I usually make fun of this stuff, but for once I’ll dispense with the snark.
This is actually an interesting idea! Supporters of multiparty reform don’t have many options, because it takes the two major parties to agree to a reform before it’s realistically viable — either that, or the nascent but still one-off state- and local-level ballot movements we’ve seen in places like NYC, STL, Maine, and Alaska.
But this flips the script: Americans have a fundamental right to free association guaranteed by the First Amendment. This includes the freedom to found parties, and ought to include the freedom of parties to associate with one another on the ballot as they see fit (within reason).
Let’s watch where this one goes!
PS: Yes, I know it’s been a while. Sorry guys, but work’s been crazy lately, and this ain’t my day job. If you REALLY want the Epic Content to keep coming, the best you can do is to upvote and engage — otherwise, I have no way of knowing whether any of this is worth my time. Thanks for your patience and understanding!
One of the hardest parts about this whole discussion is what to do and how hard to push it. This is when the POLITICAL discussion becomes more important than the POLICY discussion. Its similar to to the recent debate on the left about the gun control law passed.
If we do "too little" does it give the right a pass on further policies? they can look back and say 'hey we did a thing on voting reform, we don't have to do anything else for 50 years', or would a Ranked Choice or fusion reform at some level mark a true beginning of voting and representation reform?
To be honest i feel like you would have a better chance getting a chance through state or federal legislatures that didn't impact the power of the party system, at least at first. Voting and representation, despite the fact that those elements of our polity are what allow everything else to exist, are often the wonkiest parts of political discourse. That being said, they are often the purview of the party man (or person or woman) and not necessarily your run of the mill average joe (or jo or joanne) voter. So if we come in with a reform that immediate attacks the power of parties (fusion) maybe we get an automatic recoil at the idea and there's push back.
But at the same time maybe we need that sort of reform to get the average voter interested? This is my issue. We can talk about these types of reforms, and many much more involved and well read on the topics have, and here we sit. Am I just to pessimistic?
>>If we do "too little" does it give the right a pass on further policies? they can look back and say 'hey we did a thing on voting reform, we don't have to do anything else for 50 years', or would a Ranked Choice or fusion reform at some level mark a true beginning of voting and representation reform?
I think this discussion ends up turning into counting angels on the head of a pin too often.
Epistemological humility says "of course we can't predict everything". I'd build on that by saying we owe it to ourselves to at least try. From a political standpoint, the best epistemological insurance is to design our initiatives to be (1) a priori popular (duh), and (2) change the political fundamentals in order to pave the way for future reforms.
I also don't think we've ever _actually seen_ either side be given "a pass" just because one piece of legislation was passed. The New Deal was several pieces of legislation that build momentum over a few short years. The consolidation of the two-party system happened over a couple generations at every level of government, motivated by recent memory of the coalitional failures that played a role in leading to the Civil War. The Clean Air Act was passed by the GOP but then chipped away at for 50+ years, while recent state-level green energy movements have fizzled within 1-2 election cycles each because of incumbent retrenchment. These are all wildly different scenarios.
I think it's best to look at the fundamentals and work to mitigate any opposing ones rather than try to definitively diagnose what type of scenario we're in and only THEN make a grand strategy. After all, as the state green energy movements show, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. If we believe in multiparty reform, then dammit, let's fight for it!
And those fundamentals are... Well, on the positive side, there's massive public support for introducing more parties. Most Americans say they would prefer a third party, and my gut says we should read this as more an expression of unhappiness with only having the two major parties, rather than a specific desire for ONLY a third party and no more. This says that our issue is at least *popular*, right? To date, outside of the handful of early examples (NYC, STL, ME, NE, AK), we really haven't seen any explicit movements for electoral reform, and we still haven't seen any major candidate endorse explicitly *multiparty* electoral reform - even most Democrats only vaguely support RCV as a measure to increase moderation, not as a path towards having more parties.
On the other hand, there's a long-entrenched incumbent two-party system, mostly implemented at the state level. Despite popular support for reform, there's just a lot that has to be unwound, and neither party has yet shown much ambition to change tack now.
So, to break my own suggestion, to me it looks like an uphill reverse version of the effort it took for the two parties to consolidate the very state-level power that has to be unwound. 120-150 years ago, it was the party leaderships methodically stamping out popular resistance to their power. Today, it has to go the opposite direction, but it'll probably proceed at a similar pace - and the current pace of progress matches this assessment.
Thus, to me, I think the big objective needs to be getting turncoats from the major parties' consensus against multiparty reform, who can nevertheless use those brands plus centrist branding as springboards to create multiparty reform - and, critically, that they'll make an explicit public CASE for that reform, not just tinker at the sides or endorse RCV on mealy-mouthed "moderation" grounds.
There's a growing movement of turncoats, but none of them have really been able to master the second part. And if there's a better mechanism that someone else can come up with, then sign me up! But the only thing that speeds up the timeline is for politicians to run on multiparty reform and actually win.
This is how I think we mobilize the "average voter". Centrist moderates are notoriously mushy, and as you say, anti-wonk. Give them simple reforms like RCV and Fusion, and I think they'll support them - popular majorities that include the center are what have delivered the limited victories thus far, not the past 70 years of wonky wrangling about ballot access and "money in politics" that moderates, Libertarians, and Greens have been hysterically and ineffectually bitching about.
It is interesting. However, "...so long as that nominee promised to respect the Constitution and to govern from the center." Which center exactly? The Republican Party has moved to the right and a good portion are so far out in right field that they are camping in the parking lot.
Too many voters will eschew the Moderate Party if the "center" is halfway to the parking lot. It is fine to demand respect of the Constitution but this center business will not work; the center is no more always right than either the Democrats or Republicans. If they want to succeed, they need a decent platform and to not worry about trying to be in the middle.
I think they also highlight the weakness of centrist branding: If it's only a branding exercise, it's not going to do anything but create some temporarily good vibes. Maybe that enables some bipartisanship for a time, but because it's just a mushy branding project, it doesn't create any lasting institutional reform as a movement objective, and mushy bipartisanship won't make institutional reforms unprompted on its own either.
So yeah, if all you have as a Moderate Party is a hazy platform, it's basically just a novel branding mechanism for either party's candidates to pull off the classic Run To The Center move. Which, OK, that's fine. But it's nothing bold or groundbreaking.
The reason these centrist reform movements never work is because they're never willing to completely jump ship by calling for abolishing FPTP and other straight-up multiparty reforms. If this Malinowski guy were to make that the central plank of his Moderate platform, and manage to keep off the NJ Dem leadership's shit list - OR just be popular enough and a big-enough fundraiser to be able to tell them where to stick their complaints - then he'd probably be able to win enough votes from RCV/multiparty supporters to edge out the Republican in his moderate district.
But because he doesn't, it's just a mild branding exercise, and who the hell knows if he'll actually manage to win his district with this gambit.
The key for me is that constitutionalizing fusion voting opens the door to breaking down a lot of other barriers the 2PS has built up. If fusion voting is a right, then what about ballot access? And others?
So I hate to be a spoiler but to what ends? I’m thinking that we need to think about our ends and then figure out our means. Do we want a multiparty a la parliamentary-type system? With divided government the norm? Do we want a multiparty system similar to Great Britain where it’s more like 3 or 4 parties? And how do we get there?
I think you’re on the something with altering the voting/ballot methods, but I’m still thinking we need to get rid of the past the post system. Think of each state being one giant multi member district for congress. That alone would make everything much more representative. That and the senate needs to die. Like right now.
FWIW for comparison to the Senate "gerrymandering" idea, Germany has its own "Senate" called the Bundesrat. There are 16 constituent states, and their numbers of reps range from 3 to 6. The states, crucially, represent a more diverse array of historical units - some "states" are actually cities, some are rural (like our Western "square(ish) states"), and some in between.
To me, it's an example that despite the historical imbalances, there's no real reason we can't slowly fix the Senate's malapportionment through existing constitutional processes. Article V makes directly abolishing the Senate literally the most difficult thing to do in our entire constitutional order; amending it would take another civil war to overcome the public opposition. But new states can be squeezed in on party-line votes. That's doable!
Cooperating blue states can even help us decide how to gerrymander best - for instance, NYS could trade Staten Island to its rightful home in NJ in order to allow an independent NYC state to soak up the reddest parts of LI, leaving Buffalo and the NYC suburbs to hold up the rest of the Democrats there. Perhaps CT even chips in some of the Gold Coast!
Pittsburg and Philly hate each other so much... so next time Dems control the legislature, why not split it into two states, gerrymandering the asshole voters of "Pennsyltucky" in the process?!
The point is, there's a lot of unexplored political mileage to get from this. We don't have to split every million New Yorkers into their own state (an actual proposal a few years back!) just to fix the Senate, and there are a million things we can do to make the Senate better or even turn it in our favor without abolishing it. The only iron law that says Democrats can't add states on party-line votes is the fact that "Democrats' Boomer leadership are too big of pussies to do it".
>>So I hate to be a spoiler but to what ends? I’m thinking that we need to think about our ends and then figure out our means. Do we want a multiparty a la parliamentary-type system? With divided government the norm?
For me, I don't think we can get away from our current structure that allows divided government to happen - at least not directly from within that structure. Bottom-up reforms like fusion and RCV have to be the waystop. And to be clear, this is not necessarily a manifest-destiny-like path towards some perfect parliamentary multiparty system. We could get fusion + RCV and just fizzle out... either collapsing or joining some one-world government before we ever got to MMD, STV, and other forms of representation.
>>Do we want a multiparty system similar to Great Britain where it’s more like 3 or 4 parties? And how do we get there?
Ideally, I'd like something like Germany, Japan, or NL. Parallel voting, multi-member districts, some form of RCV/STV, replicated at the state and local government levels. Thresholds would be set to give us no more than ~5-6 major parties (10-15% each) - any more is a disaster, any less than 5 tends to collapse from 4, then 3, then to 2 again.
Eventually, abolish the Senate - OR as an intermediate (another waystop) the Senate gets "gerrymandered" by carefully-negotiated state split-ups like NY, IL, and CA and additions like DC and PR.
>>I think you’re on the something with altering the voting/ballot methods, but I’m still thinking we need to get rid of the past the post system.
These go hand in hand. If you abolish FPTP, you have to replace it with _something_.
>>Think of each state being one giant multi member district for congress.
Agreed, but perhaps not practical for the largest states. The biggest problem is that the Constitution requires only one Rep for the smallest states. We'd have to pass an amendment to up that count to the requisite ~4-5 seats to make a 5-6 party system viable.
But we also don't have to wait for Congress to act. The states can design whatever representation schemes they want for their own legislatures. And they SHOULD go ahead and adopt the ideal model, so that Americans can see how it works. OR they can try other models. Get enough of the state legs to change, and it will destabilize the national party system enough to trigger a larger wave of reform. Unlike any other kind of state legislative experiment in our lifetimes - marijuana legalization, gay marriage, abortion - the difference here is that each actual state-level reforms doesn't just vaguely drive public opinion towards the desired outcome, it actually impacts the national party system enough that the national parties will have no choice BUT to embrace multiparty reform.
>>That alone would make everything much more representative.
Agreed.
>> That and the senate needs to die. Like right now.
Good luck with Article V. As I said, I agree with abolishing the Senate, but the Senate's dysfunction is more a result of the filibuster than anything else. Malapportionment wouldn't be so bad if Senators were actually forced to vote on live-fire legislation. And I actually agree with the *Dodd* majority that Roe essentially froze the states' partisan politics in place and drove the urban-rural divide. Without Roe, we're going to see more evolution, because Senators will be less able to grandstand (again, jibing with my theme on why the filibuster's bad).
And once the filibuster's gone... look, even a 2023-2025 GOP majority denuded of an excuse not to go hog-wild, will still risk facing a backlash. Short of a successful 2024 Trumpist coup*, thermostatic politics basically guarantees Dems at least ONE more big bite at the apple after a GOP majority. As long as they secure a big enough majority, it's on them to add DC and PR. And if they fail to do THAT... again, we're all just as doomed as if there HAD been a Trumpist coup.
* In which case we have WAY bigger problems, and like my ancestors who fought for the North, I'll happily fight alongside you on the battlefield, my friend!
Fusion voting is kind of weaksauce in concept, but the idea is already in practice in some places like NYC. My own city (if not the state of CT too) has these rules, and I've seen and taken advantage of it on my ballot.
The idea is that the same candidate can run under multiple party tickets. Now, the quirk is that one of the pillars of the two-party system is that many states and localities have laws that are facially party-neutral - say, a 5-10% vote-share threshold to secure various public resources or electoral benefits like campaign funding or guaranteed ballot access - but actually work to deprive nascent parties of those same resources. Ostensibly, these laws are justified because we can't just let every Tom, Dick, and Harry start their own mini-party and clog the ballot, but the thresholds are onerous enough to betray the true intent (or at least, the true benefit to the major parties).
Fusion voting therefore allows minor parties to build the vote share necessary to secure those resources without penalizing the major-party candidates who want to run on those parties' tickets.
It's weaksauce because the minor parties usually end up being poorly-focused sub-brands of the major parties. The Working Families Party, for instance, is popular in the Northeast on fusion ballots, but it's all just bog-standard progressive/Squad/DSA populism being laundered through a minor party, not a party that has its own comprehensive grand strategy for achieving multiparty reform.
In fact, even the best-focused, most moderate (IE mainstream-viable) versions of these minor parties have always ended up myopically waging quixotic wars on esoteric issues like ballot access -- which voters don't care about -- and when they're not doing that, they waste time taking milquetoast positions that are indistinguishable from your typical moderate major-party candidate on the issues voters DO care about. The problem is, the ideal strategy would be to exploit fusion voting to retain vote share through the major-party brands, keep some vaguely popular positions on everything else, and run on an explicit multiparty reform platform to attract the middle.
I suspect this doesn't happen because fusion candidates are more beholden to their major-party partner than the minor-party one. By the time anyone gets close enough to these minor brands to contemplate making a break for it on multiparty reform, they're already on the outs with the major party's state leadership. And conversely, anyone who's in good with leadership and just running on the minor brand for a brand boost, isn't serious about multiparty reform.
One of the hardest parts about this whole discussion is what to do and how hard to push it. This is when the POLITICAL discussion becomes more important than the POLICY discussion. Its similar to to the recent debate on the left about the gun control law passed.
If we do "too little" does it give the right a pass on further policies? they can look back and say 'hey we did a thing on voting reform, we don't have to do anything else for 50 years', or would a Ranked Choice or fusion reform at some level mark a true beginning of voting and representation reform?
To be honest i feel like you would have a better chance getting a chance through state or federal legislatures that didn't impact the power of the party system, at least at first. Voting and representation, despite the fact that those elements of our polity are what allow everything else to exist, are often the wonkiest parts of political discourse. That being said, they are often the purview of the party man (or person or woman) and not necessarily your run of the mill average joe (or jo or joanne) voter. So if we come in with a reform that immediate attacks the power of parties (fusion) maybe we get an automatic recoil at the idea and there's push back.
But at the same time maybe we need that sort of reform to get the average voter interested? This is my issue. We can talk about these types of reforms, and many much more involved and well read on the topics have, and here we sit. Am I just to pessimistic?
>>If we do "too little" does it give the right a pass on further policies? they can look back and say 'hey we did a thing on voting reform, we don't have to do anything else for 50 years', or would a Ranked Choice or fusion reform at some level mark a true beginning of voting and representation reform?
I think this discussion ends up turning into counting angels on the head of a pin too often.
Epistemological humility says "of course we can't predict everything". I'd build on that by saying we owe it to ourselves to at least try. From a political standpoint, the best epistemological insurance is to design our initiatives to be (1) a priori popular (duh), and (2) change the political fundamentals in order to pave the way for future reforms.
I also don't think we've ever _actually seen_ either side be given "a pass" just because one piece of legislation was passed. The New Deal was several pieces of legislation that build momentum over a few short years. The consolidation of the two-party system happened over a couple generations at every level of government, motivated by recent memory of the coalitional failures that played a role in leading to the Civil War. The Clean Air Act was passed by the GOP but then chipped away at for 50+ years, while recent state-level green energy movements have fizzled within 1-2 election cycles each because of incumbent retrenchment. These are all wildly different scenarios.
I think it's best to look at the fundamentals and work to mitigate any opposing ones rather than try to definitively diagnose what type of scenario we're in and only THEN make a grand strategy. After all, as the state green energy movements show, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. If we believe in multiparty reform, then dammit, let's fight for it!
And those fundamentals are... Well, on the positive side, there's massive public support for introducing more parties. Most Americans say they would prefer a third party, and my gut says we should read this as more an expression of unhappiness with only having the two major parties, rather than a specific desire for ONLY a third party and no more. This says that our issue is at least *popular*, right? To date, outside of the handful of early examples (NYC, STL, ME, NE, AK), we really haven't seen any explicit movements for electoral reform, and we still haven't seen any major candidate endorse explicitly *multiparty* electoral reform - even most Democrats only vaguely support RCV as a measure to increase moderation, not as a path towards having more parties.
On the other hand, there's a long-entrenched incumbent two-party system, mostly implemented at the state level. Despite popular support for reform, there's just a lot that has to be unwound, and neither party has yet shown much ambition to change tack now.
So, to break my own suggestion, to me it looks like an uphill reverse version of the effort it took for the two parties to consolidate the very state-level power that has to be unwound. 120-150 years ago, it was the party leaderships methodically stamping out popular resistance to their power. Today, it has to go the opposite direction, but it'll probably proceed at a similar pace - and the current pace of progress matches this assessment.
Thus, to me, I think the big objective needs to be getting turncoats from the major parties' consensus against multiparty reform, who can nevertheless use those brands plus centrist branding as springboards to create multiparty reform - and, critically, that they'll make an explicit public CASE for that reform, not just tinker at the sides or endorse RCV on mealy-mouthed "moderation" grounds.
There's a growing movement of turncoats, but none of them have really been able to master the second part. And if there's a better mechanism that someone else can come up with, then sign me up! But the only thing that speeds up the timeline is for politicians to run on multiparty reform and actually win.
This is how I think we mobilize the "average voter". Centrist moderates are notoriously mushy, and as you say, anti-wonk. Give them simple reforms like RCV and Fusion, and I think they'll support them - popular majorities that include the center are what have delivered the limited victories thus far, not the past 70 years of wonky wrangling about ballot access and "money in politics" that moderates, Libertarians, and Greens have been hysterically and ineffectually bitching about.
It is interesting. However, "...so long as that nominee promised to respect the Constitution and to govern from the center." Which center exactly? The Republican Party has moved to the right and a good portion are so far out in right field that they are camping in the parking lot.
Too many voters will eschew the Moderate Party if the "center" is halfway to the parking lot. It is fine to demand respect of the Constitution but this center business will not work; the center is no more always right than either the Democrats or Republicans. If they want to succeed, they need a decent platform and to not worry about trying to be in the middle.
I think they also highlight the weakness of centrist branding: If it's only a branding exercise, it's not going to do anything but create some temporarily good vibes. Maybe that enables some bipartisanship for a time, but because it's just a mushy branding project, it doesn't create any lasting institutional reform as a movement objective, and mushy bipartisanship won't make institutional reforms unprompted on its own either.
So yeah, if all you have as a Moderate Party is a hazy platform, it's basically just a novel branding mechanism for either party's candidates to pull off the classic Run To The Center move. Which, OK, that's fine. But it's nothing bold or groundbreaking.
The reason these centrist reform movements never work is because they're never willing to completely jump ship by calling for abolishing FPTP and other straight-up multiparty reforms. If this Malinowski guy were to make that the central plank of his Moderate platform, and manage to keep off the NJ Dem leadership's shit list - OR just be popular enough and a big-enough fundraiser to be able to tell them where to stick their complaints - then he'd probably be able to win enough votes from RCV/multiparty supporters to edge out the Republican in his moderate district.
But because he doesn't, it's just a mild branding exercise, and who the hell knows if he'll actually manage to win his district with this gambit.
I agree with everything you wrote except "mushy". I prefer "squishy".
If I were five years younger, I would inundate you with mush and squish memes! 😂😂
Fortunately for both of us you are five years too mature for that.
So what would be an example of how this would work in the real world?
The key for me is that constitutionalizing fusion voting opens the door to breaking down a lot of other barriers the 2PS has built up. If fusion voting is a right, then what about ballot access? And others?
So I hate to be a spoiler but to what ends? I’m thinking that we need to think about our ends and then figure out our means. Do we want a multiparty a la parliamentary-type system? With divided government the norm? Do we want a multiparty system similar to Great Britain where it’s more like 3 or 4 parties? And how do we get there?
I think you’re on the something with altering the voting/ballot methods, but I’m still thinking we need to get rid of the past the post system. Think of each state being one giant multi member district for congress. That alone would make everything much more representative. That and the senate needs to die. Like right now.
FWIW for comparison to the Senate "gerrymandering" idea, Germany has its own "Senate" called the Bundesrat. There are 16 constituent states, and their numbers of reps range from 3 to 6. The states, crucially, represent a more diverse array of historical units - some "states" are actually cities, some are rural (like our Western "square(ish) states"), and some in between.
To me, it's an example that despite the historical imbalances, there's no real reason we can't slowly fix the Senate's malapportionment through existing constitutional processes. Article V makes directly abolishing the Senate literally the most difficult thing to do in our entire constitutional order; amending it would take another civil war to overcome the public opposition. But new states can be squeezed in on party-line votes. That's doable!
Cooperating blue states can even help us decide how to gerrymander best - for instance, NYS could trade Staten Island to its rightful home in NJ in order to allow an independent NYC state to soak up the reddest parts of LI, leaving Buffalo and the NYC suburbs to hold up the rest of the Democrats there. Perhaps CT even chips in some of the Gold Coast!
Pittsburg and Philly hate each other so much... so next time Dems control the legislature, why not split it into two states, gerrymandering the asshole voters of "Pennsyltucky" in the process?!
The point is, there's a lot of unexplored political mileage to get from this. We don't have to split every million New Yorkers into their own state (an actual proposal a few years back!) just to fix the Senate, and there are a million things we can do to make the Senate better or even turn it in our favor without abolishing it. The only iron law that says Democrats can't add states on party-line votes is the fact that "Democrats' Boomer leadership are too big of pussies to do it".
>>So I hate to be a spoiler but to what ends? I’m thinking that we need to think about our ends and then figure out our means. Do we want a multiparty a la parliamentary-type system? With divided government the norm?
For me, I don't think we can get away from our current structure that allows divided government to happen - at least not directly from within that structure. Bottom-up reforms like fusion and RCV have to be the waystop. And to be clear, this is not necessarily a manifest-destiny-like path towards some perfect parliamentary multiparty system. We could get fusion + RCV and just fizzle out... either collapsing or joining some one-world government before we ever got to MMD, STV, and other forms of representation.
>>Do we want a multiparty system similar to Great Britain where it’s more like 3 or 4 parties? And how do we get there?
Ideally, I'd like something like Germany, Japan, or NL. Parallel voting, multi-member districts, some form of RCV/STV, replicated at the state and local government levels. Thresholds would be set to give us no more than ~5-6 major parties (10-15% each) - any more is a disaster, any less than 5 tends to collapse from 4, then 3, then to 2 again.
Eventually, abolish the Senate - OR as an intermediate (another waystop) the Senate gets "gerrymandered" by carefully-negotiated state split-ups like NY, IL, and CA and additions like DC and PR.
>>I think you’re on the something with altering the voting/ballot methods, but I’m still thinking we need to get rid of the past the post system.
These go hand in hand. If you abolish FPTP, you have to replace it with _something_.
>>Think of each state being one giant multi member district for congress.
Agreed, but perhaps not practical for the largest states. The biggest problem is that the Constitution requires only one Rep for the smallest states. We'd have to pass an amendment to up that count to the requisite ~4-5 seats to make a 5-6 party system viable.
But we also don't have to wait for Congress to act. The states can design whatever representation schemes they want for their own legislatures. And they SHOULD go ahead and adopt the ideal model, so that Americans can see how it works. OR they can try other models. Get enough of the state legs to change, and it will destabilize the national party system enough to trigger a larger wave of reform. Unlike any other kind of state legislative experiment in our lifetimes - marijuana legalization, gay marriage, abortion - the difference here is that each actual state-level reforms doesn't just vaguely drive public opinion towards the desired outcome, it actually impacts the national party system enough that the national parties will have no choice BUT to embrace multiparty reform.
>>That alone would make everything much more representative.
Agreed.
>> That and the senate needs to die. Like right now.
Good luck with Article V. As I said, I agree with abolishing the Senate, but the Senate's dysfunction is more a result of the filibuster than anything else. Malapportionment wouldn't be so bad if Senators were actually forced to vote on live-fire legislation. And I actually agree with the *Dodd* majority that Roe essentially froze the states' partisan politics in place and drove the urban-rural divide. Without Roe, we're going to see more evolution, because Senators will be less able to grandstand (again, jibing with my theme on why the filibuster's bad).
And once the filibuster's gone... look, even a 2023-2025 GOP majority denuded of an excuse not to go hog-wild, will still risk facing a backlash. Short of a successful 2024 Trumpist coup*, thermostatic politics basically guarantees Dems at least ONE more big bite at the apple after a GOP majority. As long as they secure a big enough majority, it's on them to add DC and PR. And if they fail to do THAT... again, we're all just as doomed as if there HAD been a Trumpist coup.
* In which case we have WAY bigger problems, and like my ancestors who fought for the North, I'll happily fight alongside you on the battlefield, my friend!
Fusion voting is kind of weaksauce in concept, but the idea is already in practice in some places like NYC. My own city (if not the state of CT too) has these rules, and I've seen and taken advantage of it on my ballot.
The idea is that the same candidate can run under multiple party tickets. Now, the quirk is that one of the pillars of the two-party system is that many states and localities have laws that are facially party-neutral - say, a 5-10% vote-share threshold to secure various public resources or electoral benefits like campaign funding or guaranteed ballot access - but actually work to deprive nascent parties of those same resources. Ostensibly, these laws are justified because we can't just let every Tom, Dick, and Harry start their own mini-party and clog the ballot, but the thresholds are onerous enough to betray the true intent (or at least, the true benefit to the major parties).
Fusion voting therefore allows minor parties to build the vote share necessary to secure those resources without penalizing the major-party candidates who want to run on those parties' tickets.
It's weaksauce because the minor parties usually end up being poorly-focused sub-brands of the major parties. The Working Families Party, for instance, is popular in the Northeast on fusion ballots, but it's all just bog-standard progressive/Squad/DSA populism being laundered through a minor party, not a party that has its own comprehensive grand strategy for achieving multiparty reform.
In fact, even the best-focused, most moderate (IE mainstream-viable) versions of these minor parties have always ended up myopically waging quixotic wars on esoteric issues like ballot access -- which voters don't care about -- and when they're not doing that, they waste time taking milquetoast positions that are indistinguishable from your typical moderate major-party candidate on the issues voters DO care about. The problem is, the ideal strategy would be to exploit fusion voting to retain vote share through the major-party brands, keep some vaguely popular positions on everything else, and run on an explicit multiparty reform platform to attract the middle.
I suspect this doesn't happen because fusion candidates are more beholden to their major-party partner than the minor-party one. By the time anyone gets close enough to these minor brands to contemplate making a break for it on multiparty reform, they're already on the outs with the major party's state leadership. And conversely, anyone who's in good with leadership and just running on the minor brand for a brand boost, isn't serious about multiparty reform.