The New York Times columnists Michelle Cottle and David French discuss whether the moment might be right for a third party. And French tells the story of the time he briefly considered a run for president as a third-party candidate.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion, and I am here with the Opinion columnist David French today. David, hello.
David French: Michelle, it’s great to be with you. And it’s just the two of us.
Cottle: I know, which means we get to get extra juicy digging into Elon Musk. This week he announced he wants to launch a new national political party.
Now, there is a long history of — how do I put this gently? — underwhelming third-party attempts in this country. Does anybody even remember that there is a Forward Party at this point?
French: I had forgotten, Michelle, until just now, so thank you.
Cottle: You’re welcome, David. That’s another service I’m providing here today. But acknowledging the fact that Musk has more money than God and was the nation’s biggest known political donor last year, I want to talk about why even with that, it’s so hard to get a third party off the ground.
And a little bit broader, I want to get into if there might be something different about this particular moment. Certainly for a lot of people, this feels like a fraught and fragile period in the Republic’s history.
Let’s just dig in. Start us off by kind of orienting us. You’re a guy who’s open to the idea of a third party, right? You’re third-party curious.
French: Michelle, not only am I open to the idea of a third party, but I almost mounted a third-party campaign in 2016, which is a whole other story but gives me a lot of insight as to the practical problems and practical realities.
But to make a long story short, back in 2016, Bill Kristol was trying to recruit a third-party candidate. Bill Kristol founded The Weekly Standard and now runs The Bulwark. He asked Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney said no, asked some other folks, they all said no.
And then, like nine-millionth down the list, came to me and I said, I’ll think about it. And I did actually think about it for about 72 hours, which was about 71 hours and 59 seconds too long. But I did absolutely think about it, no question.
So, yeah, I think that as a concept, what we’re dealing with is a lot of theoretical demand. In other words, there’s a lot of people who will say that they want it. The problem is when you get to the actual person in the actual position — what are the positions, who is the individual — that’s where it gets so tricky. You’re moving from the notional, where you can fill in all of your ideals and this is what I imagine a third party would be, and it can be the perfect utopian little alternative in your mind. Then when actual living human beings step up and say, hey, we’ve got an idea, we could do that, it starts to fracture. Almost instantaneously.
Cottle: The idea of you running a third-party candidacy is so delicious. But given your experience, let’s go ahead and give a temperature check on this latest Musk venture. He’s calling it the America Party. Is it remotely viable? My immediate thought is, hell, no. But let me get you to go in here first.
French: I mean, how can I say this? I think of the third party ——
Cottle: Not gently. Say it not gently.
French: Well, of the third-party ideas, one part of the concept of the America Party is actually smarter than a lot of the other third-party ideas. I would then say Elon Musk is exactly the wrong person to implement it because he has a bipartisan sense of revulsion now. Because he has taken on Donald Trump and taken on MAGA. So a lot of Republicans really hate him. And when he switched from being a green techno-futurist to being Donald Trump’s wealthiest acolyte, the left turned on him. So he’s in many ways the least appealing person possible to start a third party because he’s alienated both wings. He’s been driven out of both wings.
Cottle: He’s a uniter, David. He’s united everyone against him.
French: Yes. It’s the uniting against is the problem.
However, this idea that we’re not trying to sweep away everything, but win targeted races, so that there is a third party to contend with in the Senate, so that you can’t have atrocities like the big, beautiful bill that just passed, where you can have some independent voices — I think there’s actually some real promise to that idea.
In part because it doesn’t depend on, as many third parties do, with the man on the white horse coming in with all the fame and all the resources and triggering the last thing we need, which is yet another kind of populist revolution.
Cottle: I do agree with you that I think the targeted approach is better. In part because one of the big problems in getting a third party off the ground is that elections are run by the states and you have 50 different states with a gajillion different rules, and trying to get on the ballot in all those states can be gobsmackingly complicated.
And it’s not like Musk has some grand vision for the country, is my sense. In part he’s just irritated that he didn’t get his way and he wants to have a lever with which to make everybody’s life unpleasant.
French: Yeah. There’s a lot about this that just radiates “I’m angry. I’m mad, and I’m wealthy.”
So what happens? When you or I are angry, Michelle, we do have the pen. We can turn to the pen. We can explain our position. Elon Musk has one of the world’s largest social media outlets that he can use. But that’s not enough.
Cottle: That’s not enough.
French: He can go further. He can start a party. Look, he is very angry at what’s happened, and he’s very impulsive, and all of this is going to undermine him. And on the one hand, he has helmed multiple very successful companies.
So on the one hand, I sympathize with what our colleague Ross Douthat said, that there was a time, a few months ago even, where you would say, there’s not a lot of evidence that you can bet against Elon Musk. He actually does have a knack for accomplishing things in the real world.
That was prepolitics and pre-DOGE. DOGE was a debacle. It was an absolute debacle. It was a humbling moment for him. And unlike what many people do when they have humbling moments when you retreat for a minute, he’s just gone ahead and leaned in.
Cottle: This feels like a revenge campaign because he’s had a falling out with his presidential BFF and he didn’t get his way on the bill. Is there a coalition, though, that could be rallied around a third party at this moment, and what do you think that would look like?
French: That’s the big question. There’s a quick answer to this, which is very optimistic, and there’s a longer answer to this that gets super pessimistic fast.
Cottle: You never bring me anything optimistic, David.
French: No. I’ll start with that.
There is something called the exhausted majority in the U.S. This is a documented phenomenon that does exist. And this is about two-thirds of Americans who believe that neither party listens to them, so they feel unseen and unheard in public discourse.
They’re sick of the partisan vitriol. They’re very angry at the tone of politics. In other words, the tone is exhausting. And they actually want compromise. They actually want people to come to the table and come to agreements.
And so if you’re starting a third party and it says, “You’re not being heard,” everyone’s going to yell, “Yay.” Two-thirds of the people. “There is no compromise.” Thunderous roar. “We need to sit down and listen to each other.” Thunderous roar. And then you move on to one concrete policy position. And then all of a sudden this coalition is going to start to crumble because ——
Cottle: There’s the “but” — I was waiting for the “but.”
French: —— because this exhausted majority isn’t the same thing as the moderate middle. It’s not a synonym.
The exhausted majority actually spans across the political spectrum. So you’ll have people who are pretty far on the left who are part of the exhausted majority. You’ll have people who are pretty far on the right who are the exhausted majority. But they don’t agree with each other, say on tax rates or health care policy and the nuts-and-bolts things that put together a party.
And so when the Republican Party, which is really our last successful emergent third-party movement, they had an idea. They were against the expansion of slavery. They were against polygamy, for example. They had an idea.
And so if you’re organizing a third party around a tone or a vibe, that’s a lot harder than organizing a third party around an issue or an idea. So yes, there does seem like a demand, but no, when you dive into it, it doesn’t seem very easy to fill that demand.
Cottle: I was poking fun at the Forward Party, which is the centrist party that Andrew Yang and a bunch of people got together and launched. And I think Elon Musk has in fact been talking to Yang, whose candidacy in 2020 Musk endorsed. For me, the Forward Party’s problem is exactly what you’re talking about. They are a lot about “You’re tired of polarization and we’re going to be anti-polarization,” and they’ll throw in some electoral reform to help the process.
But beyond that, it’s not entirely clear what their mobilizing, galvanizing idea would be. And so I want to be a little less ambitious in my sweeping view of parties emerging and look at the Reform Party in ’92.
Ross Perot popped up, this quirky business guy with a populist view of the American economy and how both parties were driving up the debt and threatening American prosperity. And he pulled like 19 percent of the electorate, which was basically enough to tip the scales in Bill Clinton’s favor. So it’s not that he went anywhere. And the Reform Party hung on for several years. But they did get people talking about the debt and America’s profligate spending to the degree that it became a real issue during the Clinton years. So they did something.
French: Yeah.
Cottle: Is there at least room for a third party to get enough traction that they could have impact? And it sounds like that might be what Musk is looking to do, although it’s not entirely clear in what directions.
French: I do think there is, and there is a term I believe David Shor coined called “popularism” instead of populism. So in essence — I don’t want to do violence to the definition, but — just orient yourself around popular policies that are consistent with your worldview. And are there a set of popular policies that could cement or create, if not a majority, at least a plurality in certain parts of America?
I think, yeah. I think there are a lot of popular ideas that are sidelined because the basis of the party won’t allow them to be put forth. They wield an absolute veto. So, for example, in immigration, this is almost the paradigmatic issue, where there is a kind of a broad popular policy that is stymied often by extremes.
And one of those broad popular policies, just to state it in the broadest brush, is more secure borders, relief for Dreamers and others who are contributing well in America right now. And you have that kind of give and take. And you actually can build a coalition there. But certainly on the right, the Stephen Miller side of the world is absolutely positively no to that. And so it just keeps getting cut off. It just keeps getting stymied.
And you can do this in other issues as well. But I’ll tell you, Michelle, the area where it’s the most difficult to do this is also the area where third parties often circle back to, and that is the deficit.
This was a big thing for Ross Perot, and a lot of people are against the deficit. A lot of people are very concerned. I’m one of them. But it gets really unpopular really fast, because if you want to talk about how to narrow that deficit, you’ve got to have some tax increases. Or you’re going to have to have some spending cuts that aren’t just this foreign aid budget that everyone sort of thinks is this infinite pool of money that’s just being thrown overseas when it’s really a tiny fraction ——
Cottle: Tiny percentage.
French: It’s very hard to deal with the deficit without doing unpopular things. Yet that is often the siren song that tries to get people to form a third party.
Cottle: The devil in the details again. And how do you rally people around that?
Is this a moment for a third party to rise up, or is this simply an opportunity for one of the existing major parties to rethink what they need to do and grab this group in the middle?
French: It feels, Michelle, like the easiest path here is to just have the major parties shape up a bit.
For example, there’s been a lot of commentary and a lot of discussion about the insurgent Mamdani campaign in New York. I find that much less interesting, I have to confess, than a lot of people, because I feel like it’s an artifact, not of the appeal of socialism, but of the fact that the establishment candidate was a guy who was just run out of office after a sexual harassment scandal.
And look at the drama we just went through with Joe Biden and his obvious cognitive decline and how much there was one part of the establishment that was trying to shield all of that from us and actually trying to put somebody forward to the American public who wasn’t fully up to the job. This is the kind of establishment work that’s being done in some of these parties. And then don’t get me started on the total capitulation of the Republican establishment to Donald Trump. So part of me thinks that, well, maybe the simplest, most direct route to better politics is just the party establishments of the parties that we have getting better at what they do.
But their inability to do that for a very long time is one of the reasons this third-party demand keeps bubbling up. It’s the persistent absence of the best and most obvious solution that leads us to longer-shot alternatives.
Cottle: What we seem to have now is an insider-outsider split. And in order to, as an outsider, bubble up and get people mobilized, it seems to take a particular kind of person. This is what Donald Trump started as. He started as an outsider who was not politics as usual. Now, he happened to be able to take over the Republican Party and completely consume it. But it seems you’re almost, by definition, looking at a kind of politics that’s personality or charisma-driven by these figures.
French: Totally, yeah.
Cottle: Which lends itself to demagoguery. And that makes me very nervous. What is your thought on the dangers of that?
French: I’m so glad you raised that because this is not just relevant to third parties; it’s actually relevant to the Republican Party right now, which is: Demagogues can build personal movements. They’re generally not great at building institutions or maintaining institutions.
And so one of the things I think you’re seeing right now with MAGA is you’re actually beginning to see the sneak peek of the demolition of the movement after Trump leaves. He’s assembled this coalition of cranks and outsiders, and the only thing they have in common, really, is they’ve agreed to support Donald Trump.
So you’ve got this very fractious coalition that’s united under the charismatic leader. And then when the charismatic leader is gone, what is that coalition any longer?
I know that there are a lot of people who say, well, it’s an “America first neo-isolationist or spheres of influence” kind of approach. That will be news to an awful lot of Republicans who, believe it or not, still think, “Donald Trump is more like Ronald Reagan than any Republican president in my lifetime.” Wait, what?
So there are still people who are thinking when they’re voting for Trump, they’re voting for something still normal Republicanism. Then you’ve got millions of others who are saying, “Nope, we’re blowing up everything that was normal Republicanism.”
And so I think the Republican Party is going to pretty quickly see what it’s like when it’s organized around a cult of personality and the personality is gone.
Cottle: I know that you’re not an expert on the progressive left, but the thing Republicans have redounding to their benefit is the fact that the Democratic Party doesn’t exactly have its act together as well.
Do you think that it would benefit from a few, I don’t know, revolutions? Some anti-establishment folks shaking things up the way the Republican Party has, going back to looking at the Tea Party? Do they need their own Tea Party?
French: Oh, please, no.
Cottle: Just generally speaking. I don’t mean the content of the experience.
French: Or even the vibes. You don’t even want the vibes of that experience, Michelle.
Cottle: Not the vibes. You didn’t enjoy the vibes? All those tri-cornered hats were lovely.
French: As somebody who was present at the creation of the Tea Party and used to represent Tea Party groups in court, I will tell you there was a very rapid devolution of the Tea Party.
At the very beginning, there was a lot of hope and optimism around it, that it was a movement designed to rediscover the Constitution and first principles. You could know you’re interacting with somebody in the Tea Party because they’re carrying around a pocket Constitution or they had a copy of Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom.”
Cottle: I love that.
French: It very briefly was a best seller again. But then it very quickly turned into factional infighting and ideological litmus testing. The real irony here, Michelle, is that the Tea Party pioneered this idea of cancel culture on the right, where if you didn’t agree with the whole litany of conservative positions and if you weren’t all the way down the line — this is the 2012 primary, for example — then you were out. You were a squish.
And this is where Mitt Romney famously said, “I’m severely conservative.” I think he meant to say “seriously conservative,” but said, “I’m severely” because you had this ideological litmus test with no variation. And there were people coming in saying, “Hey, maybe we need to be more appealing to the working class.” And they would say no, definitely not.
And then along comes Donald Trump. And he sort of breaks the paradigm because he’s completely outside of the box from the Tea Party on policy, but he’s exactly where the Tea Party is on pugilism. So he had that temperamental match with the Tea Party. And I would just say when you build a movement centered around populist pugilism within your coalition, get ready. You’re not going to be able to control that thing.
If you build a movement around anger and resentment, even if it has a policy frame to begin with, after a while, the policy will go away, and you’re just left with the anger and resentment, and here we are as the United States of America.
Cottle: Historically third-party candidates have mostly been spoilers. I’m thinking Ralph Nader in 2000.
That’s at the presidential level. But looking farther along, do we think there’s a case where they could be something other than spoilers on a national level? Is it just impossible?
French: It’s definitely not. Let’s go back to Ross Perot. A lot of people forget this, but that campaign was so wild because there was a point at which Bill Clinton was in third.
Ross Perot was leading in the polls. H.W. Bush was second. Bill Clinton was third. If you have heard and read a lot of gloom-and-doom commentary about the Democratic Party after 2024, some of the gloom-and-doom commentary when Bill Clinton was in third place in the polls after the Democrats had already lost three consecutive landslide presidential elections — a lot of people were writing the obituary of the Democratic Party at the presidential level. And then Ross Perot drops out.
Why? One reason is he thought Republican operatives were going to ruin his daughter’s wedding. And I’m not making this up.
Cottle: Valid.
French: Sure. So we think politics are crazy now. There’s been a lot of crazy times.
So he drops out, he comes back in. I guess the wedding was fine. I don’t know. He comes back in after dropping out, and he still got 19 percent of the vote. And at that point, his reputation had devolved to the point that he was seen as so mercurial and crazy that he played the song “Crazy” at his election night celebration.
Cottle: Props for self-awareness.
French: I don’t know if you remember all of this.
Cottle: No, I don’t remember all of this.
French: You think about that — a guy is leading, drops out, comes back, still gets 19 percent. So with a major charismatic national figure, is it possible? I would say yeah.
Cottle: So what advice as a former almost third-party candidate would you give to Elon Musk right now?
French: I would say my first piece of advice would be to hand the reins over to somebody else.
Cottle: That is valid advice.
French: But beyond that, I would say: Start small. Be smart and target a race, or two or three — a Senate race or two or three. Be strategic. Be disciplined. Don’t overpromise. And definitely don’t underdeliver.
Cottle: That’s so not his wheelhouse.
French: Oh, I know. But I do think targeting the right races and even going down to the House level, targeting the right races in the right places is going to be very important.
Because I do not see a national figure in our extremely divided and polarized time that is so unifying and so universally respected that they could sweep in. I mean, the only person I can think of who everyone loves in America is Dolly Parton.
Cottle: Oh, yes!
French: And Dolly, we need you on the cultural wall. We don’t need you in politics. But there are very few people in America who have that kind of universal appeal. I mean, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, Dolly Parton, there are some celebrities. But I guarantee you the instant that they open their mouth and start talking actual policy, a lot of that shine would start to come off.
Cottle: Oh, yeah, Dolly Parton’s too smart for that.
French: Yeah. Way too smart.
I don’t know, Michelle. I’m not optimistic, but over the long haul, supply tends to meet demand. And there is demand for alternatives in American politics.
Cottle: Well, we’re going to cling to that and we’re going to leave it there for now. Although I feel like you need to come back so that we can talk about maybe soft-launching your 2028 campaign. We could talk to Dolly as an adviser if you like.
French: How we reach my constituency of dozens will be like, what? How? What’s the marketing campaign to reach those dozens of people? That’ll be topic No 1.
Cottle: We’re going to get you hooked up.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Engineering by Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Jan Kobal and Jonah M. Kessel. Video editing by Steph Khoury. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
The post Elon Musk’s Revenge Campaign appeared first on New York Times.
