There’s been a lot of buzz about the world’s wealthiest man pledging to start a third party, so I addressed that dubious proposition at New York:
The feud between Donald Trump and his onetime deep pocket and henchman Elon Musk keeps bubbling up in unpredictable ways. But one fracture point that is potentially bigger than an exchange of insults and conspiracy theories is the Tech Bro’s musings about creating a third national political party. Not because there’s any real popular demand for another party but because Musk’s wealth could give even the dumbest idea wings.
This angle is interesting in part because Trump has himself flirted with third-party talk when it suited his purposes. But you wouldn’t know that from his categorical put-down of Musk’s fantasies over the weekend at Truth Social:
“I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States – The System seems not designed for them. The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats, who have lost their confidence and their minds! Republicans, on the other hand, are a smooth running “machine,” that just passed the biggest Bill of its kind in the History of our Country.”
He went on to brag some more about his megabill and to spitball about why Musk might have opposed it, without mentioning Musk’s own argument that it is a debt and deficit nightmare.
The third-party threat was clearly weighing on the 47th president’s mind this weekend. When asked about it by a reporter earlier on Sunday, Trump said, “’I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party,” later noting, “He can have fun with it, but I think it’s ridiculous.”
Musk has fleshed out his fantasy a bit after getting the inevitable endorsement of his efforts from his personal echo chamber on X:
“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.
“Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.”
The idea, then, isn’t to launch a new party through some big, splashy presidential campaign that will capture what Musk has called the “80 percent in the middle” of voters alienated by the Democratic-Republican “uniparty.” That, as it happens, was the vision of the last real third-party builder, Ross Perot, who never made much of an effort to create an alternative ballot line at the state level. Perot failed in no small part because winning or even threatening to win elections in a first-past-the-post system requires the sort of regional voting base he never enjoyed. The more limited strategy Musk seems to be talking about doesn’t require displacing a national party but instead simply exploiting the close competitive balance of the existing two major parties and seizing the margin of control in Congress for leverage purposes. It’s a down-ballot version of what southern segregationists tried to do with regional tickets in the 1948 and 1968 presidential elections: prevent either major-party candidate from gaining a majority in the Electoral College and then shake the parties down for policy concessions. They didn’t fail by much.
So what would Musk’s new party, which he has dubbed the “America Party,” make its be-all-and-end-all demand? Best we can tell, he wants massive reductions in the size and cost of the federal government, along with the attendant public debt. That’s not only a slender reed for a disruptive third party but it’s at least rhetorically identified with the GOP despite that party’s own spotty fiscal record. From a practical point of view, why would some aspiring deficit hawk in any given state or congressional district want to take a flier on a candidacy under the America Party banner when they could just as easily run as a Rand Paul–Thomas Massie fiscal hard-liner in a Republican primary? The only answer I can think of is that it may be a way to gain access to Musk’s money. And it’s unclear at this point how much of his fortune Musk is willing to devote to this effort.
As Nate Silver points out, if Musk could lavishly finance a new party with a broader agenda than bringing back DOGE — say, developing a national AI strategy that could prevent rather than accelerate demolition of the workforce — it might gain some purchase, particularly with young voters who dislike both major parties. But it would require the sort of patience and political sophistication Musk has not in any way displayed up to this point in his career.
More likely, Musk is just the latest in a long list of political amateurs who look at unhappiness with the two-party system and make two major mistakes: (1) they don’t grasp that most self-identified independents are what Silver calls IINOs, independents in name only, who routinely vote for the same major party even when given alternatives; and (2) they assume all these people share the same grievances with the current party system.
The only demonstrated template for third parties in the U.S. is to address an entirely unmet demand. When Republicans broke through in the late 1850s, they were exploiting a situation in which one major party (the Whigs) had already died and the other could not stake out a national position on slavery. At this point, Musk isn’t offering anything voters can’t find in the right wing of the Republican Party or, barring that, in the Libertarian Party. So Trump is correct to argue that his frenemy has “gone off the rails.”
