already doing part of what PR does: translating organized political identity into real electoral leverage.

At the end of every episode of This Old Democracy, Micah asks guests the same question: how do you cope? For Latner, the answer has a certain pleasing literalism.

“Getting punched in the face and punching other people in the face helps me both release tension and keep me humble.”

[WATCH CLIP]

He’s a regular at the gym, he explains, and does kickboxing. But beyond the stress relief, he returns to something more durable: a sense of calling. Every generation, he argues, has been required to fight for democracy — it has never arrived or sustained itself on its own. This moment is simply the version of that fight that belongs to us.

“We stand on the shoulders of giants,” he says. “We stand on the shoulders of those who’ve come before us and we’ve just got to keep pushing.”

It’s a dark time. But the argument Latner is making — that the destruction of the VRA framework, however painful, may finally force the reform movement to reach for something structurally durable — is at least a reason to think clearly about what comes next.

In Related News:

The Michigan Common Sense Party and the Libertarian Party of Michigan are now suing to revive the practice of fusion voting in the Great Lakes State, arguing in a lawsuit filed in late May in the Michigan Court of Claims that the 131-year-old ban “affords an unfair advantage to the two major parties over new and minor party rivals” and “deprives voters of the opportunity to join together in new and minor parties to advance positions that are unrepresented by the major parties.” More on that story here.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

Leave a comment

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your other favorite podcast platform.

In the conversation with host Micah Sifry, McGhee connects the dots between the racial politics she chronicled in The Sum of Us and the authoritarian moment we’re living through right now — and she doesn’t let the two-party system off the hook.

McGhee’s central argument in her writing and organizing is that the “zero-sum mindset” — the belief that gains for people of color come only at the expense of white Americans — has been systematically deployed by elites to destroy support for shared public goods. She famously illustrated this with the story of Southern communities that literally drained and then shut down their public swimming pools rather than allow Black children to swim alongside white children. On the podcast, she updates that analysis for our era. For me it remains a useful and powerful framework for understanding what’s going on in front of our dismayed eyes.

“I wish that the book didn’t have so much to say in this moment. I wish that it was an antiquated time capsule. If only... Elon Musk comes in, the richest man in the world and gleefully tries to destroy everything we hold in common from cancer research to national parks to life-saving AIDS treatment. We really are living in a world where the zero-sum story is the core right-wing narrative in the United States and in many other places.” \

[WATCH THE CLIP]

The conversation turns to why Trump’s second term feels qualitatively different from his first. McGhee’s diagnosis is clear: the corporate world has bent the knee, Silicon Valley has bankrolled the regime, and the authoritarian playbook — going after lawyers, universities, and media — is running on all cylinders. But she pushes back on the narrative that the country itself has swung sharply rightward.

“I think it’s really important that we not over-attribute an electoral snapshot to the heart and soul of this country… People are disgusted by the immigration crackdown… Donald Trump’s numbers are in the tank across everything, from the economy to immigration. And people are actually more hungry for big solidarity solutions — like addressing health care costs in a way that is permanent, universal, and guaranteed. These policies that are like refilling the pool of public goods, they’re a sort of update of the New Deal era, are far more popular than any political party.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

From there, the conversation moves to terrain that is very much The Ticket’s home turf: whether the two-party system itself is one of the root causes of our crisis. McGhee doesn’t hedge.

“Between money-in-politics and the two-party system, we simply don’t have enough choices, and there is such a radical class bias to our electoral options that you have a working class and increasingly a middle class that just does not have enough champions in politics. As long as that is the case — late-stage capitalism, record inequality, and we don’t have a politics that is not responsive to it — we are going to continue to have volatility. We’re going to continue to have faux populists, outsiders, authoritarians saying, ‘I can fix this, I will blow up this system for you.’ And then they come in and line their pockets.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

She’s unambiguous about the remedy: fusion voting and multi-party democracy. And she grounds her case in history, pointing to the cross-racial Fusion coalitions of the post-Civil War South — in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia — as a model for what electoral pluralism can do for communities of color.

“There is a long history in this country of fusion voting really being about creating cross-racial coalitions. And you see that in the era after the Civil War, when that is the only way you had white working class and Black power to help create Southern democracy, in that narrow window before the Supreme Court and the northern elites gave up on it.”

With the Supreme Court now amputating the last leg of the Voting Rights Act — wiping out majority-minority districts that have enabled the election of representatives from communities historically excluded from power — McGhee sees multi-partyism as a democratic lifeline.

“[W]e need to massively disrupt our electoral system and give more people more choices. We do need to encourage politicians to seek coalitions. We do need to encourage movements to seek coalitions in order to get things done for the American people and solve our big problems and make sure we have nice things.

“I do think that there is a way in which that does help create racial solidarity at the ballot box. And it’s a very exciting dimension of the growing push for multiparty voting, for fusion, for more electoral diversity.”

The episode closes on a remarkable note. Asked how she maintains hope, McGhee — who is descended from enslaved people on both sides of her family — turns to history not as a source of despair but as a kind of ballast.

“If you think about the generation of enslaved people that fought for their own freedom, that won … that saw emancipation, saw Black formerly enslaved people … legislating with grace and vision and power … and then saw a majority of the Supreme Court knock down the civil rights laws, saw the retreat from Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow and the adoption of Lost Cause ideology. That generation, it’s unthinkable to imagine seeing all of that change and then that violent repression. And yet they didn’t give up hope. They kept moving and building what would become the civil rights movement of the 20th century… [I]f that generation didn’t give up hope in the face of that, then who are we to despair?”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

It’s an essential conversation — and a reminder that the fight to refill the drained pool is also, inescapably, the fight for a pluralist, multiparty democracy.

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Michigan! - The Common Sense and Libertarian parties have joined forces and filed litigation last week to overturn the state’s 135 year-old ban on fusion voting and parties. Common Sense’s Jeff Timmer sums it up nicely: “Michigan politics does not suffer from a shortage of noise. It suffers from a shortage of meaningful choices.” Go Blue!

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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That’s the animating question of Bob Kuttner’s new book, Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America, and it’s the question that drives the latest episode of This Old Democracy. Kuttner — co-founder of The American Prospect magazine, professor at Brandeis University, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and author of 14 books — brings to this conversation the perspective of someone who has watched American politics from the inside and the outside for more than half a century. Host Micah Sifry gives him room to roam, and Kuttner takes full advantage.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your other favorite podcast platform.

The through-line of Kuttner’s memoir is captured in the title of one of its chapters: “Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics.” As he tells Micah, he has long believed that the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberal, market-first economics in the 1980s and 1990s was not just wrong on the merits — it was a political catastrophe.

“The turn to neoliberalism basically set the stage for Trump because it meant that the Democrats gave up on the white working class, which made interracial coalition much more arduous. And the claims of neoliberalism that this would energize the economy turned out to be completely bogus. The only thing neoliberalism did was it made the rich richer and the middle class [and] the working class more vulnerable.”

When he and Paul Starr and Robert Reich launched The American Prospect in 1990, they were swimming hard against the tide. The conventional wisdom, personified by the rise of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, was that the Democratic Party was too pro-union, too pro-Black, just too liberal. The Prospect said: no, liberals need to become better New Dealers. Two years later, Bill Clinton was in the White House, quoting them — and then, largely ignoring them.

Kuttner knew better, in part because of his experience in midwifing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Kuttner was chief investigator for Senator William Proxmire’s Banking Committee in the mid-1970s, and the story of how the CRA came to be is, well, thrilling (in a nerdy way). This profoundly useful piece of legislation did nothing more than consider poor people as legitimate actors in our society, deserving of respect when they too sought to obtain a mortgage and purchase a home.

Kuttner describes how the CRA emerged: grassroots multiracial neighborhood coalitions, a sympathetic US Senator who did not accept any campaign contributions, investigative staff tasked with developing tough hearings, and a press that covered them seriously. The result was landmark legislation that created immensely powerful tools against redlining if the citizenry used them (which they did). Kuttner calls it his graduate education in how the financial system — and the political system — actually function.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the conversation, for listeners expecting gloom, is Kuttner’s relatively buoyant short-term read on where things stand.

“I think contrary to what a lot of people felt six months ago, I think the guardrails are holding more than we dared hope. Trump is just really on the skids. Republicans are giving themselves permission to criticize him. Democrats are feeling bolder and more feisty. He’s lost the courts — which is just amazing.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

He notes that the recent defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary — by a candidate who broke from the authoritarian’s own party and organized a movement from scratch — is a meaningful data point: even entrenched authoritarians can lose when they lose the people. Unsurprisingly, he thinks it likely that control of Congress and then the presidency is likely to flip back once again to the opposition party. But then he pauses. Full stop. Because that’s when he gets worried. Short-term optimism gives way to a much harder question. Kuttner frames it plainly:

“I think democracy will survive. The question is whether it will deliver.”

For Kuttner, the social contract that his generation inherited — affordable college, decent wages for blue-collar workers, employer-provided pensions and health insurance, attainable home ownership — has been systematically dismantled. Restoring something like it will require a political agenda every bit as ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt’s. If Democrats return to power without that kind of courage and that kind of mandate, he warns, they will only incubate the next wave of authoritarian populism. The anxieties and resentments that produced Trump don’t go away just because Trump loses.

This is where Micah presses him on Lee Drutman’s “two-party doom loop” argument — explored in the second episode of This Old Democracy – the idea that systemic electoral reform, not just better candidates, is what’s needed to break the cycle. Kuttner’s answer is characteristically grounded: he’s skeptical that the constitutional structures of American politics will allow a full multiparty breakout, but he sees promise in operating within the two-party system while pulling it toward more progressive terrain.

“I think the Working Families Party gives you the best of both worlds,” he says — pointing to the well-known success of the WFP in New York but also the lesser known success of its model spreading to Philadelphia, to Massachusetts, and potentially to 20 or 25 states. That’s not a revolution in the electoral system. But it might be how the system slowly gets more responsive, one coalition at a time.

Micah closes, as he always does, by asking how his guest copes. Kuttner’s answer draws on Ira Gershwin and Albert Camus, which is about as good a pairing as you’re likely to find in a democracy podcast.

“On the one hand, you fight like hell to try and take back your country. And on the other hand, you don’t let them take away small pleasures. You know, having meals with friends or going to concerts or doing whatever you do that gives you joy. And the Ira Gershwin line is, ‘No, no, they can’t take that away from me.’

“Camus wrote in the last line of the Myth of Sisyphus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Sisyphus happy? He rolls the rock up the hill, it comes tumbling down. And my credo is Sisyphus happy — because sometimes the rock stays put for a long time, even though it ultimately comes tumbling down.

“If you look at the Wagner Act, for 50 years, until Reagan started destroying it, two generations of blue-collar workers had a good life... And the rock always comes tumbling back down the hill. But in the meantime, you make meaning from endeavor.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

It’s a beautiful formulation — and a useful one for anyone doing this work right now. Go listen to the full conversation. You’ll come away with a richer sense of where we’ve been, how much of the current crisis was foreseeable (and foreseen), and what kinds of politics might actually be equal to the moment.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

Leave a comment

The case is Louisiana v. Callais (appropriately pronounced “callous”) and by a predictable and predicted 6-3 vote the Court struck down the “majority-minority” districts that grew out of the collective shame at our nation’s past.

This humble Substack isn’t the place to parse the hows and whys that have brought the Court to this point. Suffice it to say that a majority of the Justices are convinced that (a) historic racial discrimination by states is a thing of the past, and (b) today’s problem is reverse discrimination by the state against whites.

The facts in the Callais case showed that Louisiana diluted the voting power of its Black community by “packing and cracking” them geographically when drawing district lines—the state has seven congressional districts and is one-third Black, but has had only one majority-Black district. Until today, the Voting Rights Act had been understood to allow the state to rectify that by creating a second majority-minority district. But this Court has shown itself to be predisposed to pay more attention to the claims of a group of non-minority plaintiffs who asserted that their voting power was being diluted unfairly.

The question on our minds is, what comes next? Is there a credible path forward to a political system that, even absent the VRA, recognizes that ours is a pluralist society?

Here I’d like to heartily embrace and expand upon the views of scholars like Guy-Uriel E. Charles and the good folks at Protect Democracy’s If You Can Keep It Substack: we need a combination of proportional representation and fusion voting to ensure that minority interests aren’t trampled by majority power. The SCOTUS alternative of allowing unfettered majorities to rig the electoral system and run roughshod over the voices of minority groups, whether ethnic, racial, or ideological, is the precise opposite of pluralism.

To be sure, now that Callais has been decided, the first outcome is likely to be an even more intensive partisan arms race of aggressive gerrymandering by red and blue states alike. Fair Fight Action estimates that in its wake, Republican-controlled legislatures in the South could redraw their congressional maps in as many as 19 majority-Black districts with the aim of pulling those seats into the GOP column. Democrats can certainly respond by redrawing their maps too, but such moves will make the problem of racial political exclusion even more visible. One could re-draw California’s district lines to turn every one of its 52 seats blue—but in doing so you will also turn many of the state’s majority-minority districts into places that will elect fewer non-white candidates.

Reformers need to be ready with a better answer. Here’s ours.

1. Repeal state bans on fusion voting so that new parties can form and test themselves in the political marketplace.

2. Establish proportional representation for state legislative elections and eventually congressional elections by doing away with single-member districts.

Why do we need these changes? Because democracy only works if everyone has a stake in the system. And the winner-take-all, zero-sum nature of our two-party system, which has sorted us into two warring tribes, is breaking that compact. Today’s Supreme Court itself is itself a product of that war. Its willingness to legitimize racial discrimination in districting as long as it is cloaked in partisan terms is the tell. The Voting Rights Act sought to stand in the way of racial discrimination that had the effect of keeping Blacks and other minorities from their share in the system. Now we have to find a different path to the same goal.

So what to do? We need to remember that there are two forms of representation that matter: descriptive and substantive. The goal of descriptive representation is a government that looks like us, in all our diversity: Of the people. The goal of substantive representation is a government that acts on all of our behalf: By the people and For the people.

The answer starts with recognizing that a system with single-member, winner-take-all districts in a legislature is not an act of God or nature. Nor is it dictated by the Constitution. It’s a choice. And choosing to replace it with multi-member districts and modern voting rules will lead to a more pluralistic division of representation. If enough seats are included per district, gerrymandering becomes meaningless. And the need to make race-conscious decisions about drawing district lines also goes away.

Since Congress voted in 1967 to outlaw multimember districts for itself, this approach to representative democracy can only start at the state legislative level–though of course Congress could vote to amend that law. But as states adopt this approach, there’s good reason for it to bubble up to House elections as well. So the death of the VRA need not and should not mean the end of the road for minority voting rights.

That said, there’s one problem that multimember districts and proportional representation does not solve: what about the “single winner” races for President, Congress, Governor, Attorney General, Treasurer, Mayor and so on?

Today, just 16 of 100 US senators are from communities of color (7 Hispanic, 5 Black, 3 Asian, one Native American). This is actually an all-time high, but still well below those groups’ presence in America overall. Among US governors, currently just three of 50 are from minority backgrounds.

The way to ensure that minority groups have their fair share of sway over the selection and election of such powerful offices is to bring back America’s own unique form of proportional representation: fusion voting. Under that system, minority groups were able to organize their own parties and bargain, often quite effectively, for their share of the political pie.

The best example of this from America’s past is the fusion alliance that formed in North Carolina in 1893, when mostly white farmers and sharecroppers identifying with the Populist Party combined with the mostly Black-supported Republican party. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in their book Tyranny of the Minority:

“This improbable coalition upended North Carolina politics. And it struck fear in the Democratic Party establishment. The Fusion ticket won a sweeping majority in the North Carolina State legislature in 1894, and in 1896 it captured the governorship and elected to the House of Representatives George Henry White, who at the time was America’s only African-American congressman. The Fusion-dominated state legislature restored direct elections for local offices and adopted what has been called ‘probably the fairest and most democratic election law in the post reconstruction South.’ As a result, black Republicans and white populists won public offices across the state.”

A combination of proportional representation for multi-member legislative districts and fusion voting for single-member offices like governor or senator would be mutually reinforcing. We’d see some Republicans elected in deep blue urban areas, and Democrats in deep red rural districts. But we’d also see the long-overdue emergence of some new parties – Rural Prosperity, Housing First, Youth, Common Sense. These new parties would test themselves in both the single-winner (fusion) and the multi-member (PR) races, and the ones who build a genuine base of voters and activists will survive and make our politics more representative and multi-dimensional.

Those new parties might be expected to also run their own candidates for single-member offices—potentially acting as spoilers—but with fusion voting legal, their incentives would shift toward combination and collaboration. Likewise, the two major parties would have good reason to pay attention to the interests of those minor party voters as they go about nominating their own single-office candidates. Instead of more polarization and zero-sum politics, we’d have something much closer to a healthy balancing of majority and minority perspectives and concerns.

I don’t expect this to become conventional wisdom the day after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. But it’s high time we offered the American people a new, potent approach to one of our age-old problems: how to govern a diverse society so that everyone, be they in the majority or minority, is included in having a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

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For more on the relationship between fusion voting, proportional representation, and multi-party democracy, Protect Democracy’s Deborah Apau and Jennifer Dresden explain it all in these two Fall ‘25 papers:

A practical path to ending the two party system

Fusion voting as a path to Proportional Representation

For more on what happened in North Carolina in the 1890s, do not miss this trailer for a recent PBS documentary (full length here).

Or check out the just published Short of a Revolution: The Fusion Insurgency and the Triumph of Jim Crow in North Carolina” by Craig Thurtell. UNC Press. A Fonerite.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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Dear Citizen Springsteen:

In Minneapolis, at the start of the Land of Hope and Dreams tour, you opened with a call straight from the better angels of our nature, from a road you’ve been traveling with your audience, and with this country, for decades.

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll, in dangerous times,” you began. “We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals, democracy, our constitution, and our sacred American promise.”

“Join with us,” you urged—”choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness.”

Enviably or not, you’ve never been one to stand back and let it all be, to walk away from the fire. But if we’re going to take your invitation seriously—if we’re going to stand our ground without ending up wounded, not even dead—we need to talk honestly about how we get out of this political jungleland.

Last year, talking to Time Magazine, you said something that stuck:

“We’re desperately in need of an effective alternative party, or for the Democratic Party to find someone who can speak to the majority of the nation.”

That’s exactly right. Because what we’re trapped in now isn’t just polarization—it’s a kind of political badlands, a two-party doom loop that keeps us running in place.

It works like this: the country has been sorted into two camps, each convinced the other is not just wrong but dangerous. Maybe the past was never quite the glory days we sometimes remember—but there was a time when both parties held a wider range of voices, when there were more crossing points, more ways to meet in the middle of the road.

Now, every election feels like a last stand. Each side is told it has to win it all or lose everything. Compromise is treated like surrender. And so we keep racing down the same highway, no exits, no off-ramps, just a long line of campaigns that sound like they’re shouting, prove it all night.

Meanwhile, whenever one party grabs the wheel, the clock starts ticking. Expectations rise, reality disappoints, and before long people are ready to turn the page again. The result is a cycle where nothing sticks—where gains are undone, where governing becomes a series of temporary victories followed by inevitable reversals.

Right now, the cycle may seem to favor Democrats. But we’ve all heard this song before. A scratched record, skipping back to the same line—again and again—until you start to wonder if we’re just born to run in circles.

The deeper problem is that the system itself leaves too many people feeling like outsiders—like they’re watching the show but never really part of the band. Millions of Americans don’t see themselves fully represented by either party, yet they’re told these are the only two tickets out of town.

You said it plainly: we need an alternative. Not just a different messenger, but a different structure—something that lets people come together around what they actually share, instead of forcing every issue into a binary choice.

That kind of change doesn’t come from swapping out the singer at center stage every four years. It comes from rewriting the rules of the show—how we run our elections, how we translate votes into power, how we make room for more than two voices at a time.

There are real, workable paths forward. Fusion voting—where multiple parties can endorse the same candidate—lets people support the leaders they believe in and the ideas they stand for, without throwing their vote away. We used to have fusion voting across America and it’s how the anti-slavery movement birthed the Republican party in the 1840s and 1850s, and it’s how workers, farmers, freed slaves, debtors and suffragettes pushed their causes into the mainstream parties back in the 1880s and 1890s.

Fusion rewards coalition-building instead of punishing it. It lets new movements grow without acting as spoilers. It says you don’t have to choose between being effective and being true to what you believe. It was banned almost everywhere (except Connecticut and New York) more than a hundred years ago, but there are people trying to revive it in states across the country.

Another road out of the badlands is proportional representation—used across much of the democratic world—which means seats are allocated based on the share of the vote each group earns. If 20% of voters back a set of ideas, they get roughly 20% of the representation. No more winner-take-all wipeouts. No more millions of voices disappearing when the count is done. It turns politics from a cage match into something closer to a band—different parts, different sounds, but working together to make something larger than any one of them alone.

Because if we don’t build that, we stay trapped in the same two-party showdown—every election a last ride, every victory temporary, every loss treated like the end of the road. The promise keeps slipping just out of reach, and the house we’re trying to build never quite stands.

You’ve spent a lifetime singing about people searching—for dignity, for connection, for a place where they belong. That search is still going on. And right now, politically, a lot of Americans are still out there in the dark, waiting for a system that recognizes them, that lets them step into the light and be counted as they are.

Fusion voting opens a door. Proportional representation builds a bigger room. Together, they offer a way out of the two-party trap—not by blowing the whole thing up, but by letting something more representative grow inside it.

Maybe this is one of those moments where the road forks—where we decide whether we keep driving the same route, stuck in a loop, or finally take a chance on a different kind of map. One where more people have a say in where we’re headed, and fewer feel left behind at the side of the road.

If art can help people imagine that path—if music can help them feel what a more inclusive democracy might sound like—then voices like yours matter more than ever.

Because we don’t just need resistance. We need renovation. We need a system that can hold more of us, more honestly, more durably.

And that’s a road worth writing the next verse about.

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Reading / Watching / Listening

Bruce Springsteen, meet Lee Drutman. You know how people often say “if you’re only gonna read/watch/listen to one book/movie/record, this is the one you gotta check out?

Well, check out this citizen’s latest single – “The Democratic Party is about to make the most predictable mistake in American politics.”

All readers of The Ticket – left, right or center – should take the time to read Drutman’s latest, and if you think it’s worthy, share it around. The best way forward — really, the only way forward – is together.

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Okay, that was fun.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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Mason offers a rigorous — and at times unsettling — account of why Americans have stopped thinking of their political opponents as fellow citizens. She discusses parties, politics, policy, and young people. We really need to think about this one because the civil in civil society is an essential piece of the democratic puzzle.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

In Mason’s view, political parties are essential to democratic decision making.

“[Parties] are a really useful informational shortcut for us. We can’t ask our citizens to read every single piece of legislation and every piece of the party platform and know about all of the different parts of the platform and fully understand these policies. The reason we have representative democracy is because we don’t all have time to do that and we can’t expect everyone to do that. And so what parties do is they simplify that political decision that we are given the privilege of making as citizens. We can’t all be experts. And so the parties give us a much simpler choice.”

Mason’s work centers on a deceptively simple insight: we don’t really choose our political parties the way we choose between competing products on a shelf. The “banker mind” model of democratic citizenship — the idea that voters coolly weigh policy options, calculate trade-offs, and select the candidate who best serves their interests — is, she argues, largely a myth. The reality is considerably messier.

“Our punditry tends to assume that we think about politics sort of like bankers and we’re choosing investments with a sober and quantitative mind and assessing the positives and negatives, you know, is this policy marginally affecting my family in this number of decimal points? But actually, that’s not how we participate in politics. We’re much more like sports fans when we engage in politics.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

What has happened over the past six decades, Mason explains, is a process she calls social sorting: the gradual alignment of partisan identity with race, religion, geography, and other social identities. In the 1950s, both parties contained meaningful internal diversity — cross-cutting coalitions that made it impossible to know, just from someone’s party registration, very much about who they were. That era is over. Today, the parties have sorted themselves into two fairly coherent tribes, and the sorting makes genuine cross-partisan contact rarer with every passing election cycle.

What makes social sorting especially durable, Mason says, is that people genuinely believe they are reasoning independently — even when they’re not. She describes a political science experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned either a Democratic or Republican label to the same welfare policy. Democrats reliably preferred the “Democratic” policy, and Republicans the “Republican” one, even when the substantive details of the policies had been swapped. When asked afterward whether their party had influenced their preference:

“Everyone said, not at all. That was entirely me. I have entirely come up with the reasons for my desire to have this policy enacted. We don’t know that we’re doing it. And also in that experiment, they said, do you think other people are influenced by their party? And everybody says, yes, definitely. Everyone else is influenced by their party, but I’m not.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

The distortions don’t stop at policy preferences. Mason’s research also documents systematic misperceptions of who actually belongs to each party. Americans consistently overestimate the share of Democrats who are Black, LGBTQ+, or non-Christian — and overestimate the share of Republicans who are elderly or evangelical.

“Most people assume that Democrats are 35% LGBT and the true number is 5%. They assume that Democrats are 40% Black and the true number is 25%.”

These stereotypes aren’t merely factual errors. They shape the emotional valence of partisan identity: if you believe the other party is almost entirely composed of groups you view negatively, your hostility toward that party will track your feelings about those groups — whether or not the factual premise is accurate.

The stakes of all this, Mason makes clear, are not merely rhetorical. In Radical American Partisanship, she and Kalmoe measure the kinds of attitudes that social scientists have found to precede mass violence in other contexts — dehumanization, vilification, openness to political aggression. The numbers they’ve compiled since 2017 are worth sitting with:

“In 2017, it was about 40% of Democrats and Republicans who were willing to say the other party was evil. It’s gone up to almost 70% of Republicans in 2022. Last summer, it’s around 50 to 60% of Republicans and Democrats. In terms of dehumanizing the other side — we’re up to 40% of Democrats and Republicans who are willing to say that people in the other party don’t deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

Mason is careful not to predict catastrophe, but she is equally careful not to minimize the data. The nightmare scenario, she says, is a tit-for-tat cycle: roughly 20% of Americans say violence to achieve political goals might be justified — but when asked what they’d do if the other side starts it, that number climbs to 40, 50, sometimes 60%.

Sifry asked Mason about the degree to which the two-party system itself is accelerating these dynamics. Her answer was unambiguous:

“The two-party system is a huge part of this. There’s a psychological reason for that, which is that when you have a perception of a zero-sum competition, then the competition is more intense. Either we win or we lose. And the people who benefit from our loss are always the same people.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

Mason explained that In multi-party systems, by contrast, the lines of “us” and “them” are inherently more fluid. Parties that are adversaries in one election may be coalition partners in the next; voters have in their living memory experiences of that fluidity. Research comparing “affective polarization” — the raw emotional dislike of partisan outgroups — across democracies has found it to be less intense in systems where coalitional politics are the norm.

The problem in the United States, Mason notes, is institutional: the two-party structure is deeply embedded in the rules of how we run elections. Dismantling it requires creativity — precisely the kind of creativity that efforts to revive fusion voting and open up the ballot are attempting.

On the question of democratic restoration, Mason offers two distinct registers of hope. The first is structural and long-term: fixing the institutional incentives that make our current polarization rational from each party’s perspective. The second is personal and immediate: recognizing that norms — unlike laws — are enforced socially rather than by state power. Which means ordinary citizens have more agency than they might think.

“If we don’t like the behavior that we’re seeing from our political leadership, we ourselves enforce the social norms around politics. And if we feel like politics is getting too nasty and rude and uncivil, then one thing we can do is model good behavior, discourage bad behavior, and be the people that we wish our leaders were being.”

Asked how she personally copes with staring daily into the abyss of American partisan hostility, Mason offers a warmer note. She reads fiction before bed. She teaches college students. And she finds something genuinely encouraging in the generation that has never known a political moment before Trump:

“This young generation — they don’t remember a time before Trump. And they are pretty disgusted with the way they see the adults behaving right now. And they want a different kind of politics... They’re creative, they’re interested, they’re paying a lot of attention, and they want something better.”

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Lilliana Mason is professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity and, with Nathan Kalmoe, Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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Over the course of an expansive conversation with host Micah Sifry, Rapoport traces an arc from the antiwar movement to the ballot box to the boardrooms of national advocacy, and explains why — despite everything — he remains an optimist.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

Rapoport pulls no punches about where we are:

“There are zero guardrails on what Donald Trump and the Trump administration and the movement behind him would like to do to restrict and take over our democracy. So that’s the worst of times.”

But he balances that assessment with a characteristic refusal to despair:

“[A]s the song goes, don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. Because I do think that there are lots of ways in which people are working, as you are, Micah, to make democracy better. And I think that’s a really important thing. I am an optimist on this question, because I think that the forces to preserve and improve democracy will ultimately prevail.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

Rapoport’s path from Vietnam War protester to Connecticut state legislator was not a straight line, but it had an internal logic. After years of community organizing — working to empower people and make government more responsive — he watched the Reagan revolution demonstrate, with painful clarity, that electoral power could undo in months what organizing had won over years. The answer, for him and for many in the community organizing world at that moment, was to enter the arena directly.

He ran for the Connecticut state legislature in 1984, won, and was assigned almost immediately to the elections committee — which he would eventually chair. Ten years of immersion in election law and voting rights policy followed.

“It’s not a super straight line, but there is definitely a through line... the idea that there is tremendous inequality economically and socially and racially in the country, and at the same time, our democratic institutions are failing to deal with it.”

Rapoport’s run for Secretary of the State in 1994 offers one of the most compelling real-world demonstrations of what fusion voting actually does. Rapoport, a Democrat, was cross-endorsed by A Connecticut Party, the independent, centrist party that ex-Republican Lowell Weicker had created in 1990.

When the votes were counted, Rapoport had received 365,000 votes on the Democratic line — and 125,000 more on the “A Connecticut Party” line. He won the race by 2,237 votes.

“Absent A Connecticut party, no way I would ever have been elected.”

That experience didn’t just help him win. It shaped how he governed. One out of every four of his voters had come to him on a third-party line — moderate, old-line Republicans who crossed over based on shared values around the income tax fight and civic reform. He knew who they were and felt accountable to them.

“I definitely was more bipartisan than I might have been — more conscious of making sure that the people who voted for me on the Connecticut Party line felt good about it.”

To critics who argue that fusion is too complicated for voters or too difficult to administer, Rapoport has a direct response:

“It’s not only not rocket science, it’s not even algebra. It’s just third grade math. You can vote for a candidate on one line and on another line, and at the end of the night you add the two votes together to get a total.”

He adds, with characteristic directness: “I’m urging any secretary of state who’s thinking about it to give me a call. I can give you a hands-on lesson. It’s easy.”

As Secretary of the State, Rapoport oversaw elections in a state where fusion had been practiced continuously and understood the nuts and bolts of running it well. He and Micah also discuss what was achieved beyond fusion: implementing the National Voter Registration Act (”Motor Voter”) aggressively and thoughtfully; expanding access to the primary system; and thinking of the office itself as, in Rapoport’s phrase, the “advocate in chief for democracy and participation.”

After leaving office, Rapoport continued pushing the frontier. At Demos, which he led for 13 years, he helped drive the national expansion of election day voter registration — from six states when he started to 25 today. The goal was always the same: close the gap between who is eligible to participate and who actually does.

But at some point, that incremental approach confronted its own limits. Rapoport describes the moment of clarity:

“I had been working for all the democracy reforms — same-day registration, early voting, mail-in voting, restoration of voting rights — and all of those moved the needle of expanding voter participation, but not very much. I said, is there anything that could really move the needle?”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

The answer came from an unexpected quarter: a paper by E.J. Dionne and William Galston for the Brookings Institution, which made the case for treating voting as a required civic duty. Rapoport learned, to his admitted embarrassment, that 25 countries already have mandatory voting — and that Australia has had it since 1924, achieving 90% turnout in every election since.

“I said, wow, this is something that needs to be discussed in the United States.”

The result was a book co-authored with Dionne and the creation of 100% Democracy, which advocates for what Rapoport calls “universal voting” — mandatory participation, but without mandating a vote for any particular candidate (you can leave a ballot blank or mark “none of the above”). And crucially, this doesn’t require federal legislation or a constitutional amendment. States set the time, manner, and place of elections. They can do this themselves. Bills are currently moving in Connecticut and Illinois.

Rapoport has continued to build relationships with elections officials around the country, attending the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference and speaking with counterparts from both parties. He finds real openness — both to fusion and to universal voting:

“I spent some time in Washington at the [NASS] conference and had great conversations with Secretaries of State, both Democrats and Republicans.”

That cross-partisan dialogue matters. Rapoport’s own career is proof that fusion works best when it transcends party lines — and that the voters who use third-party lines are often precisely the voters politicians need to understand and speak to.

At the end of the episode, Micah asks the question he poses to all his guests: how do you cope? How do you keep your head up? Civic faith, says Rapoport.

“What gives me hope and keeps me going is the sense that there really are — and I believe a majority of people in this country who want to participate, who care about making our country a better place, who are willing to push back. I mean, you look at the incredible civic pride that has come over Minneapolis since the ICE raids. I just think there’s a lot of ⁓ really, really good things happening. If I can be part of that and maybe even bring some new ideas to it, that’s a good reason to get up in the morning.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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The show is Borgen. It’s Danish. And it was widely written about when it first started streaming in the U.S. But here we are, 15 years late to the Borgen party, but perfectly timed for the party discussion.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would actually feel like to live inside a political system that wasn’t a binary trap — this is the closest thing to a window into that world that popular culture has produced.

Watch it. You’ll be riveted. And at first you’ll be furious — not at the show, but at the contrast to the American crisis.

Borgen — the word means “the castle,” Danish slang for the parliament building, their version of “the Hill” — follows Birgitte Nyborg, the leader of a small centrist party who unexpectedly becomes Denmark’s first female prime minister.

The show tracks her rise, her coalition negotiations, her compromises, her mistakes, and the very human costs of a life in politics.

It is, in other words, a show about governing. Not campaigning (though there is a little). Not destroying your opponents (though there are some attempts). Governing — the strange, messy, honorable business of building enough consensus among people who disagree to actually solve public problems.

That alone makes it almost science fiction by American standards.

Here’s what hits you almost immediately: in Borgen, no single party has a majority. That’s not a crisis. That’s just how it works. To form a government, Nyborg has to negotiate with parties she disagrees with — parties that have different bases, different priorities, different red lines. She has to give things up to get things done. Her coalition partners push back, defect, threaten, and maneuver. And somehow, out of all that friction, most of the time policy gets made.

Criminal justice. Retirement pensions. The environment. Immigration. All familiar issues. What seems surreal is that these Danes make progress.

Compare that to our system, where the two parties have so thoroughly sorted themselves into opposing camps that compromise has become synonymous with betrayal — where the incentive structure rewards obstruction over governance, and where the only move is to wait until your side has total power and then ram through whatever you can before losing it again.

In Borgen, the parties are supposed to fight. And then they’re supposed to find a way to work together anyway. The conflict is real, but it isn’t existential. Politics is portrayed as a practice, a craft — not a war.

Every episode is, in effect, an advertisement for what it feels like to live in a multiparty democracy.

How do we get there in the U.S.? We’ve argued here (and here and here) that the easiest path is through reviving the American tradition of fusion voting. Proportional representation is another avenue. Both of these reforms create the conditions for viable third parties to form. And that’s essential because the zero-sum two party system is incapable of meeting the moment.

But still the case for election rules reform and multiparty democracy can sometimes feel abstract. Ballot access thresholds, anti-fusion statutes, the mechanics of the Australian ballot — these are important, but they don’t exactly set the imagination on fire.

Borgen does something that policy arguments alone can’t: it makes multiparty democracy legible. It shows you what it looks like on the ground, in practice, in human terms. You see how a smaller party can have real power without winning a plurality. You see how a politician can hold distinct positions rather than having to package herself into one of two pre-set bundles. You see how voters can be represented by parties that actually reflect what they believe, rather than choosing between the lesser of two national brands.

You also see the costs and complications — Borgen is not naive about the frustrations of coalition politics, and it doesn’t pretend that a multiparty system solves every problem. But it shows a political culture oriented, at least in aspiration, toward solving public problems rather than simply defeating the other side.

That is, at its core, what we’re working towards.

It’s worth noting that Denmark is not a utopia. Danish democracy has its own pathologies, its own failures, its own rising pressures from nationalist parties and the strains of coalition governance. The show is honest about that. But it depicts a baseline of democratic health — a system where parties form, compete, negotiate, and sometimes govern responsibly — that feels, from where we sit in 2026, almost unimaginably remote.

That gap is the point. We don’t have to accept our current political reality as permanent or natural. There was another way of doing American democracy, and there could be again. Borgen is a reminder of what we’re actually working toward.

Go watch it. Then come back and help us change things.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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Disch, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, joins host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy for a wide-ranging conversation about the rules, myths, and suppressed history behind America’s duopoly. The result is an illuminating conversation — essential listening for anyone who wants to understand not just what’s broken about our politics, but how it got this way, and what we can do about it.

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

Disch opens with a provocation: she would ban the very phrase “two-party system” if she could. Not because two parties don’t dominate American politics — they obviously do — but because calling it a “system” implies something organic, inevitable, and permanent. It’s none of those things.

“Most people in the US accept third party failure as a matter of course. They feel that third party candidacies put them in a terrible position — in the grips of a terrible dilemma. Do I vote for a candidate who might represent me better, but may end up throwing the election to the candidate whom I, and actually most people, least prefer? And we assume that this is just a natural feature of the two-party system. And we don’t think about the institutions that make this game so stacked against third political parties.”

That’s not a description of nature. It’s a description of rules — rules that were deliberately designed, largely at the turn of the 20th century, to choke off the extraordinary multi-party vitality that had characterized American democracy for most of the 1800s.

The history Disch tells is one familiar to regular readers of this Substack, but unfamiliar to most Americans. Before the adoption of the government-printed “Australian ballot” in the 1890s, parties printed their own ballots, and fusion candidacies — where a single candidate could and did appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — were common and powerful. They allowed third parties to build real coalitions, elect real officeholders, and sustain real organizations.

Then came a two-step trap. First, states adopted ballot access thresholds that made it costly and difficult for minor parties to qualify. Then — and this is the critical piece — some states quietly banned fusion by requiring that no candidate could be nominated by more than one party. The effect was devastating:

“What this meant was that partisans of one party would not vote for the candidate that looked like it was the candidate of the other party... populist voters [would say], ‘I’m not voting for the Democratic party. They’re a terrible party. They supported slavery. Why would I do that? I’m going to lose votes.’”

A populist organizer of the era saw it coming with brutal clarity, as Disch quotes: “Whenever a fusion candidate running under the Democratic heading alone produced many stay-at-home votes – that is to say abstainers – in the future, we populists will have to get on the ballot by petition.” They understood exactly how the new rules would hollow out their organizations. And they were right.

“This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for third political parties to have any lasting presence in US elections — because you spend an enormous amount of resources just getting on the ballot.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

The near-destruction of fusion voting didn’t just limit ballot options. It destroyed something more fundamental: the capacity of ordinary people to build durable political organizations that could teach civic skills, develop political identities, and force new issues onto the national agenda.

“Party organizations are incredibly useful because they teach voters civic skills and give them a commitment to participation that does not revolve around a charismatic person.”

This is why, Disch argues, recent third-party efforts so often collapsed into personality vehicles — Perot, Nader, Stein — rather than sustained movements. Without the rules that enable organization-building, third parties become flashes in the pan. And flash-in-the-pan politics, as Micah Sifry noted in his own earlier writing (which Disch quotes back to him), leaves us with “chronic explosions of anti-incumbent sentiment and independent celebrity bids for office as the only alternatives to the duopoly.”

So far this is familiar stuff to most readers. But then Disch explains the deeper damage, far beyond electoral mechanics, that is less understood by voters and organizers alike.

“The two-party system we have today is giving us what political scientists like to call one-dimensional conflict. And that describes a conflict in which it can only be zero-sum because if you win, I lose, and in which I see you in very narrow terms. I assume that we disagree on everything. So all my beliefs fall in one line and all of your beliefs fall in one line.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

A multi-party system, by contrast, offers a richer, more nuanced picture of political reality — one where people’s beliefs don’t have to be sorted into two pre-packaged bundles, and where coalitions can form around specific issues rather than tribal identities.

One of the most striking moments in the podcast conversation comes when Sifry asks what happens when readers and students first encounter “buried history” — in this case, when they learn that the Constitution says nothing about political parties at all: that for most of the 19th century formidable third parties succeeded one another with what historian John Davis, in 1933, called “bewildering rapidity:” and that the United States is the only democracy in the world in which a major new party did not emerge in the entire 20th century.

Buried history, says Disch, produces first surprise — and then, a sense of possibility.

“They think that the two-party system has always been what it is now. And anytime you realize that something wasn’t always what it is now, and that what it is was the product of decisions that people made, then you know that, well, those could be changed.”

Perhaps the most inspiring part of the conversation is Disch’s account of the abolitionist third parties of the mid-19th century — the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers, and eventually the Republicans. These weren’t just moral crusaders; they were sophisticated political strategists who understood that you can’t change what people fight about without first building the organizations to fight differently.

“For slavery to become a political fight, the abolitionist parties had to make it so — because both the Whigs and the Democrats were economically and politically rooted in the institution of enslavement in the same way that both of our political parties today are rooted in the economy of fossil fuel.”

[WATCH THE VIDEO]

The Liberty Party made a deliberate choice: it would be a political abolitionist party, not just a moral one. That meant building a coalition not of people who all agreed on the deep moral wrongness of slavery, but of people who could agree that enslavement was an attack on democracy itself — and that it threatened the freedom of white citizens alongside enslaved ones. It was a big-tent strategy in the service of a radical goal.

“They not only built a coalition with people that they didn’t fully agree with... It wasn’t ‘you’re either in or you’re out.’ It was ‘I bet we’ve got an argument for you that might bring you in.’ And then they shifted the line — or they drew a line of conflict that didn’t exist before.”

What made all of this possible - all of it - was fusion voting, which allowed these emerging parties to ally with sympathetic politicians from within the major parties as they grew. Without that flexibility, none of it could have happened.

At the close of the conversation, Sifry asked the question he puts to every guest: in the face of what feels like the gravest threat to American democracy in living memory, what gives you hope?

Disch draws from two wells. One is her students at the University of Michigan, whose engagement and seriousness move her. The other is her work as an Ann Arbor City Council member, where she’s seen residents vote to tax themselves to fund affordable housing and carbon-free infrastructure — doing, as she puts it, “the boring, dirty, hard, slow work.”

That combination — engaged young people and vibrant local democracy — is, Disch suggests, where the seeds of a different kind of politics might take root. Maybe, someday, with better rules, those seeds could grow into something more.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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Last Tuesday, February 24, that prohibition received something it has rarely faced: a rigorous constitutional examination before a serious court. (You can watch a recording on Youtube.)

In United Kansas v. Scott Schwab, the State Court of Appeals panel did not treat the case as a niche procedural dispute. It treated it as a serious question about political association, constitutional structure, and the limits of legislative power over the ballot.

For those who believe fusion voting increases political competition and helps safeguard democracy against authoritarian threat, the argument offered something rare in election-law litigation: genuine judicial engagement.

Not “Across the Street”

Early in the hearing, one judge posed the blunt question that hovers over every election case:

“Are you on the wrong side of 10th Avenue right now? Shouldn’t you be across the street in that domed building asking for a change in the law?”

It was a fair question. Kansas’s Constitution grants the legislature authority to determine the “mode of voting.” The state argued that this delegation should end the inquiry.

But the panel did not stop there.

Instead, the judges pressed both sides on whether Section 3 of the Bill of Rights of the Kansas Constitution — including its distinctive protection of the right to “consult for their common good” — imposes independent limits on legislative control of the ballot.

That shift matters. Once the court frames the issue as a constitutional boundary question rather than a policy dispute, the conversation changes.

A Text Worth Interpreting

Legal counsel for the United Kansas party – Ori Lev from Protect Democracy – grounded the argument in history and constitutional language, reminding the court that Kansas adopted its Constitution in a political environment where fusion voting was commonplace.

The implication was not that historical practice automatically controls modern law. Rather, it was that constitutional meaning is informed by the world in which the text was adopted.

The state, in turn, urged the court to rely on Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, where the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a similar prohibition under the First Amendment.

But Kansas is not bound to interpret its Constitution in lockstep with federal precedent.

What made the argument hopeful for reform advocates was that the panel appeared open to that possibility. The judges explored whether differences in text — and in historical context — could justify an independent state constitutional analysis.

That is not a trivial move. It signals that the court views the Kansas Constitution as an active source of rights, not merely a mirror of federal doctrine.

The Real Question: How Heavy Is the Burden?

The state characterized the anti-fusion statute as a modest ballot-formatting rule. Parties, it argued, remain free to endorse, campaign for, and support candidates. The restriction applies only to how names appear on the ballot.

But the judges did not accept that framing at face value.

They pressed on what it means, in practical terms, to deny a party the ability to have its nominee appear under its own party label at the decisive moment of voting.

United Kansas argued that the burden is not symbolic or trivial — that it affects nominations, campaigns, and the associational rights of voters themselves.

This was not treated as a hypothetical harm. The court probed whether the restriction is merely administrative or whether it strikes at the core of political association. That inquiry is the heart of the case.

Wrestling With Constitutional Tension

Perhaps the most interesting exchange involved a potential clash between the text of two state constitutional provisions:

• Section 3 of the State Constitution’s Bill of Rights’ protection of assembly and political consultation.

• Article 4’s delegation of authority to the legislature over the mode of voting.

If both provisions matter, then the answer cannot simply be “the legislature decides.”

The judges explored what standard should govern when those provisions collide. Is reasonableness enough? Would strict scrutiny go too far? Does Kansas need its own tailored balancing approach?

The very fact that the panel entertained these questions suggests that it is not inclined to dispose of the case with a reflexive appeal to deference.

Why This Moment Matters

Fusion voting has often been dismissed as a purely legislative choice.

What unfolded in this courtroom suggested otherwise.

The judges treated the case as a live constitutional controversy — one that forces Kansas courts to decide how seriously they take the associational guarantees embedded in their own Constitution.

It’s impossible to predict the outcome. Courts are often cautious in election cases, and long-standing statutes carry weight.

But longevity does not mean immunity.

What matters is that the Kansas Court of Appeals did not trivialize the claim. It did not reduce it to a policy disagreement. It did not reflexively close the door with federal precedent.

It examined the argument on its own constitutional terms.

For advocates of fusion voting and broader ballot access, that rigor itself is a reason for optimism.

Constitutional change rarely begins with certainty. It begins with a court willing to wrestle — openly and seriously — with the meaning of its own text.

Kansas may be in the middle of that moment.

We expect a decision from the Court of Appeals in a few months. Whatever that outcome, the case is likely to be appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court.

Reading / Watching / Listening

Check out this piece in Vox by CBF co-founder Lee Drutman. It’s entitled “US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again,” and it’s a masterly and useful look at the long and complex history of political reform in America.

Watch United Kansas make its case for a multiparty democracy before the Kansas Court of Appeals HERE

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

Leave a comment

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

Estabrook is well suited to be one of the organizers of the United Kansas effort. He is a community builder, veteran, father and the executive director of the Manhattan (KS) Housing Authority.

The conversation comes at a pivotal moment: United Kansas is heading into oral arguments in its lawsuit challenging the state’s anti-fusion laws, a case that could reshape how parties and voters express political preferences in Kansas.

Estabrook describes United Kansas as more than a conventional third party. It is a reform movement built around expressive voter choice and coalition politics.

“United Kansas is a political reform movement rooted in one simple idea. Kansans deserve more voice, not less.”

The party’s core goal is to restore fusion voting — allowing multiple parties to endorse the same candidate — so voters can signal both candidate support and broader political alignment.

“Fusion voting lets someone say I support this candidate and I’m doing it as a United Kansas voter signaling support for a broader reform movement while still influencing who wins.”

Rather than fragmenting the electorate, the movement aims to enable coalition-building and give moderates and reform-minded voters a political home.

Kansas politics today is marked by one-party legislative dominance and a political center that many voters feel has disappeared. Estabrook points to growing dissatisfaction across the electorate and the rightward shift of the state GOP.

“We’ve seen… a MAGA revolution across the state where there’s been a total change and no home for moderate Republicans any longer.”

United Kansas seeks to occupy that middle space, offering a coalition home for pragmatic Republicans, change-minded Democrats, and unaffiliated voters.

Fusion voting is not new to Kansas — it was once central to its political development.

Estabrook explains that in the late 19th century, farmers, labor groups, and reform movements discovered they could win power by nominating shared candidates.

“[They] realized that if they all got together and nominated the same candidate, they would then have the numbers necessary to be victorious.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

These coalitions won legislative seats, the governorship, and congressional offices.

Fusion was banned in 1901 after reform coalitions lost power, entrenching a two-party structure. United Kansas argues that restoring fusion would revive a historically normal democratic practice rather than introduce a novel experiment.

Estabrook’s journey into party-building grew from civic frustration and a desire for better solutions.

“I was tired of the same solutions being offered, the two parties and not getting any different results.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

When the opportunity arose to create a new centrist party, he jumped in — helping gather signatures and build the organization.

United Kansas officially qualified as a party in 2024 after submitting 35,000 signatures, far exceeding the required threshold.

Creating a new party has meant grassroots organizing and constant relationship-building.

“It’s hard, it’s grassroots, it’s relational. You start with conversations and coffee shops and community events… and you explain the idea over and over.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

Estabrook notes that resistance rarely comes from everyday voters.

“The resistance doesn’t come from everyday voters. It comes from the entrenched systems that benefit the status quo.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

United Kansas quickly collided with Kansas’ anti-fusion statutes when a candidate received both its nomination and a major-party nomination. State officials required the candidate to choose one line, triggering litigation.

The movement argues that fusion bans violate political association rights and restrict voters’ ability to express layered political identities.

“Political association is protected speech… parties should be able to endorse who they choose [and] voters should be able to express layered political identities.”

The case is now before the Kansas Court of Appeals. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 24 in Topeka, with a ruling expected in the coming months. Watch the oral argument livestream at 10am CT on Tuesday.

Regardless of the outcome, the case is likely headed to the Kansas Supreme Court — meaning Kansas could soon become a key battleground in the national effort to restore fusion voting.

Opponents often argue that third parties split votes or create confusion. Estabrook counters that fusion does the opposite:

“Instead of splintering movements into spoiler candidates, it lets coalitions form around shared candidates.”

[WATCH THE CLIP]

As for confusion, he notes that states like New York have used fusion voting successfully for decades.

Despite national polarization, Estabrook finds encouragement in direct conversations with neighbors and community members.

“Offering a solution that is something new… gives people hope.”

That sense of hope — grounded in relationships, coalition-building, and democratic renewal — sits at the heart of United Kansas and the broader fusion voting movement.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

Leave a comment

Department of Self-Promotion

I’m not a writer by trade but I’m pleased (and surprised) to say that I have the cover piece in the new issue of a small, influential magazine called Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. It’s titled, “Fusion Voting, Fusion Parties: Escaping the Two-Party Doom Loop.”

Here’s the opening, to (hopefully) whet your appetite:

“Stating the obvious: Ours is a government (and thus a society) in crisis. All three branches of our federal government are led by men who do not believe in pluralism. Compromise is for the weak; domination is for the strong.

Stating the less obvious: this governmental crisis is only possible because of the failure of our political party system. It’s a system that has not functioned well for several decades, and now one of our two major parties has been fully captured by an authoritarian faction. This essay offers, humbly but urgently, a feasible strategy for party-system reform that could help weaken the authoritarians.”

I don’t expect to land another cover story anytime soon, so I hope you’ll look at this one. If you think it holds up, share it around. It really is impossible to overstate how valuable it is for these ideas to be socialized. Thanks in advance.

Share

Tipping point? Or breaking point?

You may not have noticed this story given all the other momentous and outrageous news, but two weeks ago a top Republican dropped out of the race for Minnesota governor. Despite doing well in GOP straw polls, attorney Chris Madel said he no longer wanted to be the Republican party standard-bearer.

“I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” said Madel, “nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so. Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”

Madel’s decision to abandon the Republican party is yet another reminder, if one is needed, of how the two-party doom loop keeps getting worse. It is driving hyper-polarization and feeding authoritarianism. And it is causing many sensible Americans who simply want government to function normally to feel both homeless and voiceless. Indeed, if it’s Tuesday, then it must be just another day for Americans to express their desire for more than just the Republican and Democratic parties.

That’s the central finding of a new Pew Research Center survey of 10,357 adults. More than two-thirds of our fellow citizens wish, at varying levels of intensity, that there were more than just two parties to choose from. And while that’s no longer a surprising finding, it remains a heartening one. Younger Americans are especially keen for more choices in politics. Even a slim majority of Republicans, despite their party enjoying trifecta control in Washington, say they’d like more parties.

But here’s the thing about our rigid two-party framework. It’s really, really rigid. The leaders of the faction that has seized ideological and operational control of the GOP scarcely worries about shifts in public opinion from outside its base. They are protected by the zero-sum, binary choice inevitable in a two-party system; and thus they count on tribal loyalties and negative partisanship to keep them in power.

No wonder people are frustrated and wish they had more parties to choose from. One way or another, if you want a different, better, more representative America, you could do worse than educate yourself on how fusion voting and party-system reform can help take us there.

In other words, check out the current issue of Democracy Journal!

Reading / Watching / Listening

In a courtroom in Topeka: The two-party system is on trial next week. On February 24th at 11am Eastern/10am Central, counsel for the United Kansas Party will seek to persuade the Kansas Court of Appeals that the state’s ban on fusion voting is unconstitutional. Drop this link into your calendar to stream it live. Few states have a richer history of fusion voting and fusion parties than Kansas. This is the last stop before the Kansas Supreme Court.

In judicial chambers in Trenton: In December, the New Jersey Supreme Court denied the cert. petition filed by the Moderate Party of NJ. In response, the party’s lawyers have filed a motion for reconsideration. These are almost never granted; once a decade or so. Still, perhaps the events of January ‘26 in Minneapolis will have persuaded NJSC Justices that the crisis we are all living through – not just Minnesotans – is in some substantial measure the result of a failed and failing two-party system.

It has to change, and perhaps some minds will change in Trenton. Check out the League of Women Voters of New Jersey and two former Governors of the state (Jon Corzine & Christine Todd Whitman) on why the case deserves its day in court.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

Leave a comment

I’m not a writer by trade but I’m pleased (and surprised) to say that I have the cover piece in the new issue of a small, influential magazine called Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. It’s titled, “Fusion Voting, Fusion Parties: Escaping the Two-Party Doom Loop.”

Here’s the opening, to (hopefully) whet your appetite:

“Stating the obvious: Ours is a government (and thus a society) in crisis. All three branches of our federal government are led by men who do not believe in pluralism. Compromise is for the weak; domination is for the strong.

Stating the less obvious: this governmental crisis is only possible because of the failure of our political party system. It’s a system that has not functioned well for several decades, and now one of our two major parties has been fully captured by an authoritarian faction. This essay offers, humbly but urgently, a feasible strategy for party-system reform that could help weaken the authoritarians.”

I don’t expect to land another cover story anytime soon, so I hope you’ll look at this one. And if you think it holds up, share it around. It really is impossible to overstate how valuable it is for these ideas to be socialized. Thanks in advance.

Share

Tipping point? Or breaking point?

You may not have noticed this story given all the other momentous and outrageous news, but two weeks ago a top Republican dropped out of the race for Minnesota governor. Despite doing well in GOP straw polls, attorney Chris Madel said he no longer wanted to be the Republican party standard-bearer.

“I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state," said Madel, "nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so. Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”

Madel’s decision to abandon the Republican party is yet another reminder, as if one were needed, of how the two-party doom loop keeps getting worse. It is driving hyper-polarization, feeding authoritarianism, and causing many sensible Americans who simply want government to function normally, to feel both homeless and voiceless when it comes to politics.

Indeed, if it’s Tuesday, then it must be just another day for an astounding number of Americans to express their desire for more than just the Republican and Democratic parties.

That’s the central finding of a new Pew Research Center survey of 10,357 adults. More than two-thirds of our fellow citizens wish, at varying levels of intensity, that there were more than just two parties to choose from. That’s no longer a surprising finding, though it remains a heartening one. Younger Americans are especially keen for more choices in politics. Even a slim majority of Republicans, despite their party enjoying trifecta control in Washington, say they’d like more parties.

But here’s the thing about our rigid two-party framework. It’s really, really rigid. The authoritarian minority that has seized control of the GOP scarcely worries about shifts in public opinion from outside its base. They are protected by the zero-sum, binary choice inevitable in a two-party system; and thus they can count on tribal loyalties and negative partisanship to keep them in power.

No wonder people are frustrated and wish they had more parties to choose from. One way or another, if you want a different, better, more representative America, you could do worse than educate yourself on how fusion voting and party-system reform can help take us there.

In other words, check out the current issue of Democracy Journal!

Related News:

Fusion Litigation: Watch the oral argument at the Appellate Division on February 24th at 10:00AM CT as the United Kansas party makes its case for relegalizing fusion voting in Kansas.

Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

Leave a comment

It’s a wide-ranging and unusually candid conversation about how America’s democratic breakdown looks from outside the red-blue binary — and why structural reform, not just partisan victory, is essential if liberal democracy is going to survive the Trump era.

Craig, now an election-policy fellow at the Rainey Center and a contributing editor at The Unpopulist, describes January 6 as a turning point, not only politically but intellectually — a moment when democracy reform stopped being theoretical and became urgent:

“This wasn’t just some guy with policies I disagree with. This was a threat to the Republic.”

🎧 Listen to the TOD episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your other favorite podcast platform.

Subscribe now

From that starting point, the conversation zeroes in on how America’s winner-take-all electoral system fuels polarization and minority rule. Craig argues that the problem isn’t simply Trump or MAGA, but the incentives baked into the system itself:

“Our electoral system has resulted in a kind of minority-rule dynamic — and that incentivizes more authoritarian measures.”

One of the episode’s most valuable contributions is Craig’s explanation of how the two-party system systematically disenfranchises large portions of the electorate — not only third-party voters, but millions of people trapped in “safe” districts with no meaningful representation:

“If you’re in a safe Republican district or a safe Democratic district, you might be 30 or 40 percent of the vote — and you get no seat at the table.”

Craig is not completely pessimistic. He sees some hope for the long-term recovery of American democracy.

“[T]here is a backlash to Trump. He won’t be around forever. There will be a moment, I think, and we use the term reconstruction for it. And I think that’s an appropriate analogy and framework. I mean, we’re going to have to do a lot of rebuilding and retooling our institutions to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And it’s not going to be just returning to the status quo.”

The discussion moves beyond diagnosis to reforms that are often mentioned abstractly but rarely unpacked with this level of clarity: proportional representation, fusion voting, and the uniquely American role of state-run party primaries. Craig makes the case that these aren’t fringe ideas, but practical tools — many achievable without constitutional amendments — for rebuilding a more representative and less brittle democracy.

Equally striking is Craig’s account of the libertarian movement’s own fracture in the age of MAGA. There is a core disagreement, says Craig, between libertarians who gravitate toward “burn it all down” politics and others — including Craig and his colleagues at The Unpopulist — who came to see defending liberal democracy itself as the necessary foundation for any serious debate about policy. [WATCH THE CLIP]

As Micah notes during the episode, this conversation maps a political space many Americans rarely hear articulated: socially liberal, institution-respecting, deeply alarmed by authoritarianism — and unsatisfied with a two-party system that repeatedly hands sweeping power to narrow factions.

For anyone thinking seriously about how to get beyond our current democratic crisis — not just survive the next election — this episode is valuable listening.

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Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.

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