Musk Goes Third Party

He's the latest to take up the futile and pointless challenge.

Elon Musk says he’s starting a third party. You probably don’t need me to tell you that it’s almost certainly not going to work. Indeed, I wrote an item recently about why 2028 is probably not a particularly good opportunity for a third candidate. But Musk’s claimed gambit is a bit different, and so…well, here goes.

Musk is currently floating something different from a Ross Perot (1992, 1996) or John Anderson (1980) style presidential run. Instead, he has something Congressional in mind: Running this new party in “2 or 3 Senate seats and 8-10 House districts.” The idea is that given close margins, his fragment could have an outside influence if Congress continues to be closely divided.

This is one of those things, perhaps, that sounds clever until one thinks about it for, oh, thirty seconds.¹

To begin with: The most obvious problem may be that no one can guarantee another closely divided Congress, but only slightly behind that is that while winning a handful of seats might produce some leverage, running in only a handful of seats is a good way to get entirely shut out.

Next problem: How do you pick the districts? Closely divided seats (such as, for example, the open North Carolina Senate contest) might seem to be the natural targets, but in fact both parties will be pouring resources into those elections. Voters in those districts will be most likely (all else equal) to vote based on their preference for congressional majorities, and most averse to “wasting” their vote on a third-party candidate.

Safe Democratic seats are also unlikely to be promising ground for a Musk-linked candidate, given that Musk is extremely unpopular with Democrats these days.

That leaves safe Republican seats. It’s not impossible to imagine some success there. There’s always room in the GOP for those accusing their opponents for being RINOs, and it’s entirely plausible that those attacks might work even for a third-party candidate who can’t actually claim to be Republican In Name at all but can claim to be a True Conservative. It’s still a major stretch, however, given that currently the most radical Republicans are also wild about Donald Trump, and therefore least likely to support an anti-Trump challenger.

Back up a bit. The most successful third parties in the US have been those that exploit a policy position that has strong support in the electorate but that neither of the major parties can adopt. That was most famously the case with the fight against slavery and the birth of the Republican Party. But it was also true for the 19th century Populists, the early 20th century Progressives, and even to some extent the various Dixiecrat efforts in the postwar era, when an opening for anti-Black bigotry appeared as national Democrats were moving away from it and national Republicans had not yet adopted a modified version.

Musk, at least so far, doesn’t even have a hint of any such policy. To be sure: He does talk about deficits, and neither major party supports smaller budget deficits. Republicans haven’t since the late 1970s and especially since the 1990s; Democrats turned to anti-deficit politics in the 1980s in reaction, but after decades of having nothing to show for it pretty much abandoned the position during Joe Biden’s presidency. The problem, however, is that virtually no voters oppose federal budget deficits, at least not strongly enough to make it the basis for a new party.²

The truth is that most somewhat successful one-shot independent and third-party efforts at the national level, from Teddy Roosevelt in 2012 on, have been more about ego trips by a presidential candidate than anything else. Since Musk is ineligible to do that thanks to the (dubious) Constitutional provision against naturalized citizens winning the presidency, that option isn’t open to him. So there’s just not much there.

Indeed, if there is any policy position that might work as the basis for a real third-party movement, I’m not sure what it might be. Remember: It has to be locked out for both parties, and it has to have significant public support, the kind of support that drives people to take action (as opposed to something just polling well).³

At any rate, what Mush is talking about so far doesn’t fit any known pattern of new party success, however defined. Unless, that is, his actual goal is just to damage Trump and the Republicans. In that case, his strategy should be to run candidates in modestly Republican districts (or states) and just focus on negative campaigns against Republican candidates. Even then, it’s not clear that such a strategy would be more successful than skipping the third party idea and just run negative ads.

There is one other option. Political parties in the US are permeable. If Musk really has policy ideas he wants to see implemented, the easiest path is to just get active in the Republican Party and push it in his direction. That could involve running candidates in primaries, but it could also just mean putting resources into contested primaries and contested general elections on behalf of candidates he likes. In other words, the same way that any citizen can try to change a political party. Albeit with a lot more money. But generally that kind of influence requires long-term focus and effort, regardless of the size of the checks. And that may be beyond Musk’s skill set .

1. For more reasons Musk’s idea isn’t likely to be viable, see here — especially Hans Noel’s comments — and see also Ed Kilgore here.

2. Voters claim to like balanced budgets – it sounds so responsible! - but they only want higher taxes on the rich, which Musk doesn’t appear to support, and don’t really support many large spending cuts at all.

3. Partisan polarization would seem to leave an opening between the two major parties, but it turns out that self-identified “moderates” are all over the place on policy, so there aren’t any consensus “moderate” policies available.