In electoral fusion, the same candidate receives nomination from more than one political party and occupies more than one ballot line.

The New Party was founded in the early 1990s by Dan Cantor, a former staffer for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign, and by political science, sociology and law professor Joel Rogers as an effort to break with the largely unsuccessful history of progressive third parties in the United States.

Their hopes rested largely on the U.S. Supreme Court case Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party.

In 1997, the Court, in a 6–3 decision, upheld the Minnesota ban on cross-endorsing candidates, rejecting the New Party's argument that electoral fusion was a right protected by the First Amendment's freedom of association clause.

New Party founder Daniel Cantor and other key staff members left to found the Working Families Party of New York (1998),[12] an organization which has had considerable success in building a New Party-style organization within New York state, and which now has expanded into other states that have fusion voting.