Wow, I made a very similar point on my own personal blog today (nathanhj.livejournal.com)!

Great minds and all that...

Posted at March 5, 2008 1:07 PM in response to The Politics of Fear---Again

Michael,

I'm enjoying your first day at Table For One.

I just want to chime in on this direct action thread and note that it behooves those of us who understand the power of direct action, both in terms of winning a set of demands and in terms of its transformational power for those who participate within it, to try to communicate that understanding to Millenials.

I'd say that it was a tactic like any other, to be used and evaluated with other tactics. And that direct action can include on-line as well as in-person action, but nothing screws up the ability of someone to get something done like taking over their offices or shutting down a transportation system.

And I'd definately make the point that nothing is as potent a threat (within the realm of civil disobediance) as the threat of taking direct action and garnering the resulting publicity. Sometimes the threat is more powerful than the actual action.

Direct action just isn't from the 60's and even so, it did produce some of the most important cultural and political shifts of the last century.

I'd say its worth looking at again, even if the greybeards are the ones associated with it. 8-)

Posted at March 3, 2008 7:35 PM in response to Millennials Rising

Stephen,

I'm assuming that you've read Goodwyn on the Populists to put Wright County into context. He notes that the MN Populists (Farmers' Alliance) were different from the "classic" FA members from Texas, Kansas, MO, et al, being more drawn to a charismatic leader in Ignatius Donnally and having a perpetually weak organization. That might account for the variance of leaders in the Wright County FA vis a vis the main body of FA members.

Or it might not, what do I know? I'm no historian.

Re: MN and fusion. The Supreme Court case that said it was okay to ban fusion came from St. Paul (Twin Cities Area New Party vs. Timmons), so at least some people in MN see fusion as a viable tactic.

Given that MN has moved to primaries as its final means of nominating a candidate for office from a party, the DFL endorsement doesn't mean as much as it used to. If the DFL wants to constrain its endorsed candidate like that, then it can continue to do so, but the candidates in question might not want the endorsement as much as they want the additional votes from a fusion party.

Given that polling data shows that the majority of WFP voters would not vote for the WFP's fusion nominee without the WFP ballot line (in other words they fracture their vote among different candidates), a fusion ballot line for a party that is heavily identified with issues (as opposed to candidates) means garnering votes that would not otherwise go to that candidate. If you can regularly get your 5% critical mass, then candidates would be foolish to ignore it.

Obviously this is all theoretical until someone actually puts it to the test, but it is based on the WFP NY experience. Since it used to work so well in MN before it got banned 100 years ago, there's no real reason to see why it wouldn't work again.

Posted at July 11, 2007 2:04 PM in response to Reviving a Lost Tool of Democracy: Prospects for Expanding Fusion Voting

I don't think anything I can say will make a dent in your position, so I'm not really going to try.

I do just want to answer this:

I just don't see what's to be gained by giving them a ballot line other than screwing up the whole idea.

One of the senior staff members for one of the member organizations of the WFP once said that the thing that keep the union/community group coalition together in NY is that they belong to a party with a ballot line. That ballot line gives them power, power which they don't have as a coalition. Why not? Because as simply a coalition it is very hard to explicitly show to a politician, a person who's life is dedicated to counting the votes, how much public opinion they actually control. With a ballot line they can deliver the one thing that any politician needs to keep being an elected official: votes.

That power keeps the coalition together because the individual members of it see that ballot line as being more powerful than what they can achieve on their own. So the disincentive to break with the coaltion to pursue their own organizational interest is very high and very powerful.

If you care about the impact that progressive coalitions can have in today's political environment, then fusion is something to be closely examined, not dismissed out of hand as a crazed exaggeration of America's sordid history of party politics.

I think it is also instructive to think about why it was outlawed in the first place: because Dems and Repubs didn't want minor parties, especially citizen-oriented parities like the People's Party, to gain power. Simple as that. They elections of the 1880's and 90's so freaked them out they needed to change the structure of American elections so they and their corporate masters could hold power. So if the party bosses and their corporate patrons from the turn of the 20th century are against something, it makes me wonder why they feared it so.

Posted at July 8, 2007 4:10 PM in response to Fusion: What’s in it for Democrats?

It is only IRV that allows a new party to slowly build up strength for the future, without sabotaging the present.

Tell that to the NY WFP, which has been growing steadily since 1998 and is now probably the most influential minor party in NY.

You can't seriously believe that a candidate who gets 5% of his votes from a group that believes fervently in a flat tax, for example, but 95% of his votes from a group that has a variety of beliefs, including both for and against a flat tax, is going to be influenced preferentially by the pro flat tax group. That just isn't sane.

If that 5% of the vote is consistently within the margin of victory in race after race in year after year, then, yes, I can seriously believe it. What's more, the WFP experience with the minimum wage raise in NY and the first steps at reform of the Rockefeller Drug laws, to name just two examples at the state level, bear this supposition out in reality.

What makes the cross-endorsed candidate take it seriously is not just the vote total, but the follow-up by the party to hold the candidate accountable to the promises he/she made to get the ballot line. The WFP doesn't just do it's thing in a vacuum, but has candidates fill out questionnaire's that run to 140 questions. People who don't answer the way the WFP likes, don't get the line. Those that do and that get elected get held accountable for voting the right way on specific policies. There is a real danger to either lose the ballot line to a new challenger or have the party sit out the election all together, both of which are tactics that can be used to ensure accountability.

Fusion doesn't solve problems just by existing, as the old Liberal Party proved. What it does is give organized, active parties a powerful means to influence public policy. No organizing = shrinking power until you die, like the Liberals did.

Posted at July 8, 2007 3:56 PM in response to Fusion: What’s in it for Democrats?

How do you figure?

I feel almost like you are willfully missing the arguements being advanced here about the power of showing elected officials where their votes are coming from and how that helps (a) keep them accountable and (b) moves an issue-based agenda.

You are sounding a lot like the Supreme Court in their reasoning the ruled against the New Party's fusion case in 1996 (TCANP v. Timmons I think it was). Fusion "confuses" voters they said.

Which is bunk unless you believe New Yorkers are inherently smarter than the rest of the country or that we are collectively, as a country, stupider than we were 120 years ago.

It's not that I mind disagreements over the use of fusion as a tactic for progressive to gain and wield power, its that your points seem to either ignore what proponents are actually saying or fly in the face of empirical evidence and settle again and again on an arguement that fusion will just confuse voters.

We have lots of evidence that this isn't the case. What's your evidence that it is the case?

Posted at July 6, 2007 1:56 PM in response to Fusion: What’s in it for Democrats?

They aren't mutually exclusive. You can have both. One thing I don't like about IRV is that is privileges candidates rather than issues, but I do like the fact that it works well in getting people elected who appeal to a majority of voters, not just the biggest minority bloc.

What IRV also doesn't do is let the people with Green Party as preference 1 have any influence with the Dem once they win. They know they will always be the second choice of Green voters so why do they need to respond to signature Green issues?

But if the Greens can provide a bloc of votes to the candidate who is also a Dem, then they can prove how much power they have and the force of their issues and can work to hold the Dem accountable on those issues.

Obviously you would need to show how many votes you got on the Green ballot line to do this, so IRV tallies would have to show how many people picked the Green as their first choice for this to make sense in an IVR/Fusion world.

Posted at July 6, 2007 10:57 AM in response to Fusion: What’s in it for Democrats?

One of the realities of electoral politics is that people vote based on their own personal identity, choosing the candidate who they feel the most comfortable with.

Reagan Democrats do not feel comfortable with the image of so-called "national" Dems, even if they agree with them on issues of economic justice. They do feel comfortable with the more, umm, muscular identity of the national GOP.

If you offer these folks a way to vote on the kitchen table issues they feel are extremely important, without having to face the unappetizing task of pulling a Dem lever, then they will take that opportunity.

The WFP's internal polling bears this out, as does the polling work they've done in other states as part of their research into how they can expand fusion across the country.

Posted at July 6, 2007 10:54 AM in response to Fusion: What’s in it for Democrats?

Can you really count 1884? Did the Prohibition Party not fuse in any of the elections they contested? If so, that's impressive, given the political landscape at the time.

I think this info nuances Cantor's point a bit, but he still makes compelling points about why fusion counteracts spoiling, which is a particular argument among Dems. The fact that the GOP suffers from it as well just means fusion can help people across the spectrum make their voices heard, which is healthier for our democracy than what we have now.

Fusion helps put the emphasis back on issues and not on personalities and it privileges those people who can organize and mobilize people, a skill set that progressives have developed very very well.

Posted at July 6, 2007 10:45 AM in response to Fusion: What’s in it for Democrats?

John,

A couple things. First, I see you've been pushing memories of the nightmare that was the Harding-run Liberal Party. But it is also important to note that this party no longer exists and you can point to the emergence of the WFP for that. I think your point is that a patronage machine with no accountability can take a ballot line and that's true, but that just makes Cantor's point that there is no substitute for organizing. A ballot line multiplies the power of that organizing a thousand-fold, but if you don't have it, you will eventually die. Like the Liberal Party did when the WFP killed it.

Second, what do you mean easier and cheaper to create? Do you know what the party requirements are state by state? But the ancillary question is how much easier and cheaper are the to sustain then a one-shot candidacy? They aren't. Under most ballot access rules the 3rd party has to maintain a serious amount of activity, active registrations, and/or vote totals to stick around.

Third,the Nader candidacy was a Nader candidacy, not a Green Party campaign. It is unlikely that Nader would have thrown his support to another cadidate, since he was a candidate already. The Green Party, on the other hand, might have given its ballot line to Gore in exchange for some explict promises for action on priority issues, and then actively moved issue-based campaigns on those priorites to keep Gore's feet to the fire. KNowing how many votes came because of those issues would let Gore know how many peopel wanted action on them.

Finally, this stuff about voters being confused is just nonsense. People know what they want, they understand issues, and in New York they have generations of voting under fusion laws. They get it, which is why Fulani's party has zero influence in NY politics.

Posted at July 5, 2007 3:53 PM in response to Fusion: What’s in it for Democrats?