Here is Blake Hounshell at The New York Times:
When Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for the Supreme Court majority in a landmark 1997 case, rejected a minor party’s demand that it be allowed to nominate candidates who were already on the Democratic ticket, he argued that states have a strong interest in “the political stability of the two-party system.”
Nearly 25 years later, Rehnquist’s fundamental premise is now widely in question. Signs of extreme polarization and voter unease are everywhere, from this week’s congressional hearings over one party’s baldfaced attempt to overturn a presidential election to the surging number of Americans who decline to register as either Democrats or Republicans.
Past efforts to stand up viable third parties have foundered repeatedly in the United States, however — be it because they hitch themselves to quixotic causes at the expense of more mainstream appeals, or because of the obstacles the two major parties routinely place in their path.
A new political party in New Jersey is hoping to disrupt that pattern by embracing the very technique that Justice Rehnquist scorned — fusion voting — with ambitions of taking the idea national. And while the party’s founders acknowledge that the chances of success may be low, supporters say they have identified a formula that offers greater promise than more sweeping but ultimately unworkable ideas for overhauling America’s sclerotic political system.
The party, led by a core of local Republicans, Democrats and independents alarmed by the G.O.P.’s rightward drift under former President Donald J. Trump, has given itself a name that makes its middle-of-the-road ideological positioning crystal clear: the Moderate Party.
The party’s goal is to give centrist voters more of a voice at a time when, the group’s founders say, America’s two major parties have drifted toward the political fringes. But unlike traditional third parties, the Moderate Party hopes to nudge the Democratic and Republican Parties toward the center, not replace or compete with them.
One of the party’s co-founders is Richard A. Wolfe, a partner at the law firm Fried Frank and former small-town mayor who says he is repulsed by the Republican Party’s embrace of conspiracy theories and fealty toward Mr. Trump.
“Starting around 2020, my wife and I started to feel like the Republican Party no longer represented our views,” Mr. Wolfe said in an interview. “We started to get very uncomfortable with the extremism.”
But he could not bring himself to support the Democratic Party, which he views as too beholden to left-wing economic ideas and cultural causes. Feeling politically “homeless,” Mr. Wolfe began having quiet conversations with like-minded individuals about starting a new political party and stumbled across the concept of fusion voting, he said.
Under fusion voting, multiple parties can nominate the same candidate, who then appears more than once on the ballot. Proponents say it allows voters who don’t feel comfortable with either major party to express their preferences without “wasting” votes on candidates with no hope of winning.
Read the rest here.
By the way, I am occasionally asked why I am so loyal to my home state of New Jersey. There are a lot of reasons, not all of them rational, but maybe videos like this are part of it: