Lessons Learned

The first lesson to be taken from the WFP case study is that the associational party path to stronger parties is a viable one. Associational party-building is not just possible in an era of mass media politics but has happened. Between 1998 and 2018, the WFP developed strong ties to elected officials while building a socioeconomically and racially integrated partisan network of party leaders, activists, and civic associations. It then used its political and social capital to deliver policies to its base—a multiracial coalition of working families in New York. In this way, it operated as an associational party grounded in “membership and linkage organizations, rooted in society,” with manifest returns for ordinary citizens. It “channel[led] voters’ interests and translate[d] them into the substance of party competition and policy,” and it connected its members to government—sometimes quite literally.¹

The WFP illuminates the essential features of an associational party. More importantly, its story highlights the panoply of organizational choices that enabled it to build a strong associational party. These include the early decision to anchor the party in existing unions and civic groups with extensive ties to voters and to communities; its commitment to offering a face-to-face experience of party membership through participatory processes; its investment in a year-round organization with a stable and talented staff; and, finally, its decision to create a dues-paying party with egalitarian voting rules, which significantly reinforced the idea of party as association.

The party’s associational qualities, moreover, reinforce its political capacity. The synergies between an engaged membership and a stable staff with accrued political capital powered the minor party’s influence on governance decisions in New York, fueling the party’s power to mobilize voters on Election Day and to translate that agenda into policies that addressed the needs of working families in New York. Indeed, the WFP’s most impressive accomplishment has been its capacity to sustain its geographically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse coalition. Its story demonstrates what political scientists mean when they say that a political party’s primary democratic purpose is to serve as a mediating institution to organize and provide coherence in large, diverse, and increasingly multiracial democracies.² But it also shows how a ballot line contributes to that capacity.

Most importantly, the WFP’s experience fleshes out how “the two-way street of communication” within an associational party works to produce responsiveness. The WFP case study supports the position of the political theorist Lisa Disch, who asserts that parties do not and cannot simply reflect the views of their members (the uncritical conception of representation) because, by and large, constituents do not know what they want.³ Instead, the function of a party is to listen and shape preferences and then mediate conflicts to hold the coalition together around those preferences.

Still, the WFP story illustrates the importance of institutionalizing the listening process. By empowering its members through the nomination process, the party ensured its leaders knew members’ views. The WFP’s choice to regularly put party members in a room and take the time to have everyone introduce themselves ensured not just that regular voters were involved but that party staff—like potential candidates—knew who the WFP’s members were and what they cared about.⁴ The WFP offers evidence, therefore, that an associational party with local clubs and membership-based institutional affiliates—one that emphasizes member participation—is better positioned to gauge and formulate policies and priorities that resonate for their constituents. It supports the central premise of associational party-building as a reform strategy that “a party with social breadth and interpersonal depth…[goes] a long way to grounding elected officials in the experiences of their constituents through intermediaries” in ways that secure responsiveness.⁵

A second lesson to be drawn from the WFP’s experience is that fusion offers a promising and realistic path to building meaningful institutional third parties that operate as engines of broad participation in politics at the state level (and across states) even in the twenty-first century. Unlike most contemporary minor parties in the United States, the WFP is not a party in name only. It is neither a mere label for independently wealthy, rogue candidates nor a spoiler.⁶ Votes on its line are far more than mere “protest votes for the outsider candidacy of a celebrity, wealthy, eccentric, or fugitive establishment politician.”⁷ Its appeal is not tied to a charismatic candidate,⁸ and it is not dependent on the talents and chemistry of its original founders. Instead, it regularly holds conventions and mounts a full slate of candidates to run in seriously contested elections across the state every cycle.⁹

The legality of fusion politics in New York and the access it provided to a non-spoiler ballot line proved vital to the WFP’s development as a sustainable associational party. It enabled the WFP to build a strong and effective party organization, capable of delivering public goods and social benefits in accordance with its left-of-center priorities. Its ballot line also mitigated the two great challenges for new political parties: building to scale and managing the internal conflicts that come with building a broad geographically, socioeconomically, and racially diverse coalition. Indeed, the WFP is one of four third parties that have exercised significant political power in New York in modern times.¹⁰

The WFP story, thus, vindicates Pocasangre and Strano’s argument that fusion offers a feasible path for the development of minor parties capable of providing representation to voters otherwise marginalized by our two-party system by “creat[ing] incentives for minor parties to form, develop a brand, and invest in their organizational and mobilization infrastructure.”¹¹ This final lesson is especially important for those who are interested in a transition to proportional representation, insofar as the clear lesson from history is that moves from first-past-the-post, single-member districts to proportional systems generally follow the emergence of a credible third-party threat to the two parties that monopolize political markets.

None of this guarantees that reintroducing fusion in other states will lead to similar positive democratic returns. American politics has changed significantly since 1998 in a variety of ways, and the voters who currently feel marginalized by the two major parties are disconnected from civic associations and extraordinarily difficult to organize. Independents, especially those ideologically committed to individualism, may prove uninterested in joining or live in states with less robust civic infrastructures from which to build associational parties. Political entrepreneurs in the center-right may not be as skilled or committed to investing in and building a party organization as the WFP was. 

The WFP was also launched at a time when elections in New York were still somewhat competitive.¹² Today, there are very few competitive elections for congressional, state, and local seats. On the other hand, an upstart minor party committed to associational party-building could potentially use this to its advantage. At this moment of immense political disillusionment with the two major parties, an entrepreneurial minor party might have a unique opportunity to expand in potentially realigning ways. The lack of competitiveness is itself arguably a potential opening for minor parties, especially at the state and local level where so many races are uncontested, leaving incumbents extremely detached from their constituents, unresponsive, and thus potentially vulnerable. Indeed, in a smaller state where campaigns are less expensive, a minor party might well benefit from running its own candidates for local office, leaving cross-nomination for statewide and federal offices only.

To succeed, the minor party would need to commit to building up from the local to the national and recognize that it must focus on party-building just as much as on its brand. The party would need to focus on winning office and thus figure out exactly what drives voter dissatisfaction (or, at least, what might contribute to abating it), but it must also commit to devising realistic policies to address the disaffected. It must engage in the type of associational party-building that will draw voters to it and then use the political power it accrues to produce tangible benefits for its supporters.

A final lesson to be taken from this account of the WFP is that the formation of an associational third party, capable of functioning as a party in all ways, does not depend on any precise organizational form or locus of decision-making. Like virtually all political and civic associations today, including the NRA, the  ACLU, and the Sierra Club, the WFP operated through multiple corporate structures and legal forms.¹³ An overlapping set of figures populated each of these official entities. Still, its members, leaders, and the public experienced it “as a single association—just as McDonald’s is experienced as a single corporation.”¹⁴

While advocates of stronger parties generally hew closely to a formalistic conception of party, in which the party is the organization with state recognition, the WFP most closely vindicates Michael S. Kang’s observation in his 2005 article, “The Hydraulics and Politics of Party Regulation,” that party officials and leaders “operate within the confines of the official party organization only when it suits their interests.”¹⁵ The WFP story reinforces his observation that “the law captures only a small portion of the activity and people referenced when we refer colloquially to a ‘political party,’” and the core constellation of leading actors in a political party extends far beyond the party’s legal apparatus.”

Indeed, the WFP’s local chapters had no formal legal structure. They were genuinely political clubs, truly private political organizations. Their state conventions, similarly, were not strictly party conventions under the law; rather, they included members from across the WFP family of organizations. As Cantor puts it: “The main point is, the formal laws that govern parties in the electoral code are not adequate for a living, breathing party, for organizers. The Advisory Council is an unincorporated something or other. Really, it’s an agreement that we needed a way to have institutional and individual actors engaged for the party to be real…The formal stuff is not necessarily as important as the informal. The Advisory Council isn’t really informal. It just isn’t in the election code.”¹⁶ The WFP is best understood as a party association—a network of people and groups—that organize through a variety of legal and corporate structures run by the same people. Most importantly, there is nothing shady about this. Both major parties and most civic groups similarly manifest as a variety of corporate and legal entities. It is only party leaders and their lawyers who pay scrupulous attention to the corporate details.

The key point is that a political party is much more than the official party committees or what the state deems to be the party.¹⁷ It is a network of individuals and groups—activists, donors, officeholders, and dealmakers—tied together and to the electorate by the ballot line but also by an internal culture committed to the functions of a party—above all a desire to organize and contest elections in order to deliver for its members. Despite its network-like qualities, the WFP party remains qualitatively distinct from a partisan entity that shares only a vague ideological project. It is decidedly not a party in the style described by Kathleen Bawn and her colleagues at UCLA: a mere partisan network in which there is no distinction between the party and the civic associations, social movements, and interest groups that both support and shape it.¹⁸

This should not surprise anyone who has studied nineteenth-century parties. Political parties in that era were private associations, often federated and governed by internal bylaws, but they also had more informal manifestations, supported by particular people, salons, and clubs. For most of the century, individual states did not produce an official ballot so the state had little reason to recognize or define a political party. Certainly, it did not regulate party finances. The federal tax code’s first forays into defining nonprofit organizations did not occur until the early twentieth century. 

A political party is a “colloquial shorthand to describe…a loose collection of political relationships, some legal and some nonlegal, among a diverse set of actors and institutions, all of whom perform important work in furtherance of a common [electoral, policy, and ideological] agenda.”¹⁹ The only thing that is critical to being a party is that the association has a ballot line and a culture and commitment to a party as an organization with face-to-face, social connections of various strengths. What is critical to democracy, on the other hand, is that political parties are strong and capable of delivering responsible and responsive governance.