I don’t want to overstate the power of the TPM Café. But facts are facts. And the fact is, when I started posting here a week ago, Connecticut had a weak, limited fusion law. Now, as I wind up my posting here, it has a strong one. The new fusion law signed by Governor Rell last Friday is, as election-law maven Richard Winger says, “the first time in at least 70 years that any state has expanded fusion.” Is it just coincidence that it was passed right after my posts here?

Well, OK, it is a coincidence. The Connecticut WFP – the sister party to the one I run in New York – has been pushing hard for this reform for months now. But it is a big victory, and it is occasion for talking about something I’ve overlooked in my previous posts here – efforts to expand fusion voting to other states.

Without going into the details – which you’d have to be a true election-law geek to appreciate – Connecticut formerly had a partial form of fusion that essentially limited the races in which minor parties could cross-endorse. Under the old fusion law, for instance, the Connecticut WFP was not allowed to cross-endorse Ned Lamont for U.S. Senate even though most of the WFP’s base was strongly behind Ned (I’m sure the first question on many people’s minds.) Under the new law they can. (For the full story see “Ballot Access Laws Go Atomic” on the prominent CT blog myleftnutmeg.com.)

Working Families has existed in Connecticut for several years now and has some real successes to point to. They’ve passed living wage laws, pushed through a historic bill extending free speech protections to the parking lots and other public areas of Wal-Mart and other big retailers, and have been very engaged in the fight for broader health coverage in Connecticut. But on an electoral level, they are on the ballot in only about one-third of all state legislative elections. That’s far more than any other minor party in the state, but still far less than the nearly 1,000 races the New York party now endorses in each two-year cycle. With the new law, the Connecticut WFP will over time to able to reach a whole new level of influence in state politics, meaning a bigger voice for workers, grassroots environmentalists, low-income communities, and progressives.

What about elsewhere? What’s the history here?

Fusion, as I’ve said, was once legal in all 50 states. It was banned around the turn of the last century as part of Mark Hanna’s strategy for permanent Republican dominance. Republican state legislators pushed laws prohibiting fusion in all but a handful of states. Why? Simple. This was the heyday of the Populists and similar parties, and these parties frequently fused with the Democrats to form a coalition against the then-dominant Republicans.

(Hanna, remember, is Karl Rove’s political model. It would be a delicious irony if we could inaugurate the post-Rove era by undoing the work of his hero, and allowing alliances between Democrats and third parties to flourish once again.)

The Populists and Democrats both sought to represent working-class Americans, but they were divided by a deep cultural gulf. The Democrats’ base was in the cities, among immigrant workers, often Catholic and against prohibition. The Populists, in the Midwest and Western states where they were strong, represented small farmers and rural artisans, overwhelmingly Protestant and generally pro-Prohibition.

Then as now, many of these rural voters refused to support Democrats even when it was in their economic interest to do so – especially the older generation for whom the memory of the Civil War was still strong. But under fusion, these voters were able to vote on the Populist ticket for a joint Democratic-Populist candidate, a strategy that threatened Republican dominance in a number of Plains and Western states. As one Michigan Republican put it, a fusion ban was necessary because “We don’t propose to let the Democrats make allies of the Populists, the Prohibitionists, or any other party and get up a combination ticket against us.” David Sirota further quotes a 19^th-century Minnesota Republican, “We don't mind fighting you one at a time, but the combination we detest.” By 1910, fusion had been eliminated in all but a handful of states – and so had a meaningful role for the Populists and other third parties.*

Until recently, that was the last word on fusion. But recently, as a 2006 story in The American Prospect reports, efforts to revive it have taken on life in a number of states, most prominently Maine, Oregon, New Mexico and Maryland. In some states, the effort is led by unions – like SEIU, the UFCW, the CWA, or the UAW, for example – or community groups – like ACORN – that want a bigger voice for their members in state politics; in others, by Democrats and Republicans alike who want to reach out to disaffected swing voters; and in others by elected officials who simply believe in a more open, transparent electoral system. Whatever the reason for the interest, all these efforts will get a big boost from last week’s victory in Connecticut.

Changing the rules of elections is one of the hardest lifts there is in politics. By definition, those in power are the ones who have benefited from the current structure. So it’s fair to be skeptical of whether any reform, no matter how attractive in principle, can become law in the current environment.

What the Connecticut law – along with the long history of fusion in New York – shows is that

this is an achievable reform. It’s one that works in the American context, that voters understand, and that doesn’t require wholesale rewriting of our election laws. I don’t claim fusion is the be-all and end-all of election reform. But fusion is real, it works, and it’s winnable. And in the often-frustrating world of election reform, that’s saying a lot.

If you’re interested in knowing more, check out OpenBallotVoting.org.

Happy Fusion! And thanks to TPM for giving me this platform for the week.

* The authoritative source on this history is the Peter H. Argersinger article “‘A Place on the Ballot’: Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws,” 85 American Historical Review (1980), which unfortunately does not seem to be available on the web. A historiography of the Populist movement that contains much of this history can, however, be found online.