Most Americans, at least according to Gallup, want a third party that ends our de facto two-party system. I am not of them, so I write with trepidation: Elon Musk’s America Party could happen and matter.
The hot take industry is hot with speculation on whether Musk could build a sustainable party. Most of the punditocracy presume he cannot, noting the complexity of state ballot access laws, the history of third-party failures, the lack of ideological cohesion among independents, and Musk’s reputation for erratic behavior and poor follow-through.
Betting the America Party won’t go anywhere is safer, but Republicans and Democrats shouldn’t be sanguine. Both parties suffer from chronically weak favorability, leaving a market of voters open for a political entrepreneur to tap.
The notion that the two-party system is an impenetrable fortress was undercut in the 1990s. Independent billionaire Ross Perot scored 19 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 presidential campaign, the largest showing of a third-party candidate in the 20th Century. He leveraged that support into creating the Reform Party, and the party’s nominee for Governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, won the 1998 election.
How did the Reform Party go as far as it did?
The weak, early 1990s economy and President George H. W. Bush’s infamous broken campaign promise to reject all tax increases soured many voters on Republicans. The Democratic brand remained bruised from the high inflation during the Jimmy Carter presidency of the late 1970s, and the caricatures of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis as tax-and-spend liberals didn’t help matters. Rising federal government debt levels—primarily incurred under Ronald Reagan, when the debt-to-Gross Domestic Product ratio grew by nearly 60 percent—stirred panic and raised doubts among voters about either party’s capacity to balance the budget.
Democratic nominee Bill Clinton would eventually win the 1992 election, but he emerged from the primaries bloodied by charges of impropriety and dishonesty. Enough Democratic voters were alienated to buoy the Perot campaign and keep Clinton’s popular vote share well below 50 percent.
And then there’s Perot himself. As a self-made billionaire, he had a veneer of competence. And as a reliable dispenser of folksy aphorisms, he could entertain and oversimplify the complexities of governance. But he also appealed to some serious-minded voters with a detailed deficit reduction plan premised on “shared sacrifice,” melding tax increases and spending cuts, which he sold with 30-minute TV infomercials festooned with old-fashioned pie charts that look like a graduate-level seminar compared to much of today’s campaigning
Why did the Reform Party ultimately fail?
Perot was still pretty loopy. He abruptly quit the race in July 1992 despite leading in some polls, only to return in October, justifying his suspension with a baseless accusation that Republican operatives, at the behest of President Bush, were going to disrupt his daughter’s summer wedding. Had he not seemed a taco short of a combination plate, he might have broken 20 percent.
After his relatively impressive vote haul as a solo act, he created the Reform Party. But his ego got in the way four years later. He boxed out a competitor with a better political resume, former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, for the 1996 nomination, which lent the impression that the party was little more than a cult of personality back when that was considered a liability. His complaints about free trade during an economic boom had less appeal than a focus on debt during a recession. He only got eight percent of the vote in 1996 still better than many third-party presidential bids like John Anderson in 1980 or Henry Wallace in 1948, but a steep decline from 1992. Ventura’s 1998 gubernatorial victory broadened the party, but things fell apart in 2000.
Perot seemingly had tired of the project, having done little to build up downballot candidates. He declined to run for president in 2000, and the far-right former Republican Pat Buchanan moved to take over the party. A relatively moderate businessman named Donald Trump briefly pursued the Reform Party nomination, calling Buchanan a “Hitler lover” who courted the “really staunch-right wacko vote.” (You can’t make this stuff up.) But when party officials sided with Buchanan, Ventura was livid and quit the party. Trump followed suit and ditched his campaign. Buchanan drove the party into the ground.
What does that history tell us about Musk’s prospects?
First, as an immigrant, Musk can’t run for president. So, while he is an egomaniacal billionaire like Perot, Musk needs proxies. He has no choice but to recruit an army of candidates, or there is no party. (It’s hard to imagine Musk being open to being a U.S. Senator, sitting through Commerce Committee hearings.)
Plus, Musk has more money than Perot ever did—plenty to fund the 50-state obstacle course of ballot access, so long as he has the attention span to care about details.
Like Perot, Musk is obsessed with debt, which hasn’t been a motivating political issue in a long time. But maybe that time is now.
The newly signed budget reconciliation bill, larded with tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy, is overflowing with red ink despite deep cuts to health insurance and food aid. Federal debt, in and of itself, isn’t bad, especially when it is used to support smart investments, such as education and infrastructure. It’s less useful when covering the cost of tax cuts for millionaires. And there are always limits, even if there is no expert consensus on how much debt is too much.
If we experience an economic recession—hardly implausible with Trump destabilizing international trade—high debt levels may hinder the Federal Reserve’s ability to mitigate the impact with lower interest rates. As Josh Barro put it in his Very Serious newsletter: “Wildly increasing the budget deficit is an inflationary policy that restricts the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. This law is going to make it more expensive to get a mortgage and harder to finance business investment, and it’s going to raise consumer prices.”
If high debt gets blamed for economic disruption in the near future, Musk would have an opportunity to craft a Perot-esque platform that borrows seemingly common-sensical ideas from both parties. (Sure, he could simply target voters on the far right, but that would be politically foolish. Such a party is likely to be limited to a spoiler role, splitting Republicans and helping Democrats, which is presumably not his objective.)
Musk needs two things Perot didn’t have: an army of competitive downballot candidates, and the capacity to be consistently sane in public. Evidence of the latter would help recruit the former.
(I grant that Trump’s electoral success argues against the necessity of traditional qualifications and mental stability to win elections. But the woes of candidates such as Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Mark Robinson, Herschel Walker, and Doug Mastriano suggest the Trump model does not travel well.)
Since Musk’s penchant for extremism, conspiracies, and bigotry surpasses Perot’s—and since the folksy Texan could be genuinely funny and charming while Musk only thinks he is—you have good reason to believe Musk will eventually faceplant.
But the major parties should not bet on Musk—no longer hitched to the Trump train—failing to raise his game. They should work harder to deny Musk access to a wide swath of dissatisfied voters by providing more voter satisfaction.
As with most advice, that’s easier said than done. Republicans will be saddled with the Trump record, for which the budget reconciliation bill looms very large, for the foreseeable future. Democrats are perennially struggling with how to craft a policy agenda that’s both practical and potent. And while in opposition, Democrats wonder if they should go light on details to keep the focus on the policy debacles perpetrated by Republicans?
History suggests that opposition parties can get away with a minimal agenda when the governing party shoulders an unpopular record. But the prospect of a functional third party would complicate that political calculation and pressure Democrats to show their policy cards and address any issues Musk can elevate.
Until Musk takes more concrete steps toward building a party infrastructure, Democrats probably won’t put a third-party threat high on their list of concerns. But they should keep a wary eye on his activities, possibly backing third-party candidates in key congressional races next year. A bona fide third party—without ranked choice voting up and down the ballot—would destabilize the American political system, increasing opportunities for minority rule or dysfunctional, tenuous governing coalitions, which is why I’m hesitant to bust up the so-called duopoly for all of its imperfections.
While Musk has been operating as a force for the far right, Democrats should not assume his estrangement from Trump would only hurt Republicans. Musk is a political shapeshifter and could poach disaffected Democrats. The best way to prevent that is to limit the number of disaffected Democrats.
