Republicans are rightly worried about Elon Musk’s threat to form a third party, but for all his considerable talents, the billionaire’s latest political project faces numerous obstacles before it can become a real threat to the status quo.
The first is the lack of a candidate. When Musk made his first foray into national politics, President Donald Trump solved that problem. Whatever the merits of Musk’s contribution to the Trump 2024 ground game, we have yet to see it replicated down-ballot. Trump was previously elected president in 2016 and mounted a competitive reelection bid in 2020 under historically adverse conditions. Musk’s forays into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race were unsuccessful and may even have backfired.
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The last billionaire to seriously attempt what Musk is undertaking, Ross Perot, was able to solve that problem for himself. The draft-Perot movement of 1991 was to some extent astroturfed. Perot, who, like Musk, was animated by deficit reduction despite building a significant part of his fortune from government contracts, ran as an independent in 1992 before trying to start the Reform Party.
Musk is constitutionally ineligible to run for president, unlike Perot, because he isn’t a natural-born citizen; Trump has previously been known to raise this constitutional objection under more dubious circumstances. Nor is Musk personally all that popular. In a Decision Desk polling average, Musk is viewed favorably by 35.4% compared to 55.8%, which is worse than Trump or Vice President JD Vance’s numbers, suggesting some Republican defections.
Musk’s poll numbers among Democrats have tanked since his close association with Trump. CNN data analyst Harry Enten has found that only 4% of voters like Musk but not the sitting president.
The tech billionaire could try to turn these liabilities into assets. One thing that has held back past semi-successful third parties is that they become too associated with one big personality.
Perot wasn’t even originally going to be the Reform Party’s nominee in 1996. He lured former Gov. Richard Lamm (D-CO) into the fledgling party’s presidential nomination race and then trounced him at the convention. Perot perennially feuded with the Reform Party’s biggest electoral success story, then-Gov. Jesse Ventura, and then endorsed against its next presidential nominee, the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, in 2000.
The Reform Party never really recovered and had minimal post-Perot effect. Perhaps having a leader who cannot run for president, with a possible emphasis on state and local races that would theoretically be easier to win, would put Musk’s America Party in a more favorable position.
Another challenge would be determining the America Party’s target audience. Musk appears to be motivated by a combination of fiscal austerity and, as Tesla’s owner, a robust support for the electric vehicle industry. The overlap between these two groups is minimal. Is Musk trying to form a genuinely centrist political party? If so, is a combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism the best way to do that, as opposed to the other way around? Does Musk want to start a party to the right of the existing GOP, or at least a political movement that is more libertarian? Does he want to promote the industries in which he is heavily invested? He has yet to really pick a lane.
A poll by Echelon Insights, a Republican firm, asked respondents which party they would support if the United States were a multiparty parliamentary democracy. The Right was closely divided between nationalists at 24% and conservatives at 20%. On the Left, a clear plurality of 31% picked a labor party, 13% chose a more centrist “Acela” one, and 6% were green.
Musk could presumably draw from all of those camps, except perhaps labor. Ex-Democrat Andrew Yang has already offered to help. However, it is unclear whether Musk or his party would be the logical first choice of any of these factions or whether Musk’s vision would be more competitive nationally than Trump’s. Most importantly, the U.S. is not a multiparty parliamentary democracy and is just beginning to experiment with ranked choice voting.
While Musk was able to pour millions of dollars into pro-Trump super PACs last year, he would not legally be able to bankroll a political party. Third parties generally have to spend a great deal of money to secure ballot access before focusing on getting their candidates elected.
The recent experience of Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) suggests that taking over a major political party is the more promising path. Despite the pushback against their heterodoxy on the “big, beautiful bill,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) possess far more political power and have achieved electoral success as Republicans than as members of the Libertarian Party. Musk was briefly an example of this as a member of the Trump administration.
DESANTIS WARNS MUSK THAT FORMATION OF AMERICAN PARTY COULD BACKFIRE
If the America Party is purely a Musk revenge tour, it might not need to win many votes in close elections to have an effect. Musk’s focus on the Jeffrey Epstein files, for instance, may suggest that he targets the low-propensity voters he and conservative activist Charlie Kirk mobilized in 2024. These voters are already less likely to turn out in the midterm elections and haven’t always supported down-ballot Republicans without Trump’s coattails.
But many questions would need to be answered before Musk’s new venture can get off the ground. As one wag put it, building rockets might be easier.