Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Anyone who’s tired of centuries of two-party dominance in American politics has probably dreamed of something coming along to shake things up. And earlier this month, when Elon Musk capped weeks of mouthing off about the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill by announcing the formation of a new America Party, it might have felt like a rare piece of good news for the left. Maybe democracy’s two greatest enemies would soon tear each other apart and absent-mindedly leave the door wide open for Democrats to walk back in from the wilderness next year.
Well, not to be a buzzkill, but so far Musk’s party is just the latest iteration of a consistently unsuccessful effort to build a political movement around Third Way–style austerity and other things people don’t actually want. Musk adds little to that familiar, uninspiring recipe, aside from his increasingly virulent racism, which already has a very comfortable home in the MAGA-fied Republican Party.
And austerity is what this is really all about. The world’s richest man’s spectacular fallout with Trump happened not because the president and his allies just gutted several key pillars of the electric vehicle industry that helped make Musk the wealthiest person in the world, but because the GOP’s big economic package didn’t slash government spending enough. “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” he told CBS in June. A normal person might have tried to quietly set up a meeting with Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, but Musk, who is very much not a normal person, dialed it straight to 11, eventually accusing Trump of being an Epstein Guy. Trump allies like Steve Bannon then floated the idea of deporting Musk, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen. And it didn’t take all that long to move from this extremely ugly threat-hurling to Musk’s spitefully launching of a third party designed to humiliate the president.
But it’s much harder to go from announcing a new third party to becoming an actual force in American politics than Musk seems to think. The country’s third parties are almost all plagued by one of two distinct ideological problems, on top of the well-known systemic difficulties facing smaller parties in winner-take-all electoral systems like the U.S. and Canada. Many of the better-known third parties are so ideologically extreme in the context of U.S. politics that their appeal is limited. This has always been the main problem for the Green and Libertarian parties, whatever the merits of their policy infrastructure.
Even when third parties successfully identify a policy that appeals to voters and isn’t on the Donkey/Elephant menu, they often watch helplessly as Democrats or Republicans co-opt their ideas. Political scientists Shigeo Hirano and James Snyder argued convincingly in a 2007 paper that FDR’s New Deal cut off growing left-wing third-party challenges at the knees by making muscular progressive policymaking part of the Democratic brand. Similarly, Gingrich-era Republicans defused the threat of Ross Perot’s anti-elite populism by making term limits and balanced budget amendments part of their Contract With America—while (shocker) never getting around to implementing them.
Other challengers to the two-party system make the opposite mistake, trying to fill ideological space that is already occupied by one or both of the major parties. This was the biggest problem with No Labels, the hapless centrist organization that tried for years to get someone like former Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to run for president. The organization’s yearning for bipartisanship could have been borrowed from one of President Joe Biden’s campaign speeches, and its fixation on deficit reduction and entitlement reform sounded as if it could have been masterminded by former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan himself.
While neither party seems willing to pay the political price of balancing budgets once in power, it is nevertheless a message voters have been hearing ad nauseam from major-party figures for as long as most of us have been conscious, and at the end of the day, ordinary people couldn’t care less about deficits. Similar problems have plagued Andrew Yang’s rudderless Forward Party, which abandoned its only interesting ideas (like a universal basic income) when it merged with dull centrist organizations like the Serve America Movement, which function mostly as make-work programs for former elected officials, meaningless side projects for finance executives, and tax write-offs for rich people looking to Make a Difference without actually getting their hands dirty.
Musk says he will focus on a handful of critical battleground-state Senate races and closely contested House districts rather than the presidency, but that is unlikely to increase his chances of success. While there are well-liked independents in the Senate, it has been decades since anyone was elected to the chamber under the banner of a legitimate third party (with apologies to Joe Lieberman’s 2006 operation Connecticut for Lieberman). And there’s no particular reason to think that swing-district voters are more willing than anyone else to risk wasting their ballots on a third-party candidate, no matter how many ads they can afford to run. Yes, Musk will be able to focus his considerable financial firepower on a small number of races, but he will still ultimately face the same challenges as anyone else, including running headlong into what political scientists call Fenno’s Paradox—the tendency of voters to disapprove of Congress but love their own representatives. The best-case scenario for Musk is seeing his candidates shaving off just enough from Republican margins to allow Democrats to retake the House, Senate, or both next year. But Republicans will see this threat from miles away and are likely to react accordingly.
It’s not that there’s no political opening here. The Trump administration is indeed doing a number of things that are profoundly unpopular, and political scientists Matthew Kerbel and John Kenneth White argue that “third parties have won public support when voters found the major parties lacking in their responses to the major issues of the day.” The percentage of Americans saying they want another option beyond the two major parties has reached near-century highs. But does Musk have any actual ideas to address the very real dissatisfaction with the status quo that has led voters to toss out the incumbent party in three consecutive presidential elections for the first time since the 19th century? If he does, he hasn’t shared them with us, and that’s almost certainly because they don’t exist.
According to a 2024 Chapman University poll, Americans are most worried about corrupt leaders (e.g., Trump), cyberterrorism, illness and death, nuclear war, and financial precarity. A platform that addressed growing fears about A.I.–driven layoffs, mitigated ongoing frustrations with the cost of housing and health care, and promised to restore nonpartisanship in government might actually have legs, but Musk himself is almost uniquely unsuited to that role. He is one of Earth’s leading A.I. snake-oil salesmen, has used DOGE primarily to destroy the government’s capacity to rein in corruption, and has never shown the slightest interest in America’s various affordability crises.
Yes, Musk has more liquidity than many medium-sized countries, and he owns his own propaganda website whose algorithms he can manipulate at will to signal boost whatever rancid conspiracy is on his mind. But while there’s no denying that he commands a cult of credulous followers on X and can throw gobsmacking stacks of cash at his new project, the ideal third-party standard-bearer would probably not be a widely despised man with a not-so-secret drug problem, a lurid personal history that cries out for a Discovery Channel reality show, and a recent history of repulsing anyone who comes into contact with him. According to Nate Silver’s tracker, Musk’s net favorability is pushing –22 points, making him less popular than Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and even reliably disliked congressional leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Despite all that, Democrats have little to lose by hoping that Musk can, against all odds, fracture the Republican coalition, or at least peel off enough of it to swing tight races over the next few cycles. Although most third-party candidates pull more evenly from Democrats and Republicans than you might think, polling suggests Musk and his party pose no threat at all to Democrats given his impressively thorough alienation of anyone to the left of Ted Cruz. So, by all means, throw some popcorn in the microwave and hope for maximum MAGA mayhem—just don’t count on the America Party to be the pinch that wakes us up from our ongoing political nightmare.
