Twin Cities Area New Party (TCANP) and The Tyranny of the Two-party System

Frances Fox Piven in 2019 — Author with her spouse Richard Clower of Poor People’s Movements. Her ideas were foundational to the New Party. Photo credit — Valerie Chiang for the New York Times.

Lisa Disch’s book, The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, after both a preface and Introduction, opens Chapter 1 — “The Politics of Electoral Fusion 1994–1997,” with the following paragraph:

Former MN State Rep. Dawkins in 2014 — photo credit — By Jthaines — Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34532888

At a sparsely attended press conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 18, 1994, a third party and an incumbent state legislator made a historic announcement. They proposed to file the state’s first fusion candidacy in nearly a century. The proposed alliance would have joined the Twin Cities Area New Party to the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party behind the candidacy of Representative Andy Dawkins. TCANP was the Minneapolis-St. Paul chapter of the national New Party.

What is fusion? This question is the central thesis of her book, and needless to say, gets answered — and analyzed — over and over again. But here is a basic intro for those who need it.

Full disclosure — I was in that room. Perhaps it was sparsely attended, but it was a tiny room in the State Senate building, at least in my recollection. Andy Dawkins was there, and by that time I had come to know him fairly well, as we, the organizing core of the TCANP…