Fusion voting is a key tool both for strengthening progressives within the Democratic party. For progressives, the great virtue of fusion is that it lets us build our own organization while supporting good Democrats. It lets us wield our 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the electorate not as a symbolic protest vote, but as a voice with real power. It’s easy to say, “Democrats need to speak the language of jobs and health care and fair taxes if they want to win swing voters.” It’s easy to say, but hard to prove – unless this populist vote for the Democrats is tallied up separately via a fusion party.

For progressives, fusion gives us our own organization, a distinct voice, and a credible threat of exit when the Democrats run too far to the right. For the Democrats, fusion delivers votes that would not come to their candidate running just on the “D” line.

Last time I talked about how fusion brings in progressive voters – especially those who want to cast a vote with real power and not a symbolic protest vote. For them, the Working Families Party is the equivalent of, say, the Greens in Germany who sometimes govern in coalition with Social Democrats in their parliamentary system. In this way, fusion delivers some of the same benefits as proportional representation, allowing a minor party to make a coalition with a major one.

Democrats need progressive voters, for sure. But they need much, much more than that. Above all they need voters who are not strongly attached to any major party. Call them swing voters, independents, or as we say in New York, “blanks”— these are the people you want to attract if you actually want to win. And it’s complicated, because this group is a very mixed grouping: some are culturally conservative working-class voters, others recent citizens and other new voters, and some simply not engaged with politics. As readers of TPM all know, though, the key trait many of these voters share is that they don’t reliably vote for Democrats, even though they share Democratic values on most issues, especially the economy.

That’s where fusion comes in. In New York, we’ve found, the Working Families Party line reliably draws non-Democratic voters to good Democratic candidates. We don’t always know exactly why they’re unwilling to vote for the Democrat on the “D” line. But we know that’s what they’re doing – it’s right there in the election returns.

Take Tim Bishop, who in 2002 unseated Rep. Felix Grucci in New York’s First Congressional district, out on the tip of Long Island. Grucci was one of only two incumbent Republicans defeated that year, and the race was a nail-biter -- 81,524 votes on the Republican line to 81,325 on the Democratic. Bishop only won because he got another 2,900 votes on the Working Families Party line.

But here’s the interesting thing. Only 1,300 voters in the district voted on the Working Families Party line for Democrat Carl McCall for Governor. That means that more than half of Bishop’s WFP vote was composed of people who voted for either Pataki (Republican) or Golisano (Perot-style billionaire running independent). If you voted Pataki (R) and Bishop (WFP), you are a swing voter.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen again and again in the 10 years we’ve been working in New York. A poll of suburban and upstate union members taken after Hillary Clinton’s first election to the Senate found that votes for her on the WFP line were most frequently cast by people who described themselves as moderates or politically conservative, among white men, and among suburbanites – again, classic swing voters. And indeed, unions have often found the WFP an important vehicle to get their members to “vote for the union” regardless of their individual partisan loyalties (or lack thereof). As one of our union leaders liked to say to his conservative, largely rural members, many of whom would never vote Democratic, “Just put down your guns and vote Hillary – on the WFP line.”

In the run-up to New York City’s 2005 Mayoral election, a Pace University/Observer poll of Democratic primary voters found that the single most important endorsement for Mayor was the Working Families party – more important than the New York Times or Daily News, more important than any current or former officeholder, more than any advocacy or good government group. One thing this shows is how having a consistent presence on the ballot can build up awareness of a party in a way that a handful of individual candidates cannot, and the value a credible party brings as a “seal of approval” to major-party candidates.

But even more interesting was which groups drove the results. As it turned out, the highest value was placed on the WFP endorsement by younger voters, less educated voters, and Latinos – all groups with lower than average turnout and less attachment to the major parties. For these voters, it may not be so much that they are put off by the Democrats’ position on this or that issue, but that they don’t feel the party speaks to them. The option to vote for a party that puts their concerns front and center – and that works for their vote, as the Democrats in one-party NYC often don’t – is very attractive.

As I wrote before, 2008 will be a Democratic year. But we don’t want to take any chances. What a Democratic president accomplishes will depend on the size and political character of the Congressional majority behind him or her. (Isn’t it great to be able to write “him or her” here and mean it?) Fusion won’t move solidly red districts into the “D” column, but there are plenty of purple states and regions where this will help.

To boil it all the way down: re-legalizing fusion in a few key states should be on the radar screen of anyone who shares the view that we want the Democrats to win, but we want them to win in a way that then pushes them to govern more progressively once they are in office. Nothing more, but nothing less.

Thanks for reading. As we say in the WFP, pay your dues, read the papers, and...organize!