Elon Musk has finally done something predictable (for a gazillionaire with a political itch, that is): He says he’s launching a third party devoted to the cause of deficit reduction. Instead of the quadrennial dream of No Labels, in which high-minded donors put up the money for an imaginary white knight who never materializes, we may get the “America Party,” in which the world’s richest man puts his fortune behind, he says, “extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield.”
If you parse Musk’s postings and re-postings, that seems to mean a third party strategy that targets a handful of close Senate and House seats, trying to create a legislative faction that exerts control over both bodies by preventing anything from passing without their crucial votes.
Credit where due: This is a somewhat better plan than just backing a doomed third-party presidential bid in 2028. The most compelling suggestion for would-be third partyers during Joe Biden’s presidency was that they should persuade a clutch of discontented senators to caucus as independents, creating a potent Joe Manchin-Mitt Romney-Lisa Murkowski-Susan Collins-Kyrsten Sinema bloc. Musk’s concentrated-force idea, presumably, would be an attempt to create this kind of bloc from scratch, discovering the next Murkowskis and Manchins and making it possible for them to fund and win a race without an R or D beside their name.
Before the travails of DOGE, I would have said that it was a mistake to automatically bet against Musk; now it seems safer to just acknowledge up front that this plan is unlikely to work out, and that Musk will probably find it too difficult to seriously pursue.
But in the spirit of possibility, and because the House-and-Senate plan is an advance on most third-party fantasias, let’s consider the things that would need to happen for Musk to succeed.
First, the America Party couldn’t just target the tightest swing states. You’ll notice that of the independent-minded senators and former senators listed above, only Sinema comes from a hotly contested state. That’s because under polarized conditions, a true swing state is usually the place where both parties make the strongest efforts at persuasion, where the stakes of each election seem highest and the fear of the other party’s rule is sharpest among partisans on either side.
Whereas a more reliably blue or red state is more likely to feature a persistent exasperation with the ruling party even among its own registered supporters, or an eccentric form of politics (think of anti-Trump Mormonism in Utah or the residue of liberal Republicanism in New England) that doesn’t have any place to go in a normal two-party presidential election.
These tendencies explain not just the resilience of politicians like Collins, but also how you get popular Republican governors in typically Democratic states and vice versa: A vote for Larry Hogan in Maryland or Andy Beshear in Kentucky is a way to express discontent with one-party rule without giving aid and comfort to the national version of the rival party.
A reasonable goal, then, for the America Party would be to convince more Kentuckians or Marylanders that they could do the same thing with their Senate votes — that they could safely send an independent senator to Washington without effectively empowering Donald Trump or Chuck Schumer.
But to pull that off, you need not just posturing but trust, and that’s hard to build from scratch. In 2010, it was easier for Murkowski to run and win as a write-in candidate after she lost a Republican primary in Alaska because she was already a known quantity. In 2018, it was easier for Romney to run and win as a heterodox Republican in Utah because he was already America’s most famous Latter-day Saints politician. So the second challenge for the America Party would be to find recruits who bring their credibility with them — who could plausibly start at a 15 percent to 20 percent floor and build toward the necessary plurality, rather than needing to spend a fortune just to achieve any position in the polls.
Junior-varsity state politicians or faded cable-news characters aren’t going to cut it, especially if you’re contesting Senate seats. You need names with real in-state credibility — a popular former or even sitting governor, or a captain of industry with a very positive public profile, or someone with an amazing personal story outside of politics. The kind of candidate, in other words, whom the G.O.P. or the Democrats would otherwise recruit. Ideally, too, you would want a sitting senator like Murkowski or Collins — or, who knows, even John Fetterman — to take the plunge and join the party.
But for that kind of recruitment to work, you would also need the party to achieve some distance from the brand of its progenitor and funder. A successful script for the America Party would probably need to be deliberately vague, promising compromise on every front (in ways that would infuriate pundits, of course) while constantly defining itself in the negative, against the woke left and the MAGA right. But Musk himself is associated both with extremely specific cuts to government programs and with full-throated MAGA rhetoric, with a strong dose of billionaire idiosyncrasy (if I may put it mildly) woven in.
Somehow the America Party would need to be Musk-funded without being Muskian. It would need to be perceived as something he had set in motion but declined to micromanage, with its successful candidates as its natural leaders rather than the Tesla king himself. And as Nate Silver suggests, his funding would need to have a longer time horizon than just the 2026 and 2028 races; electing even one senator in those cycles would be impressive, and the goal would be to shape America in the 2030s, not to upend Trump’s second term.
Musk is good at making long-term bets on fronts where naysayers expect swift failure. He’s not good at being hands-off or in the background, and on the evidence of the last six months, he’s terrible at intuiting what swing voters want. So the test of his third-party ambitions will be whether he can demonstrate a new facility: accepting his own limits and learning from defeat.
Breviary
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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