Launching a new national political party in the United States may be more difficult than sending a man to Mars.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who last year was the nation’s biggest known political donor, now says that he is trying to do both. But while the effort to achieve interplanetary travel has made slow progress for over 20 years, the past several decades of American politics are littered with abandoned attempts to disrupt the two-party system.
It remains to be seen how serious Mr. Musk is about the new political project, and whether it will evolve from musings on his social-media platform to a fact of real life. While he declared on Saturday that “Today, the America Party is formed,” so far he has yet to register it with the Federal Election Commission.
As with many of his tweet-length proclamations, Mr. Musk’s plans for the new party are opaque. His private conversations about it so far have been conceptual and not focused on the details of what it would take to bring it to fruition, according to two people briefed on those talks. Some advisers to Mr. Musk who have also been involved in these early talks, however, appear more focused on those details and are soliciting more feedback from experts, according to one of the people.
Mr. Musk’s advisers have indicated privately that they plan to use a super PAC to organize initial support for the new party before it is formally established, according to one of the people briefed.
Mr. Musk has said the America Party would be a new entity and would have the goal of disrupting the two major parties’ hold on the federal government.
Should he eventually tire of the idea, it would not be the first time he offered a grand pronouncement in an X post before either walking it back or letting it wither as he moved on to a new pursuit. Still, some notions that originated as seeming jokes by Mr. Musk — like his early purchase of shares in Twitter — have ended with world-altering investments.
Public opinion polling has long shown that Americans are hungry for an option beyond the two major political parties, though third-party candidates have seldom performed well in elections.
Should Mr. Musk make a sustained investment in his America Party project — either in monetary terms or by expending his political capital — it would face steep hurdles. Here are a few.
Rules in each state are hard to follow
Mr. Musk boasted on Sunday that his plan to radically transform American democracy would not be difficult — suggesting he had spent little time studying state ballot-access and federal campaign-finance laws.
Congressional candidates for a theoretical new party face a labyrinthine system of signature requirements that vary from state to state. The most restrictive laws are in Georgia, where candidates outside the two major parties must gather 27,000 signatures from their district. This hurdle has kept third-party congressional candidates from being on a general election ballot since the law was enacted in 1943, according to Richard Winger, the publisher of Ballot Access News, which has tracked election laws since 1985.
Even the name America Party could trip up Mr. Musk. New York State, for instance, has a law that forbids the word American — or any variant of it — to be on the ballot as part of a party name, according to the Election Law Blog.
Qualifying a slate of 435 House candidates, were Mr. Musk to take his idea national, would require about three times as many petition signatures as putting a presidential candidate on the ballot in every state and could cost more than $50 million just in signature gathering, Mr. Winger said.
“I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” Mr. Winger said in an interview Monday. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”
Parties require a sustained commitment
It is not yet clear whom Mr. Musk would designate to set up a new party on his behalf. Some people who are friends with Mr. Musk’s Republican advisers privately worry about those advisers’ career prospects should they attach themselves to an anti-Trump effort. President Trump has punished Republican consultants who have joined or even tenuously linked arms with his opponents. The White House in recent days has been closely watching Mr. Musk’s allied operatives, a person briefed on the White House’s posture said.
That could leave Mr. Musk dependent, at least somewhat, on the mercenary types who populate the world of minor parties and ballot-access campaigns, and who may be willing to suffer reputational damage with national Republicans if the paycheck is big enough.
In recent days, cash-hungry ballot-access operatives have been conducting frenzied research and developing proposals with the hopes of getting them in front of Mr. Musk, according to one person doing just that. Some of them have begun spending inordinate amounts of time analyzing his social media posts.
Aside from minor parties like the Libertarians and Greens, which have been successful at qualifying for ballots and occasionally at spoiling general elections, American third parties have generally had a short shelf life.
The Reform Party, created by H. Ross Perot for his presidential campaign in 1992, petered out after Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota on its line in 1998 and Mr. Trump declined to run for president on its line in 2000.
Mr. Perot won 19 million votes in 1992 on a populist platform that in some ways preceded Mr. Trump’s rise. Mr. Musk so far has espoused no real policy agenda beyond deficit reduction and anger at Mr. Trump.
“He’s no Ross Perot, you know,” said Ralph Nader, the 2000 Green Party presidential candidate, who was widely seen as having spoiled that election for Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee. “He doesn’t have a popular program to run on.”
Another much-discussed group, No Labels, never got around to putting forward a candidate in 2024. Andrew Yang’s Forward Party merged with a few state-based third parties but has not made a significant impact on elections anywhere. Mr. Musk and Mr. Yang have been in touch in recent days, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.
And Unite America, a 2010s project to put forward centrist candidates, stopped nominating candidates after the 2018 election and shifted its focus to pushing for changes in election laws that would make it easier for independent and third-party candidates to succeed.
Musk may not know what he wants yet
On his social media site, Mr. Musk has floated the idea of holding an American Party Congress this August in Austin, Texas. He suggested that he would be interested in keeping a “laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts” in the 2026 midterms. And if those candidates were to win, he said, they would “caucus independently,” but “legislative discussions would be had with both parties.”
Mr. Musk’s team has not yet taken many operational steps to stand up the party, according to people in touch with them. On X, he has ingested feedback about the effort — including what the party’s logo should look like — from Grok, his company’s artificial intelligence chatbot.
Limiting his ambitions to just a handful of races might not fit with Mr. Musk’s often grandiose self-image, but it could leave him with a better return on his investment.
It could also require Mr. Musk to direct the actions of his candidates and elected officials, much like an old-school party boss. And for such a smaller-scale initiative to achieve the influence he imagines, it most likely rests on the continuation of a narrowly divided Congress, in which lawmakers aligned with Mr. Musk had the numbers to decide the majority.
Given Mr. Musk’s recent actions tearing down large segments of the federal government on Mr. Trump’s behalf, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Democrats might align with Mr. Musk to thwart the president.
It is easier to work within the system
For all his talk about starting a new party from scratch, Mr. Musk may find it easier to work within the existing system.
There are still many Republicans in Congress who will privately express disgust with Mr. Trump, but very few who have been willing to cross him in public. In recent weeks, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska announced they would not seek re-election next year, in part because of their inability to be totally committed to Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Mr. Musk has committed to support Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican who is staring down a potential primary challenge from a Trump supporter.
Several veterans of minor parties suggested that Mr. Musk might try to ally himself with an existing party that has a ballot line already, such as the Libertarians.
Mr. Troiano proposed that Mr. Musk could achieve a much better return on his political investment by persuading Republican incumbents to align with his new effort than by trying to elect newcomers to Congress.
Whether the new Musk crew operated as a bloc within the Republican Party or formed an entirely new organization could make little difference if members of Congress aligned with Mr. Musk stuck together amid what would certainly be an unrelenting onslaught from Mr. Trump.
“If the hardest thing to do is elect a third-party or independent candidate to Congress, the overlooked opportunity is who is there that would potentially defect to a new effort if they had the backing to get re-elected,” said Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America. “Right now, the options are to continue a miserable existence in the party, or retire, or try something new.”
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
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