It wasn’t too long ago when Elon Musk vowed to launch a new “America Party” as a vehicle for voters alienated from the two major parties. Yet Musk is already backing away from the project. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, the world’s richest man has told allies that he wants to refocus on his businesses amid fears that he is alienating powerful Republicans, since his new party could theoretically siphon votes from them.
It was always hard to tell how serious Musk was about this venture. Once a Democratic-friendly billionaire, he fell into Donald Trump’s orbit after buying Twitter (renamed X) and became, by 2024, a prolific donor to the GOP and the Trump campaign. As a reward, Trump put him in charge of the ludicrously named DOGE on a Musk pledge to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of annual outlays. DOGE made a mess of the federal bureaucracy (while only delivering a relative pittance in cuts) and proved unpopular.
The relationship between Musk and Trump, with their titanic egos, was never built to last — the budget cuts were never all that compelling to Trump — and they broke up when it became clear that the Tesla boss was a political drag on the administration. For all the chatter about how they clashed over tax credits, the death blow for Musk was probably a hotly contested election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Musk spent heavily to boost the Republican nominee and even campaigned for him personally; the Democratic nominee handily won anyway. For Trump, this was an embarrassment.
The third-party bid, then, was probably Musk’s lame attempt to console himself. Yet the brief life of the America Party — notwithstanding its founder’s willingness to invest huge sums in the project — sheds light on why third-party politics are such a challenge in the United States.
The Democrats and Republicans maintain the longest-lasting party duopoly in the world. Of the two, the Democrats are the older party, founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to represent Southern and Western farmers, the emerging proletariat in the North, and grasping entrepreneurs everywhere who felt shut out by the Eastern establishment. The Republicans, meanwhile, were founded in the 1850s as a vehicle for Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers, and everyone else opposed to slavery. Since then, no sustainable third party has taken root. Many tried, to be sure, but they either dissipated or were absorbed into one of the two major parties.
Much of this is structural. In a first-past-the-post presidential system that rewards, in every way, zero-sum politics, there will always be two dominant factions. The Electoral College renders third-party efforts mostly futile. In the 1992 presidential election, billionaire Ross Perot garnered nearly 20% of the national vote, a significant sum, against Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In a proportional parliamentary system, he’d have been entitled to that share of the vote in parliament; instead, he won zilch, because he couldn’t carry a single state and was therefore awarded no electoral votes.
Due to ballot-access laws that vary from state to state, it can be very hard for third parties to maintain a long-term presence in either local or national elections. Take the Green Party, a small Leftist party best remembered as a vehicle for Ralph Nader’s presidential runs (and blamed for spoiling Al Gore’s chances in the 2000 election). In New York today, the Green Party no longer has a ballot line. Indeed, in 2024, no third-party candidates for president appeared on the ballot in New York — a first in the modern era. Voters could only choose between Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.
The two major parties in America are remarkably malleable and adaptable, able to survive even when they serve, within their own ranks, diametrically opposed regional and class interests. In Britain, the Conservative Party — the world’s oldest, if not the oldest continuous, party — is now threatened with extinction by Nigel Farage’s Reform movement, which is cutting deeply into the Tories’ base.
If Britain’s intra-Right contest took place under US rules and conditions, the Tories would almost certainly swallow or co-opt Reform. That’s in essence what happened with Trump: he ran a populist, outsider campaign against the GOP establishment in 2016 and, instead of destroying the party, he simply remade it in his own image. The keepers of the older GOP consensus — foreign-policy hawkism, pro-business austerity — simply learned to push their agenda using Trumpian rhetoric (and often succeeded because Trump’s populism was skin-deep).
On the Left, a similar dynamic played out with Bernie Sanders, except Sanders could never beat the Democratic establishment in the same fashion. Rather than campaign as a Green or a socialist, Sanders — who doesn’t identify as a Democrat but caucuses with the party in the Senate — ran in the 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. He won many states and millions of votes, and was able to emerge as a significant political leader after the election.
In the wake of this, the Democratic Socialists of America saw a huge boost in membership and became a budding political force in American politics. Unlike the Socialist Party of the 20th century, DSA doesn’t field candidates on its own ballot line. Instead, the DSA simply endorses Democrats who call themselves socialists and are willing to fight for their policies. In New York, this is how Zohran Mamdani won. He ran as a Democrat and beat back the Democratic establishment. Like Trump, perhaps, he’ll be able to reshape the party — at the local level, at least (full disclosure: Mamdani managed my own unsuccessful bid for the New York state Senate in 2018).
What Musk, as deranged as he often is, did get right is that Americans are hungry for other options. Both parties are resented (centrist Democrats especially), and the nation isn’t so much polarized as negatively polarized, with voters defining themselves as much by the party they revile as the one they support. It’s rarer and rarer to hear an American declare they’re proudly a Democrat or Republican. The old political machines have withered. Americans have a weaker relationship with the Democratic and GOP apparatuses than they ever did before.
To build a viable alternative, millions of dollars would be needed to secure ballot access and advertise the virtues of the new party to voters who are still used to only voting Republican or Democratic. And the party, in some sense, would have to be distinct enough to avoid charges that it’s simply siphoning ballots from the Democrats or the GOP in America’s zero-sum system. This was Musk’s fear — that he would end up a spoiler, abetting Democrats.
What Musk would probably have never gotten right is the policy platform of the America Party. Musk doesn’t understand the American electorate very well. DOGE, his great obsession, backfired, as even rank-and-file Republican voters rebelled against the idea of government programs they rely on facing devastating cuts. At heart, he is a globalist capitalist, and even his nativism is limited by his desire for high-skilled foreign workers to join his companies.
A viable third-party movement in America would have to unite voters who feel underserved by the Democrats and Republicans. What kind of voter isn’t truly seen or served by either party? The answer is a socially moderate or conservative economic populist, a voter with a Bernie Sanders view of the economy who is more traditionalist on cultural issues and skeptical of immigration.
Trump’s GOP, on immigration, has plainly overreached. Americans wanted him to get control of the border, and on that count, he succeeded. But terrorizing ordinary migrants, dispatching hairdressers to a Salvadoran gulag for life, and removing student green cards over pro-Palestine op-eds was heinous. Trump’s approval rating is falling, including on immigration, and Americans now take a warmer view of immigration.
A third party, in this scenario, would advocate for a stricter border but a reasonable path to legal status for law-abiding migrants — the compromise once supported by Republicans like Marco Rubio. The dynamism of the United States derives from its inherent multiculturalism, its ability, again and again, to assimilate newcomers. If there’s a single politician who might embody what this theoretical third party movement would look like, it’s Dan Osborn, the former labor organizer running for the Senate again in Nebraska. Osborn is campaigning as an independent against the Republican incumbent, shunning both parties. He’s deeply critical of corporate power, like Sanders, and sympathetic to rural gun owners, like a Republican. He advocates for a “secure” border. And he’s got a shot at winning.
Osborn, though, isn’t helming any political party. There might be a universe in which a saner version of Musk attempts to use his cash to seed more Osborn-like candidates across America, building a movement around the America Party. That universe, though, hasn’t yet arrived, and maybe never will. Team Red and Team Blue are here to stay.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Ross Barkan
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
