I saw a lot of chortling after Elon Musk’s announcement last week that he intends to start a third party, the America Party. Chortle away if you like. But this effort, at least according to what Musk said his goals are, is completely different from other third-party bids in recent U.S. history, and I’ve been amazed these last couple of days at how few people seem to understand that.
Third parties in the United States are jokes for one simple reason: They are built around presidential candidacies. That is a ridiculous goal, and it always has been. The reason? At the presidential level, we are indeed locked in a two-party duopoly, and it’s nearly impossible for a third-party candidate to garner enough support to win 270 electoral votes.
Let’s look at the most successful third-party presidential candidate in modern American history: Ross Perot in 1992. He struck a nerve among folks who were then referred to collectively as “the radical center.” He even led in the polls for a short time. Then he withdrew from the race for 10 crucial weeks (mid-July to October 1). But he ended up winning 19 percent of the vote. Impressive!
However: In electoral terms, Perot was a joke. He won zero Electoral College votes. In fact, he didn’t come remotely close to winning a single electoral vote. He finished third in every state. He almost finished second in Idaho, where he came within about 7,000 votes of besting Bill Clinton. But the Electoral College count was Clinton 370, George H.W. Bush 158, and Perot, all too predictably, 0.
This is why that overhyped No Labels nonsense from 2024, which got a lot of silly press, was ridiculous (and run by hustlers, picking the pockets of gullible, ill-informed rich people). Joe Manchin was never going to be president. He was never going to be much more than an asterisk. To get elected president in this country, you have to be a Democrat or a Republican.
But the presidency is not Musk’s goal. He posted on July 4 that his goal would be “to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.”
Now that is a different kettle of fish. That is doable, at least in theory. And that really would alter American politics immediately.
First, the obstacles. They’re formidable. There’s this thing in political science called Duverger’s Law. French political scientist Maurice Duverger studied party systems in the 1950s and found that countries that elect their legislatures in winner-take-all single-member districts (as we do in the United States) tend to narrow down to having two parties.
This video does a pretty good job of explaining why. In sum, if voters know that only one person will represent a legislative district, the factions that can tolerate one another will pool resources to block the factions they hate. In such a system, third parties don’t have much of a chance—unlike proportional representation systems such as Israel’s, where they don’t have single-member districts and each party is allotted seats according to its national vote total, no matter how small.
So let’s apply Duverger’s Law to Musk’s effort. He’s going to be fielding candidates under his America Party banner in a handful of (presumably) carefully chosen congressional districts. The question is, can an America Party candidate for the House win 34 percent of the vote in a three-way general election?
The answer is: It won’t be easy, but it also isn’t impossible. First of all, it has happened. Bernie Sanders and Angus King are independent senators. Both first made it to Washington—King to the Senate in 2012, Sanders to the House back in 1990—by beating Democratic and Republican opponents. Joe Lieberman won reelection to the Senate in 2006 as an independent. That’s a pretty thin record, but it exists; it’s proof that third-party legislative victories are possible.
But yes—winning even two Senate seats and eight House seats is a massive undertaking. To win at even that fairly modest scale, three conditions would need to obtain:
First, the candidates would need basically unlimited resources. There are still caps on donations to candidates, but Musk and his pals could spend as much as they wanted on “independent” committees to attack the Republican and the Democrat and promote the American Party agenda.
Second, the American Party will need to stand for something that has the potential to slice off a big chunk of already aligned voters—in this case, mostly Republicans. It’s not clear yet what that issue would be. Musk seems to be focused on the debt and the deficit. That has some potency as an issue, but I doubt it’s enough to corral 34 percent of the vote in a given state or congressional district.
Musk’s agenda right now seems to be radical libertarian. That will appeal to his uber-rich tech bro friends, but it won’t peel away enough Republicans to win a House seat. He needs to find a couple MAGA Achilles Heels and build a platform around them. (Also, if Musk’s platform is essentially libertarian, it raises the question of why he doesn’t plow his resources into the existing Libertarian Party, as it so desires.)
Third, Musk needs some serious division within the GOP. Third parties arise in winer-take-all systems when one of the two major parties is coming apart. This is how the Republican Party arose in the first place—the Whigs were split over slavery, and the Republicans were united around an anti-slavery position. It’s how Labour came to power in the UK, also a winner-take-all country: The Liberal Party was split into two factions after World War I, and Labour was united around issues like full employment, a minimum wage, and public ownership of industry.
Ever since, incidentally, the UK has served an example of a place where Duverger’s Law doesn’t hold as strongly as it does in the U.S. Yes, there are two major parties, but the Lib Dems and the Scottish National Party and others have always won some seats. And today, tragically, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is consistently polling well ahead of the Tories.
There’s no sign that the GOP is headed for schism anytime soon. But here’s where Tomasky’s Law comes in: Things are the same until the day they aren’t. We tend to think current conditions are natural and will always hold. Lots of kings, and even some presidents, have learned otherwise.
So let’s say Trump has screwed up and is at 24 percent in the polls by 2027. That will mean he’s lost most independents who backed him and a third or so of Republicans. If that’s true, then there might be room for independent candidacies—which, remember, will have bottomless Musk money—to succeed. I could certainly imagine many such voters backing JD Vance but also supporting American Party candidates to “keep him honest.”
This raises the important question of which party Musk would be stealing seats from. Surely it would be more Republican than Democratic ones. The America Party is not going to be another mushy-center party. Its candidates are going to be quite conservative. It’s hard to see them taking many seats held by Democrats.
And finally: If Musk’s party has, say, two senators and seven or eight House members in January 2029? Those few people may well hold enormous power in their hands. I think we can presume that the Senate and the House will still be pretty narrowly divided, no matter which party is in charge. If every big vote is 51-49 and 220-215, then two senators and eight House members have a ton of leverage.
Then, the United States would start morphing into a parliamentary system. You’d see divisions open up more within the Democratic Party, which is really two parties, or maybe even three (moderate to liberal; progressive with an emphasis on economics; progressive with an emphasis on rights, social issues, and Israel-Palestine).
Our two parties have been around for many years and are deeply entrenched. At the same time, they’re both amalgams of different factions that have plenty of internal disagreements but paper over them to try to block the other side from winning. It would take, as I’ve described, an unusual and probably unlikely set of factors for them to splinter. But nothing is impossible. And unlike leaders of other third-party efforts, Musk, repellent monster that he is, is at least going about this in a non-stupid way.
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