Strategic Fusion and the GOP
One hundred and seventy-one years ago, a small group of Americans opposed to slavery met in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. They gathered there to discuss the future of politics in a deeply divided nation. After several hours of debate, the group decided that pursuing anti-slavery goals through the existing national political parties was futile. Combining their moral commitments with political pragmatism, they decided to create a new political party dedicated to halting the expansion of slavery. As meeting organizer Alvan Bovay put it: "We went into the little meeting held in a school house Whigs, Free Soilers and Democrats. We came out of it Republicans."
Most prominent among the competing stories of the Republican Party's "real" founding, Ripon's powerful symbolism persists. Such is reflected in its selection as the setting for a notable event that took place during the 2024 race, when Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and once a Republican rising star, joined Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the campaign trail. The intended meaning was hardly subtle: Cheney and her brand of anti-populist conservatism, the event's organizers asserted, had inherited the GOP's founding ethos, and in the 2024 election, it was the Democratic — not the Republican — nominee who was more faithful to that tradition.
Almost two centuries after the schoolhouse meeting, Ripon remains the ceremonial birthplace of the party that in its infancy would secure the presidency, lead the country through its greatest crisis, abolish slavery, and then persist as one of two major parties in American politics through the 21st century. But the Republican Party was not simply cut from whole cloth. Rather, it was the next — and as time would prove, best — idea tested by those long troubled by America's original sin, the same advocates who had struggled for decades to build social, economic, civic, and political institutions capable of taking on slavery and its allies.
For years, leading opponents of slavery engaged principally in a moral crusade, purposefully eschewing electoral politics as tainted. The political arena had long been hostile territory dominated by two political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs — with major contingents in each party either pushing to export slavery into new states and territories or acquiescing to the South's "peculiar institution." And yet, there were individuals within both parties who opposed slavery and worked earnestly to prevent its growth.
Starting with the Liberty Party in 1840, however, the anti-slavery movement built and sustained several third parties. While their galvanizing purpose remained unchanged, their political strategies — including their selective cooperation with individuals and factions within the major parties — evolved over time. As the movement learned to balance the twin virtues of principle and pragmatism, it matured politically and transformed what had been a marginalized faction without much clout in D.C. or state governments into a cogent political force.
This period of political realignment offers important lessons for contemporary voters and elected officials whose personal ideologies are increasingly at odds with the major party they long supported. Whether it's foreign-policy hawks on the right, cultural conservatives on the left, or fiscal conservatives anywhere, the reductive binary of today's electoral options can be deeply frustrating. Without powerful political institutions pursuing their substantive priorities, these factions will have little hope of success in advancing an agenda incongruous with the major parties' top-line goals.
Once again, third parties today could bring together those alienated from the dominant parties and institutionalize new centers of political power. But actual success — the election of candidates who effectively pursue political goals — will be difficult without the hard-nosed pragmatism that the anti-slavery movement exhibited during the 1840s and 1850s. In practice, this often means working with one of the major parties to elect a like-minded candidate backed by both the major and minor parties in lieu of nominating a third person to a race he cannot win. Shorthand for this strategy is fusion — that is, two parties fusing their support behind the same candidate.
A MORAL CAUSE GETS POLITICAL
By the time of the Ripon schoolhouse meeting, the anti-slavery movement was poised to build a political coalition that would dominate Northern politics for decades. But its success was never a foregone conclusion.
The anti-slavery movement started out as a civic and moral effort. Through the 1830s and early 1840s, the movement published pamphlets, organized meetings, and held fundraisers such as bazaars, where patrons could purchase items like purses and sugar bowls to support the cause. Even as the movement became more organized with the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, it remained largely within this vein — putting pressure on partisan politics from the outside.
Yet while leaders of the movement considered themselves detached from partisan politics, others recognized that serious progress required political engagement. Anti-slavery newspapers applied public pressure through coverage of congressional debates and votes. Advocates like Henry Stanton, Lewis Tappan, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Joshua Leavitt visited Washington in the late 1830s and early 1840s to lobby members of Congress for more robust anti-slavery action.
Anti-slavery forces also mobilized their wider network of supporters. In the mid-1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society began organizing its adherents to petition Congress, including through a campaign that delivered over 130,000 petitions urging abolition in the one area of undisputed federal authority: Washington, D.C. Yet not one of these petitions made it to the floor of Congress. Lacking sufficient influence in the halls of power, advocates failed to thwart the 1836 adoption of the infamous "gag rule," which automatically tabled and thereby prohibited the reading of any petitions about slavery. Unable to force debate on the issue, anti-slavery politicians could neither use congressional proceedings to make the case against slavery nor force fence-sitting colleagues to take a stand.
By the 1840s, many advocates came to recognize that direct partisan involvement was necessary, prompting the formation of the nation's first explicitly anti-slavery political party: the Liberty Party. Anchored in New England and other parts of the Northeast, the Liberty Party's emergence was a watershed moment in American political history. Its immediate electoral impact, however, was limited. Abolitionism was, at the time, politically unconventional, and Liberty men largely withheld support for anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs, refusing to cooperate with political institutions complicit in perpetuating slavery, even indirectly. Instead, the Liberty Party typically nominated uncompromised third candidates to compete against Whigs and Democrats without much electoral success outside local races where abolitionist sentiment was particularly strong.
At the national level, this strategy backfired. In 1840, Liberty Party nominee James Birney collected a few thousand votes across the North, having no real effect on the outcome of the presidential election. But in 1844, the top political issue was whether the United States should annex Texas: Democrat James Polk expressly endorsed immediate annexation, while Whig Henry Clay equivocated, sending mixed signals that he alternately opposed annexation and was potentially open to it under different circumstances. The Liberty Party and other anti-slavery forces strongly opposed annexation, fearing the addition of an expansive slaveholding territory to the Union.
Instead of supporting Clay, the only candidate capable of defeating Polk and preventing immediate annexation, the Liberty Party again nominated Birney, who garnered more than 62,000 votes nationwide (roughly 2% of the popular vote). Nearly 16,000 of those ballots were cast in New York, representing more than three times Polk's narrow 5,000-vote margin of victory over Clay (amid the half-million ballots cast in the state). Had Clay won New York, he would have won the presidency. Instead, Polk ascended to the White House, where he signed the bill annexing Texas less than 10 months after his inauguration.
POLITICAL TACTICS EVOLVE
On the other hand, when the Liberty Party did cooperate with figures and factions within the major parties, it achieved some of its most notable successes. For example, Congressman Joshua Giddings — a Whig from Ohio and a vocal opponent of slavery — purposely violated Congress's gag rule in 1842, speaking brazenly in opposition to slavery and introducing several anti-slavery resolutions. He was censured by the House and abruptly resigned; yet in a special election months later, the energetic support of Liberty Party leaders helped send him back to Washington. Emboldened, Giddings and several other lawmakers continued defying the gag rule, paving the way to its repeal two and a half years later.
In other cases, partisans used the nuances of local election rules to cooperate. At the time, winning certain elections in many New England states required an outright majority. This was before the adoption of run-off procedures to ensure someone got a majority, so these states simply held repeated elections until one candidate prevailed. Though undoubtedly frustrating to voters, such rules provided opportunities for the Liberty Party to wield meaningful influence.
The New Hampshire elections of 1845 and 1846 provide a striking example. In February 1845, the Democratic Party dropped from its ticket first-term U.S. congressman John P. Hale over his opposition to annexing Texas and criticism of the party's pro-slavery positions. Hale decided to stay in the race as an "Independent Democrat," squaring off against candidates from the Whig, Liberty, and Democratic parties. When no candidate won a majority in the first round, the Liberty Party chose not to run a candidate, instead supporting Hale in three successive rounds of voting. While Hale failed to secure a majority himself in any of these races, he nonetheless prevented the pro-slavery Democrat from doing so, keeping the seat vacant for the remainder of that Congress.
A similar strategy proved even more successful in the elections to follow. In June 1846, after years of Democratic dominance in the Granite State, a cross-party anti-slavery effort under Hale's energetic leadership prevented Democratic candidates for governor and state senate from securing a majority of the votes. At the same time, Hale won a seat in the state house, and a newly elected coalition of Whigs, Liberty men, and Independent Democrats took control of the chamber, using their authority under state law to appoint Whigs to the gubernatorial and state-senate vacancies. In turn, the legislature raised the Liberty Party's own Joseph Cilley to the U.S. Senate — and when his term expired, replaced him with none other than John Hale.
The anti-slavery movement took a momentous leap forward in 1848, as Liberty Party leaders joined disaffected Whigs and Democrats to form the Free Soil Party, so named for its central goal of preventing the extension of slavery into any additional U.S. territory. Former Democratic president Martin Van Buren topped its inaugural ticket and picked up 10% of the national popular vote — more than any third-party candidate before him at that time in American history. Between 1848 and 1854, a dozen Free Soilers won seats in the House of Representatives, and victories in state legislatures led to the appointment of six Free Soilers to the Senate, including the renowned Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.
Free Soil's success was no happy accident. The integration of former Whigs and Democrats reflected a growing recognition of the necessity of broadening anti-slavery appeal beyond long-time readers of the Liberator and other constituents with rigid moral convictions. In particular, the coalitional strategies the Liberty Party occasionally embraced but largely eschewed in favor of nominating third-party challengers would play an increasingly prominent role.
The Free Soil Party anchored its platform in opposing the expansion of slavery into the West. But not all politicians who shared this view were willing to abandon their major parties to join its ranks. In elections Free Soilers could not win outright, a secondary route opened by which anti-slavery forces could unify and further their cause: fusing support behind one anti-slavery candidate. This strategy might have required a degree of moral compromise, but it proved effective in defeating pro-slavery candidates.
The alliances varied geographically, based on the political dynamics in each state: In some, intrepid Whigs were willing to push the anti-slavery agenda, while in others, the Democrats did so. George Julian, a former Whig who would later become the Free Soil nominee for vice president in 1852, won his 1848 congressional election in Indiana on a ticket fusing support from the Free Soil and Democratic parties. That cooperation extended to state races as well, as Democrats and Free Soilers fused to support the same legislative candidates in the northern part of the state.
This approach facilitated growing anti-slavery and, in particular, Free Soiler influence elsewhere throughout the North. In Wisconsin, Whigs and Free Soilers cooperated in congressional and gubernatorial elections. After years of Whig dominance in Massachusetts, Free Soilers and Democrats joined forces and won a shared majority in the state legislature in 1850. They then shared the rewards of their electoral victory, selecting Democrats for governor and speaker of the state house, and Free Soilers for president of the state senate and U.S. senator. All four men — George Boutwell, Nathaniel Banks, Henry Wilson, and Charles Sumner — would eventually become Republicans of great national influence. Littered throughout the history of antebellum politics are instances of fusion tickets and other examples of strategic cooperation between anti-slavery outsiders and allies within the major parties.
The founding myth of the Republican Party often begins here: As the Whigs collapsed in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Free Soilers, disaffected Northern Whigs, and various homeless political factions coalesced to form the new party. In the white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, leaders of this motley crew hammered out the beginnings of what would become the GOP. Like all American political parties, Republicans would prove a coalition of varied interests: It was not a one-issue party, and not all of its founding members were principally focused on abolition. But from the beginning, radicals and their more moderate anti-slavery allies could insist that opposition to slavery — or at least its expansion — would be a central, non-negotiable plank in its platform.
The anti-slavery movement accomplished this feat because the meeting in Ripon was not the beginning of the Republican story. Rather, the movement's patient development of an ideologically diverse network of anti-slavery politicians and leaders provided a firm foundation on which to build a new party. No single strategy can explain something as complicated as a new party's creation, but it is clear that the growing embrace of strategic, cross-partisan cooperation gave the anti-slavery movement essential tools for navigating an otherwise hostile two-party system.
As historian William Gienapp observed: "[I]t was not obvious at the outset that the Republican Party would become either powerful or permanent." Indeed, in 1854, only a handful of states successfully precipitated a broadly unified slate of candidates — much less a sustained party — from the fractured opposition that would become the Republican Party. Where some of these early movers succeeded (as in Wisconsin), or where there was localized support for such an approach (as in northern Illinois), there was a history of electoral cooperation between Free Soilers and Whigs. Thus, not only did fusion and other forms of cross-party cooperation build momentum for anti-slavery forces, it likely also created a prototype for the inter- and cross-party cooperation that would help launch the nascent GOP.
STRATEGIC FUSION'S POTENTIAL TODAY
This history does not suggest that similar revolutionary realignment is likely today. And of course, the policy disputes of the 21st century pale in comparison to the fundamental issue of human bondage. Nonetheless, for those who do not currently see their priorities embraced by either major party, it is worth reflecting on the events of those pre-war decades.
Of the misfit factions spanning the political spectrum, one has played an outsized role in recent elections: current or former Republicans whose views are typified by fiscal prudence, free markets, limited government, assertive foreign policy, and commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law. While these positions had been Republican orthodoxy for decades, they are now, to varying degrees, incompatible with core aspects of the formal GOP platform and the impulses and priorities of Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and other leading nationalist-populists.
These traditional Republicans are well aware of their party's shift. To date, opposition to Trump and his movement has been this group's organizing principle. Yet it is unclear how they might exert meaningful political influence in the years ahead. How can they best ensure that fiscal responsibility, respect for the Constitution, loyalty to our allies abroad, and other core conservative principles are not jettisoned, and instead maintain their rightful place among the foundations of sound governance? The current political reality only offers so many paths forward.
One option is attempting to reassert control of the Republican Party. Former governor Nikki Haley's 2024 presidential primary bid encapsulated this effort. The early primary contests confirmed that there was indeed a durable portion of the Republican electorate who subscribed to these core beliefs, but her lopsided losses also demonstrated that this group was relatively small, far outnumbered by those supporting Trump. Similar trends — albeit with some notable exceptions — were observable down ballot.
A convincing rejection of Trump in the 2024 general election might have reopened this path, even if narrowly. Yet such a reversal seems unfathomable after his resounding Electoral College victory. What's more, fewer and fewer holdovers committed to (or even familiar with) traditional Republicanism remain in positions of power; most have been replaced by opponents controlling not just the national-party apparatus, but state-party institutions nationwide. As was true with certain Whigs and Democrats in the antebellum period, unique constituencies and local political conditions might allow individual officials to defy the party line. But on their own, they have little power to challenge the party's orientation.
Another path could be a third-party challenge. Early in the 2024 presidential race, the centrist group No Labels promoted a potential bipartisan ticket and invested millions in the laborious process of securing ballot access across the country. The group interpreted widespread apathy for the leading Democratic and Republican candidates as promising for a third option and hoped to channel the conservative sensibilities of someone like former governor Larry Hogan or former senator Joe Manchin. Despite substantial resources and months of recruiting, No Labels failed to find willing nominees.
Just as Liberty men and Free Soilers managed to win outright in some Northern communities where anti-slavery sentiment was particularly strong, it is conceivable that third-party candidates running as Reaganite conservatives could win in certain jurisdictions. Their prospects would, of course, be most favorable in races against a single major-party opponent, especially where the abstaining major party supported the challenge.
Yet in most contested races, the two major parties run their own candidates, and the likelihood of a third-party victory is miniscule. The downside can be massive: James Birney demonstrated in 1844 that even a meager showing from a third candidate can splinter like-minded voters and help elect the opposing candidate most at odds with the new party's goals. Lest that race seem like an aberration, the same phenomenon repeated in 1856. The ascendant Republican Party, the disintegrating Whig Party, and the nativist Know Nothing Party were unified in spirit against the Democratic Party and its growing alignment with pro-slavery forces. But in practice, they splintered, nominating John Frémont for the Republicans and Millard Fillmore for the Know Nothings and Whigs. Combined, Frémont and Fillmore received nearly 55% of the popular vote — but the split sent to the White House Democrat James Buchanan, widely regarded as one of America's worst presidents.
This same "spoiler" risk is a key reason why No Labels faced substantial backlash from erstwhile allies. Future efforts to introduce serious third-party candidates into presidential or other competitive races would face the same challenges.
Instead, the most effective approach to date has been assessing each race on a case-by-case basis and supporting whichever of the two major-party candidates better reflects these traditional values, regardless of whether the candidate is a Democrat or a Republican. This was the path Liz Cheney and other prominent Republican former officials took during the 2024 presidential contest. This approach recognizes politics as the art of the possible, and that the perfect ought not be the enemy of the good.
But there are limits and drawbacks here, too. Cheney and other elites had the opportunity to publicly explain and defend the principled basis for their decision — why it was the honorable choice notwithstanding the candidate's imperfections and her party's ideological shortcomings. But most voters simply check a box on the ballot, and for many longtime Republicans, the necessity of voting Democrat in a given race causes reservations about supporting the candidate who nonetheless better aligns with their priorities. And because such votes are indistinguishable from all others cast for the same candidate, it is impossible to know how much support comes from principled voters of this mold versus the party base.
These challenges raise the question: What if a new political party was formed not to run third, ideologically pure candidates in competitive races, but rather to fuse with aligned Republicans and Democrats? With a second nomination on the ballot, people could vote for their preferred candidate without incorrectly implying support for the candidate's major party and its agenda. Instead, such votes would amplify the third-party platform, allowing ordinary voters to communicate why a favored candidate earned their backing.
In the aggregate, it would become clear what share of a candidate's total support came from these voters, as they would no longer be subsumed within the monolithic pool of major-party ballots cast today. Such transparency gives a faction its rightful and proportionate credit for each victory, just as Free Soilers and Democrats divided power fairly after working together to dethrone Whigs in Massachusetts.
In lieu of informal endorsements and ad hoc signaling from like-minded elites, this approach allows for the systemized accumulation of power, resources, and personnel in a formal party institution oriented around shared political goals. Political isolation can give way to a political community and identity that is distinctive, greater than any individual leader or single election, and durable and adaptive over time. A new party need not mimic today's major parties by focusing on fundraising and coordinated messaging: Drawing again from 19th-century practice, building tight networks at the community level could give the party a more meaningful role as a true association. Anti-slavery leaders learned the hard way that a political cause does not prevail simply because it is morally righteous. Rather, the prudent creation of new parties committed to the righteous cause — the apotheosis being the Republican Party — finally leveled the playing field with the pro-slavery (and acquiescent) interests that had dominated the major parties for decades.
In some states today, this fusion strategy is possible if local leaders are willing to undertake the serious work of building and sustaining a new political party. In many others, state laws dating from the progressive era prohibit candidates from accepting or having two party nominations on the ballot. But laws can be changed. These restrictions severely limit participation in the electoral process and were passed with the explicit purpose of limiting political competition, leaving them vulnerable to constitutional attack.
Nineteenth-century anti-slavery pioneers faced no such legal impediments as they built and leveraged power outside of and within the existing two-party system. Numerous other political, cultural, economic, and social differences further distinguish their era from ours. As the saying goes, "history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." At a time when many principled voters again find themselves politically homeless, we would do well to understand the strategies that propelled the anti-slavery movement from the periphery of politics to the halls of power in less than a generation.
