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.