Why NYC’s Multiparty Politics Feel So Chaotic

The city blends reforms meant to curtail party power with rules designed to enhance it. No wonder the outcomes are messy.

Photo by Liena Zagare

In this essay, Jack Santucci, a Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington University and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains why New York’s mix of reforms is structurally incompatible—and what it would take to build a party system that works.

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New York City is becoming the nation’s test case for the latest electoral reform proposal, fusion voting, which allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate. Advocates say fusion creates space for third parties while avoiding the pitfalls of ranked-choice voting and other “voter-centric” approaches to single-seat elections. Some now note that Zohran Mamdani’s victory can be seen as fusion failing on its own terms. This critique extends to a larger set of reforms to “give party leaders more control over their brand[s].”

I see it differently. This election demonstrated what happens when reforms designed to strengthen parties collide with reforms that weaken them. If New York wants to avoid repeats of this year’s chaos, it should adopt rules that bolster parties and bring order to its increasingly fractious multiparty politics.

New York City elections rest on three key pillars:

1. Closed primaries for nominating candidates.

2. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) within those primaries.

3. Fusion voting, which lets multiple parties endorse the same candidate.

Primaries and RCV reflect one theory of politics: voters on their own can manage spoilers and unite behind a majority-supported candidate. Fusion reflects the opposite: parties better manage coordination through bargaining, and voters should be asked to choose among (ideally between) the resulting options.

Historically, fusion emerged in the late 1800s to cope with multi-candidate contests in multiparty systems. The major parties in most states then banned it in attempts to limit the issues raised in election campaigns. Direct primaries followed shortly after—not to empower voters, but to try to stop rival factions from fracturing major parties. Some of that factionalism likely resulted from the fusion bans. In some states, parties even tried using RCV to manage it. Almost all abandoned the practice by the late 1930s in favor of runoff or plurality rules.

Though these systems were meant to solve the same basic problem—uniting behind a single candidate likely to win a majority of votes—they rest on fundamentally different assumptions about voters. Fusion works when parties control nominations. Primaries and RCV aspire to outsource the job.

This year, the contradictions became visible. Fusion incubated a third party with experience in extracting concessions from major parties. Primaries denied Democratic leaders control over their own label, even though those primaries were “closed.” RCV prolonged viability for too many candidates, letting party leaders avoid finding someone who might have united the party’s factions.

Primaries and RCV often mask their flaws because party leaders still run an informal “invisible primary”—steering money and endorsements toward a choice they think can win the general election. That didn’t happen here. Instead, we saw the pathologies that early-20th-century reformers once hoped primaries would cure: major figures publicly negotiating over who should drop out; ideological factions threatening to split the party; and an RCV finale that exposed the party’s internal division rather than yield consensus. The final tabulation round had Mamdani with 56 percent of Democratic votes.

If the outcome is worrying, the wrong lesson is that fusion should be blamed or that third parties should be abolished. Going after multiparty politics writ large would compound the dysfunction inside primaries.

The right lesson is about coalition raids and how one might prevent them. A coalition raid is an effort to exploit a major party’s fractures to peel off supporters. History’s best-known examples involve major-party candidates courting voters across the aisle (Trump on immigration in 2016; FDR on prohibition in 1932). Third-party raids are rarer because closed primaries limit them, and, until recently, third parties have been resource-poor. But in blue cities with an ascendant Working Families Party, they seem to be getting more common.

What should New York do?

One approach is to end primary-based nominations entirely. Put the power to choose nominees with local party committees and, for citywide offices, conventions of their delegates. This is what scholars mean by “strengthening parties,” not the current system of closed primaries layered awkwardly atop fusion.

Another option is to create a coalition party—a vehicle for New Yorkers whose politics diverge from the Democratic Socialists of America and allied elements in the WFP. This aligns with recommendations from the school of thought now raising questions about “strong parties.” According to that school, the national parties will stabilize when local parties are built around actual community interests.

A better, more structural fix would be to institutionalize all parties through a form of party-list proportional representation (PR) for the City Council. As John Ketcham and I recently explained, one model could retain the existing single-seat districts but add supplemental seats so that each party’s seat share reflects its citywide or boroughwide vote share. We rejected proportional RCV because it invites the same primary-style raids we just witnessed. Who should design that PR system? One potential answer is: all parties entering the City Council next year.

As things stand, New York’s fusion system falters because parties do not behave as parties. Most run low-visibility primaries, while the Democratic Party’s primary becomes the battlefield for every faction hoping to capture its brand. The way out is to narrow the nomination process and adopt a council election system that lets each party convert its numerical support into a corresponding share of seats.

A prominent math professor who studies local elections recently told me: If 30% of a city’s voters want socialists in office, then socialists should hold 30% of council seats. Democratic theory supports this view. The question is how to design institutions to achieve these outcomes. Fusion helps reconcile multiple parties with single-seat offices, like the mayor or comptroller. The next step is to rework the rest of the system so it can accommodate the multiparty politics New York already has.