More Than Semantics: Distinguishing Dual Labeling from Traditional Fusion Voting

Maresa Strano and Joel Rogers wrote about the difference between traditional fusion voting and dual labeling for Ballot Access News.

Fusion voting was used sporadically in the pre-Civil War era, most prominently by political abolitionists determined to emphasize their opposition to slavery. But it was after the Civil War that fusion parties bloomed across the nation. Democrat-Populist fusion was common in the north, as wage earners and farmers united against Gilded Age Republicans. In the south, fusion allowed newly enfranchised Black males to unite with poor white farmers in Republican-Populist fusion tickets. In a few southern states such unity actually elected governors and members of Congress, but this multi-racial unity did not survive the rise of Klan terror and Jim Crow segregation.

Throughout the 19th century, then, minor parties were able to choose between running stand-alone candidates or backing fusion candidates in coalition with another party. The latter strategy proved the more potent one, with minor parties deriving much of their power from the vote share that they were able to concretely demonstrate via fusion.

In the waning years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, however, the two major parties accumulated enough power to ban fusion in nearly every state. Minor parties did not disappear, but they were no longer able to escape the spoiler or wasted vote dilemma that plagues third parties in our single-member district system. Once fusion was banned, third-party supporters who wished to vote for a viable candidate had no choice but to abandon their prior loyalty and instead associate with one of the two major parties. The major parties essentially used – some might say abused – the power of the state to consolidate their grasp on power and policy-making.