Musk's America Party is doomed

His message makes no sense

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Late last week, Elon Musk became the latest in a long line of billionaires and tech-adjacent figures to announce that they intend to revolutionize American politics by founding a third party. Musk is reportedly whacked out of his gore on ketamine half of the time, but let’s put to one side the question of whether he is going to follow through on this idea and just assume that he will.

Musk’s America Party is doomed for the same reason that previous attempts to found third parties have been doomed: America’s first past the post electoral system and extremely high levels of partisan polarization mean there is simply not space for a third party to prosper.

I wrote about this back in 2023, when a group called “No Labels” claimed it was going to launch a third party, and I also wrote about it in 2022 when tech CEO Andrew Yang said he was going to do it. Here’s a quote from the 2023 piece:

To put it mildly, third parties have not had a good track record of electoral success throughout American history. Since the emergence of the Republican Party in the 1850s, no third party candidate has ever come close to winning a presidential election. Even those that have racked up impressive percentages of the popular vote have seen their attempts fatally wounded by America’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which gives all the Electoral College votes in a state to the winning candidate regardless of their margin of victory.

The best Electoral College performance by a third party candidate came from Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, but his 27.4% share of the popular vote only translated to 88 in the Electoral College. That wasn’t bad given that Roosevelt was shot during his campaign, but it was well shy of Woodrow Wilson’s 435. More recently, Ross Perot won 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 but absolutely no votes in the Electoral College whatsoever.

If you want more about the history of why third parties fail, I recommend that piece - here I’m going to talk about Musk’s project specifically.

A lot of the commentary that I’ve seen about Musk’s new America Party focuses on the practical difficulties of launching a new party. And these are indeed formidable. Parties are heavily regulated at the state level, so to start a new one you need a bunch of money and lawyers to deal with the tedious process of gathering signatures, filing paperwork, and overcoming all of the legal barriers that the two-party duopoly has erected to stop you.

But if there is any individual in the United States able to overcome these barriers, I would say that it’s Elon Musk. He’s the richest man in the world and he can afford a lot of lawyers. So if you set aside his tendency to pick up projects and then drop them just as quickly, there’s no practical reason why he can’t do this. There’s a chance that the legal wrangling might drag on until the midterms, but I’d give him a good chance of being able to field candidates next November if he really tries.

The reason that his party is doomed is something different. And it boils down to the fact that it is inconceivable that it would win any seats.

Like most previous bids to found a third party, Musk’s pitch is that there is a great mass of American voters who are fed up with the two-party system, who are just yearning for “common sense” and non-partisan policies, and yadda yadda. But this is simply not true. The reason that American politics is currently so profoundly polarized is because voters’ attachment to one of the two main parties has rarely been stronger. Extremely few voters switch parties between elections. Even those who are somewhat skeptical of their own party hate the other one so much that they will stick with the best means of keeping it out of office.

The situation gets even worse for Musk when you think about the coalition that he aspires to put together. So far as I can tell, his main policy disagreement with Trump is about cutting government spending - he wants to balance the deficit and reduce the debt. Otherwise, they are simpatico. Musk is one of the most egregious purveyors of far-right racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, so he’s not opposing Trump there.¹ He’s culturally and socially very conservative. He’s also just as deep into the world of MAGA conspiracy theories as Trump himself - arguably deeper.

This single-minded focus on reducing government spending means that the America Party’s pitch is essentially “just as racist and crazy as Trump, but with more cuts to your welfare!” That is not a winning message. One of the under-appreciated facts about Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party is that he moved the GOP substantially to the left on welfare policy - the fact that with him you could get unadulterated racism and keep your pension was a big selling point. That’s also why the party’s recent healthcare cuts are such bad politics as well as policy.

And then there’s Musk’s electoral strategy, which is apparently to target a certain number of swing districts so that he can hold the “balance of power” in Congress and key votes. This is bizarrely simplistic thinking. There is little reason to expect that voters in swing districts are more likely to jump ship to a third party than voters anywhere else - they may actually be less willing, because they are acutely aware that their votes really matter.

Musk’s politics mean that he’s basically trying to siphon votes from the GOP, so if he really believed he had a winning message, he would be better off targeting districts with a lot of Republican voters rather than ones with lots of Democrats. And it’s really a moot point anyway, because the math just doesn’t add up in any district.

I’ll allow that “racist, somewhat skeptical of Trump, wants to the cut the debt” is certainly a statement that describes a percentage of the Republican coalition, but how much of it? 20%? 50% 70%? Even if the answer were 70% - and it’s actually closer to 20% - then in the typical 50/50 swing district that’s still only 35% of the electorate. Good luck with that.

One reason that people might give for taking Musk more seriously is that he has a lot of money. And I agree that this makes it possible for him to overcome the financial and logistical barriers to setting up a party, maybe. But I also think that people often get confused between “money is shamefully necessary to succeed in American politics” and “money lets you buy American elections”. It is simply not the case that vast amounts of spending allows you to substantially move the needle of public opinion. Campaign professionals will tell you that a really excellent and well-resourced campaign can shift things to the tune of 1, 3, maybe 5%. That’s it.

If Musk were really serious about transforming American politics, then he would do what Donald Trump did - take over one of the existing parties. That’s the only way to succeed in a system in which voters are fiercely loyal to their party of choice. Setting up your own usually amounts to little more than a vanity project - which, let’s face it, might be right up Musk’s street.

1. Interestingly, there have been two “American Parties” in U.S. history before. The first was a virulently anti-immigrant party from the mid-nineteenth century whose supporters were called the “Know-Nothings”. The other was George Wallace’s attempt to save segregation in the American South in the latter half of the twentieth century.