By Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Former Kansas House Majority Leader Don Hineman finds himself searching for a remedy to the Republican Party’s movement away from a framework that anchored GOP role models Dwight Eisenhower, Robert Dole and Nancy Kassebaum.
“It feels like the center of Kansas and also the American political spectrum has been abandoned by the Republican Party,” said Hineman, who left his southwest Kansas seat in the House six years ago. “Those of us, like me … who identify as Eisenhower, Dole and Kassebaum Republicans, feel as if they were abandoned as well. Where did my party go? What do I do now?”
He said one option for drawing the GOP closer to the center would be the return in Kansas to fusion voting, once a common feature of American electoral systems. It would allow more than one political party to nominate the same candidate. If three parties nominated the same individual, the candidate’s name would appear on ballots three times in association with each nominating party. This approach to coalition building — used in Kansas until the early 1900s — would determine the winner by combining all votes received by each individual.
“I believe that fusion voting shows us a path forward — a chance at a much brighter future for representative democracy,” Hineman told participants at a fusion voting seminar Thursday at Washburn University in Topeka.
He said election of candidates through this method would foster alliances with a more diverse groups of supporters and provide elected politicians greater autonomy to make decisions outside demands of leaders in the dominant Republican or Democratic parties.
In Kansas, Saline County District Court Judge Jared Johnson dismissed this week a lawsuit filed in July 2024 by United Kansas, a recognized political party in Kansas, to challenge the state’s prohibition on fusion voting.
Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a GOP candidate for governor, submitted the motion to dismiss the case based on interpretation of the Kansas Constitution. Schwab said the idea of fusion voting was illegal. Officials with United Kansas plan to appeal the judge’s decision to idle the lawsuit.
Bill Kristol, editor of the center-right web-based publication The Bulwark and a contributor to CNN and other networks, said he grew up with fusion voting in New York state and was intrigued by how multi-party endorsements could help the electorate find middle ground. He said states should be open to reform such as fusion voting, especially because it didn’t require disbanding existing political parties or trigger complex changes in mechanics of voting.
“The obvious point to make, you know, our politics is pretty broken,” Kristol said by video link. “We can debate who’s responsible for that, but surely we can’t really think that the two-party system is working well.”
Kristol was a Republican for 40 years before declaring himself an independent in 2021. He served in the administrations of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 2016, he opposed the nomination of Donald Trump, who was elected to a first term as president. Kristol said he voted for Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020 and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.
No longer do the Republican and Democratic parties serve as big-tent organizations skilled at assimilating different groups of people and capable of compromising on finer points of public policy, Kristol said. The two-party system used to work, he said, but dogmatism and authoritarianism has dominated the major parties for the past decade or so.
“It is striking how rigid the parties have become. The gulf between them has widened and the ability and desire to work across the aisle has lessened,” Kristol said.
Oscar Pocasangre, senior data analyst in the electoral reform section of the New America think tank, said a shortcoming of elective politics was the insufficient number of competitive races. For example, he said, only 8% of the 2024 races for Congress were decided by less than 5 percentage points. In the four Kansas congressional races, winners secured a seat in the U.S. House with double-digit margins.
He said many areas of the United States essentially had one-party rule, but introduction of fusion voting could produce greater competition if minor parties decided to form coalitions to support independent candidates.
“Electoral competition is a feature of elections that makes a lot of the good things about democracy work,” he said. “Electoral competition is how you get accountability. It’s how you get disciplined politicians. Without electoral competition elections lose a lot of their meaning. You get to vote, but not much of a choice.”
Jess Wisneski, co-chair of the New York Working Families Party dedicated to labor and community issues, said the history of fusion voting in New York state showed voters appreciated the chance to maintain allegiance to an alternative party while casting votes for candidates capable of prevailing.
In New York’s 1994 gubernatorial contest, for example, the Republican and Conservative parties aligned with GOP state Sen. George Pataki, while the Democrat and Liberal parties fused for then-Gov. Mario Cuomo. Cuomo won the major-party competition with 2.27 million Democratic votes to Pataki’s 2.15 million Republican votes. But Pataki upset Cuomo, the 12-year incumbent, by adding 328,000 Conservative Party votes to Cuomo’s 92,000 votes from the Liberal Party.
