It would be hard for New York State politics to get any more interesting or harder to write about. Just trying to think about explaining it all makes me exhausted. It would be fascinating for its own sake even if it didn’t have so many implications for our next presidential election and the future of American politics.
If the prospect of explaining New York’s “fusion ballot” didn’t make me so weary, I’d probably write a long post about this. Instead, I am forced to ask you to do your homework for yourself, tonight.
The bottom line is that the Working Families Party is extorting campaign finance reform from Governor Andrew Cuomo who is extorting campaign finance reform from the Republican senators, using Quisling Democratic senators as his enforcers.
Tomorrow, I hope to have the energy to explain. Follow the links to figure out what I am saying tonight.
Too cool.
… and the article does a fair job of it in one sentence. A fusion ballot means “means that a third party can seek to influence one of the two major parties by putting a major-party candidate on its own line, in exchange for some leverage over his or her platform, instead of always just running its own long-shot candidate and potentially playing a spoiler role.”
It does make the politics more complicated, but not generally in a bad way. And it makes it a little harder to get stuck in a lesser-of-two-weasals dynamic.
Explaining the fusion ballot is kind of easy, but explaining its impact in the current situation is not.