Beau Tremitiere of Protect Democracy has a piece for RealClearPolicy arguing in favor of a return to fusion voting, to enable Democrats to co-nominate a non-MAGA Republican running also as the nominee of a centrist party. The specific example discussed in the piece is the independent candidacy of John Wood, a self-described conservative Republican who until recently was working for the House’s January 6 Committee, but has left that position to run for U.S. Senate in Missouri given the possibility that controversial (to put it mildly) former governor Eric Greitens is the current frontrunner for the GOP nomination.
Fusion voting is unquestionably an idea worth pursuing in those states, like Missouri, where a Democratic nominee has little or no chance, perhaps even against a candidate like Greitens. Wyoming is another state that comes to mind. Would fusion voting help Liz Cheney win reelection there, if she ran in November, against the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee, as the fusion candidate of centrists and Democrats? A bit difficult to imagine, but maybe.
Fusion voting, however, doesn’t seem (at least to me right now) a realistic way to assist an independent candidate like John Wood in states where Democrats have a fighting chance, even if it’s an uphill battle. Consider my own state of Ohio and the Senate race between Trump-endorsed J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Ryan. Suppose a non-MAGA Republican, like Matt Dolan, who lost to J.D. Vance in the primary, or John Kasich or even incumbent Rob Portman, wanted to run the kind of independent candidacy that John Wood is pursuing in Missouri. There’s no way the Democrats would give up their chance to elect Tim Ryan to fuse with a non-MAGA Republican like Dolan, Kasich, or Portman running as the nominee of a centrist party.
The same point applies to states like Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. If the GOP nominates MAGA candidates in any of these competitive states (like Mastriano in Pennsylvania), the Democrats are still going to go with their own nominee. Even with fusion voting in these states, centrist or moderate parties would not be in a position to offer an independent choice in the mold of John Wood; at most, they would be able to co-nominate the Democrat as preferable to the MAGA Republican.
If the goal is to give more moderate or centrist candidates a chance to win against either MAGA Republicans to their right or traditionally liberal (or progressive) Democrats to their left, then rather than fusion voting in competitive states it would be necessary to adopt something like round-robin voting or some other electoral system designed to identify the “Condorcet winner” among a field of multiple candidates.
Perhaps in competitive states, where partisan primaries are followed by conventional plurality-winner general elections, the existence of fusion voting might nudge the Democratic Party towards more moderate nominees, and might even nudge the Republican Party to avoid MAGA nominees in favor of more traditional conservatives. It would be worthwhile to see any empirical evidence that could guide this assessment one way or the other. But absent evidence, it’s hard (for me at least) to envision fusion voting in purple states, or even red-leaning states like Ohio, to cause Democrats to back an independent Republican in the mold of John Wood (or Evan McMullin).
Thus, the Missouri example, while important, seems to be confined to those states like Missouri (or Utah) that are deep-red, rather than those like Ohio that are moderately red.