As New Yorkers headed to vote for their next mayor and other local officials, those unfamiliar with New York elections found a surprise: Zohran Mamdani, Curtis Sliwa, and several other candidates were listed twice. The mayor-elect appeared as a Democratic Party candidate and as a Working Families Party (WFP) candidate; Sliwa appeared as a Republican candidate and, as the owner of multiple cats, as the candidate for the Protect Animals party.
Soon enough, questions and rumors started circulating online about this double-listing. Some people were just confused. Why were candidates listed twice? Would a vote for Mamdani on the WFP count for the Democrats? But others, like Elon Musk, said it was a scam, hinting that it might be a fraudulent ploy to help Democrats cheat their way to victory.
Those who follow New York politics know that candidates can appear more than once under different party lines on the ballot, a practice known as fusion voting. Although in this year’s election he appeared on only one party line, Andrew Cuomo has previously been listed on the ballot under different lines, including the WFP and, ironically, the short-lived Women’s Equality Party. Last year, Kamala Harris was a candidate for the Democratic Party and the WFP, and Donald Trump was a candidate for the Republican Party and the Conservative Party of New York.
The votes received under each party line are reported separately, indicating the smaller party’s appeal and strength, and then summed for each candidate to determine the winner. In Tuesday’s election, preliminary results show that Mamdani received 42.8 percent of the votes on the Democratic Party line and 7.6 percent on the WFP line for a total of 50.4 percent. Sometimes the votes on the minor party line are pivotal: the votes on the Independence/Jobs & Education Party line carried Michael Bloomberg to victory in 2009, and Rudy Giuliani won the mayoralty in 1993 thanks to the votes he won on the Liberal Party line.
Today, only New York and Connecticut actively use fusion voting, but it was once a common practice. In the 19th century, fusion voting fostered the emergence of multiple political parties. Fusion voting is credited with helping small parties stitch together an anti-slavery coalition that ultimately contributed to the abolition of the institution. But by the turn of the century, it was banned in most states because it threatened the power of the major parties. The practice survived in some states, most prominently in New York, where it enabled minor parties like the Liberal Party to be active political players.
Fusion voting gives minor parties a meaningful role to play without necessarily spoiling a race by giving them their own ballot line. For a minor party to maintain its line, it must surpass a vote threshold in statewide elections, which gives serious minor parties incentives to develop their brand and strengthen their mobilization capacity to convince voters to vote on their line and not on the major party’s. Moreover, the more votes a minor party wins on its line, the stronger its position to influence candidates once elected by threatening not to endorse in a future election or to run its own candidate. At a time when U.S. politics is stuck in a two-party doom loop, allowing minor parties to meaningfully participate in elections may help sustain more fluid coalitions and help parties find common ground over different issues.
Fusion voting also benefits voters. The minor party endorsement on the ballot can give voters more information about the candidates and the issues they care about. For years, Republican candidates in New York fused with the Right to Life Party to signal their anti-abortion stance, and the Liberal Party endorsement helped signal the liberal credentials of candidates. The minor party line also allows voters to vote for a candidate without voting for the major party. In a city like New York, the Liberal Party line allowed voters to cast a ballot for Giuliani without voting for the Republican Party. Moreover, voting for a minor party lets voters cast a more informative and expressive vote. For many voters in this week’s election, their vote on the WFP line indicated support for Mamdani while also signalling discontent with the Democratic Party establishment.
As more and more voters in the U.S. seek alternatives to the two major parties, fusion voting may provide an initial first step towards a multi-party democracy. It can encourage minor parties to build their organizational capacity and eventually push them to demand more thorough electoral reforms, such as proportional representation. It can help voters get used to voting for and identifying with alternative parties. Importantly, fusion voting doesn’t have to be limited to New York and Connecticut: efforts to reintroduce fusion voting in states like Kansas, New Jersey, and Wisconsin are already underway. If they succeed, we’ll learn more about how fusion works across different contexts, and voters could finally have more realistic options on the ballot that could help loosen the grip of the two-party system.
Oscar Pocasangre is a senior data analyst at New America
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.