As we wait for the votes to start trickling in, and get ready to focus on a vast landscape of close races, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on some unclose races where the bad guys have already lost. First up, there’s Ricky Santorum of PA, who is sort of a poster boy for all those big-time Washington pols who get a little ahead of themselves. Not that long ago, after establishing himself as a hero to the Cultural Right, and serving as the Senate point man for the lobbyist-shake-down K Street Strategy, Ricky was lookin’ damn good in the mirror each morning. Indeed, as recently as late last year, he was maneuvering to succeed Bill Frist as Republican Leader in the Senate, and envisioning himself occupying the Oval Office in 2009. He reportedly regarded the Democrat who is likely to trounce him tonight, Bob Casey, somewhat like a pit bull regards a raw steak. Now Ricky’s about to become an ex-senator. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.Then down in FL, there is Senate Republican Nominee Katherine Harris, who perfectly represents the blowback from the savage Bush-Cheney endgame in 2000. Having done more than anyone outside the Supreme Court to secure the presidency for W., she became the Conservative Republican Base Champion par excellence, and thus could not be denied a Senate nomination when she asked for it. Her bizarre, if-you-love-Jesus-you-gotta-love-me campaign, which was marked by repeated resignations of her staff and consultants, will end tonight with an ignominous defeat by Bill Nelson. And for dessert, Democrats could pick up her old House seat. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to call OH Secretary of State Ken Blackwell the Katherine Harris of ’04, but there’s no question in my mind that he aspired to the title. Along with Harris, he’s a living advertisement of the case against partisan election administration. He’s also so violent a cultural conservative that none other than George W. Bush (according to the recent Bob Woodward book) called him a “nut.” And in his doomed gubernatorial race this year, he showed his class by letting his campaign drop broad hints that his opponent was gay, soft on sexual predators, or both. On top of everything else, his political meltdown tonight should convince GOP strategists that African-Americans are not going to vote for just anybody who is African-American.When these three folks go down hard tonight, I will pause to enjoy the moment. And let’s not forget the earlier fine moment when another bad guy, Ralph Reed, lost the opportunity to lose tonight (the Republican who beat him in the Georgia Lieutenant Governor primary, Casey Cagle, is in a tight race with distinguished Democrat Jim Martin tonight).
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 9: Musk’s “America Party” Is Just the Right Wing of the GOP
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.”