Elon Musk wants to start a new political party.
Good luck with that, pal.
I will hardly be the first to point out the difficulties in that. While we’ve occasionally had third parties pop up around a galvanizing figure — Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party in 1912, George Wallace and the American Independent Party in 1968, Ross Perot and the Reform Party in 1992 and 1996 — none have lasted in any serious form.
The last third party to have any staying power has been the Libertarian Party, but staying power should not be confused with electoral success. Most years the party’s presidential candidate hasn’t even cracked 1% of the popular vote.
It’s been 171 years since we saw the founding of a third party that did become a serious contender — the Republican Party — and its success shows one of the main obstacles that Musk faces. The Republican Party wasn’t founded as a top-down party but as a bottom-up party created to address an animating issue that neither of the major parties at the time was addressing in a coherent way: slavery. There was a very active abolitionist movement that did not feel represented by either the Democrats or the Whigs.
It was absolutely clear what that newly formed Republican Party in 1854 stood for; it is quite unclear what Musk’s proposed America Party stands for. “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” Musk asks on his X social media platform. Musk has a very generous definition of what constitutes the middle, and his recent role as government chainsawer-in-chief suggests he’s not exactly in the middle, either. He’s right that there’s a lot of disenchantment with both major parties, but the problem with creating a moderate party is three-fold:
First, moderates are moderates for a reason; they tend to be moderate in tone, as well, and not given to rash things like creating a new party.
Second, there’s the continental divide problem, as I call it. The political middle is not a myth; it’s quite real, but it’s also like the Rocky Mountains, or the Appalachians, for that matter. Just as there are mountain peaks that separate the land into two different water basins — some water flows east, some west — the same thing happens in politics. Take abortion and guns. Those are the two issues that tend to automatically divide voters into one side or another. Some people may be center-left or center-right, but they are still on the left or right, and those two issues help divide who is on which side. You may not care about those issues, but there are plenty of people who do, and who care passionately. It’s hard to envision a centrist party that has some on both sides of those issues; just look at how Democrats and Republicans have essentially purged themselves of members who are at odds with party doctrine on abortion.
Third, there’s the voter psychology problem. A third party is going to take votes out of somebody’s hide, but whose? Let’s envision a mythical contest between candidates Flugelhorn and Hornblower. Along comes a third-party candidate, Smith. Both existing parties have enough core supporters that it’s hard for Smith to poll ahead of either Flugelhorn or Hornblower. Even if Smith does well, Smith is probably pulling more votes from one side or another — let’s say from Hornblower. At that point, Smith is tilting the race to Flugelhorn — and some of those voters who have defected from Hornblower to Smith may get so alarmed that they drift back to Hornblower. Maybe they’d really prefer Smith, but they really hate the thought of Flugelhorn winning, so they’re willing to “settle” for Hornblower just to keep Flugelhorn out. That’s why third-party candidates might poll well initially but eventually fade as the election approaches — that antipathy toward Flugelhorn (or whoever might be that year’s Flugelhorn) is simply too great.
Musk is not wrong when he says the way to pull this off is to concentrate on just a handful of swing seats — two or three in the Senate, eight to 10 in the House. If he were able to pull that off, his new party would have considerable leverage. Just look at how Republicans recently had to cater to a relative handful of members to get their One Big Beautiful Bill passed (to get the vote of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the bill is larded with benefits for her state), or how Democrats had to agree to the demands of then-West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin to get their Inflation Reduction Act passed. That’s why we have the Mountain Valley Pipeline today; that was part of the price for Manchin’s vote. (Irony for Democrats: They got a few years for pro-renewable energy policies but had to agree to a permanent natural gas pipeline.)
Virginia has two districts that could potentially qualify for Musk’s attention: Republican Jen Kiggans won the 2nd District in Hampton Roads last time with just 50.74% of the vote; Democrat Eugene Vindman won the 7th District between Richmond and Northern Virginia with 51.18% of the vote. Both those will be heavily contested in next year’s midterms.
Of those two districts, the 2nd makes the most sense for Musk’s America Party. It’s currently a Republican seat, while the 7th is a Democratic one. Reducing the size of the current Democratic minority doesn’t buy Musk any leverage, but helping to reduce or even prevent a Republican majority would (assuming the result isn’t a Democratic majority). Targeting the 7th only makes sense if Musk thinks Democrats will win the 2026 midterms and he needs to reduce their anticipated majority. Ultimately, what he needs is a situation where there is no majority party and a handful of seats in the hands of America Party members hold the balance of power.
However, Musk faces another challenge I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere: candidate quality. The smaller the electorate, the more likely voters are to have some sense of who the candidate is. More to the point, is this potential America Party candidate someone respected in the community or is this just some dweeb who’s been living in his mom’s basement? Many of the early Republicans were former Whig officeholders — including Abraham Lincoln, who had been a Whig member of Congress — so the party quickly gained stature.
In many cases, voters have had third-party choices — and showed little interest. In three of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts, there were three candidates on the ballot last year (and four candidates in the 8th District). The strongest of those, David Kennedy in the 8th District in Northern Virginia, polled just 2.59% of the vote in the state’s most Democratic district. How much better would any of those candidates have done if they had some of Musk’s billions? That’s hard to say, but we’ve seen many times that money doesn’t necessarily make the difference in politics.
The reality is that third-party candidates rarely rise above 1% or 2% of the vote when there are both Democrats and Republicans on the ballot; the main exceptions in Virginia have been under unusual circumstances. In 1994, former Republican Attorney General Marshall Coleman ran as an alternative to both Republican Oliver North and Democratic incumbent Charles Robb. Even with support from then-Sen. John Warner and former first lady Nancy Reagan, Coleman still managed just 11.4%. Before that, we have to go back to the chaos of a realigning Virginia in the early 1970s to find three-way races where independents mounted serious campaigns (and won). In those cases, Sen. Harry Byrd Jr. was an incumbent senator (1970) and Henry Howell (1971, in a special election for lieutenant governor) was a statewide figure from a previous gubernatorial campaign. Politics are always in flux, but they’re not as in flux today as they were then when the two major parties were still evolving to take their present shapes.
If Musk really wanted to disrupt the political process, he’d take another route — he’d push for ranked choice voting.
Under ranked choice voting, voters don’t just vote for a single candidate, they indicate who their second (or third or fourth or whatever) choices are. If no candidate wins a majority, the last-place candidate’s second-choice votes are reallocated to the others until someone does get a majority. (There are many variations of how this works, but this is a common one.)
The supposed advantages of this: No one’s votes are “wasted” on third-party candidates, and the system might encourage candidates to appeal to those third-party voters to get their second-choice votes.
Mind you, I’m not advocating for ranked choice voting — I have very mixed feelings about it. I like the prospect that it might encourage moderation; I worry that voters would find it confusing or anti-democratic. Of course, there are many partisans on both sides who aren’t in favor of moderation at all; they want the pure strain of liberalism or conservatism and are quite fine with a plurality winner if that’s the only way to get the genuine article. However, this isn’t about how I feel; I’m just pointing out that ranked choice voting is an option.
Fair Vote, an organization pushing ranked choice voting, says that two states, three counties and 47 cities now use ranked choice voting. Two of those are in Virginia: Arlington County and Charlottesville. Virginia law only allows ranked choice voting in local elections, and then only if the locality wants it, so it’s not an option in congressional races. However, laws can be changed.
What would happen if Virginia changed its election laws to allow ranked choice voting in congressional elections? Ultimately we have no idea, of course, but my guess is that it would make third parties more viable, particularly in those closely contested 2nd and 7th districts.
I would not rush down to the casinos in Bristol, Danville and Portsmouth to wager on this happening. It’s one thing for the General Assembly to allow this in local elections — whose impacts don’t extend beyond the city limits or the county line — but quite another in congressional elections. The impacts there would be potentially national. I suspect if Virginia flirted with extending ranked choice voting to other elections, the national parties would bring much pressure to bear on their state counterparts in Virginia to make sure ranked choice voting didn’t happen: Republicans would worry that this would endanger their congressional majority; Democrats would worry that it would complicate their goal to win back their own majorities.
It will be difficult for Musk to find candidates who could win a plurality against candidates from two long-established parties. Ranked choice voting would make that prospect easier. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, but if anyone really wanted to break America’s political duopoly, that’s one way to do it.
Want more politics? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter: