Obligatory Seriousness about the America Party

Musk's Folly, Ross Perot 2.0, or the new Republicans?

I’m going to start by admitting I am nowhere as smart as Elon Musk and certainly not as good at business. On the other hand, I can’t understand where he’s coming from with this third party effort. Basing a party on a quixotic combination of Massie/Paul fiscal hawkishness, 2A squishiness, unlimited H-1B visas, and a fondness for solar energy over fossil fuels and nuclear power seems about as practical as saddling up one’s Cybertruck and taking a lance to the nearest wind turbines. Still, it’s possible that his decision to form a third party instead of working to knock off RINOs in the primaries is based on information I don’t have or am not seeing in the same way he does.

The problems with third parties are well known, dating back to 1912 and Teddy Rossevelt’s doomed Bull Moose effort to keep Taft and Wilson out of the White House, which resulted in Wilson defeating TR by a wide margin. More recently, Ross Perot’s candidacy for President in 1992 didn’t succeed in carrying any states, but he drained enough votes from Bush the Elder to put Bill Clinton into the White House.
I’d bring up Jesse Ventura’s experience in Minnesota, where the voters wanted a Reform governor but got a tool of the DFL, but that would be coals to Newcastle.

On the other hand, Musk is aiming to affect the 2026 congressional midterm elections, not the 2028 Presidential race (yet). He presents the America Party as a moderate alternative to “extreme” Democrat and Republican party candidates who are doing nothing about the Federal budget; he has frequently expressed frustration that the (narrowly) Republican Congress didn’t enact the DOGE spending cuts into law as part of the BBB. Perhaps he thinks he can elect enough America Party representatives to force the Republican caucus further toward the fiscal conservative right, but I think he’s about to get a brutal, expensive lesson in how third-party politics work (or don’t) in this country. It’s going to be hard to find good candidates who don’t already belong to the Democrats or Republicans, hard to get them on the ballot, and harder still to convince the voters that America Party candidates are worth voting for at a time when Republicans have kept their income taxes low, successfully deported huge quantities of illegals (with consequent knock-on effects for crime and the economy), and taken steps to shrink government by eliminating USAID and the Education Department. He’s also not going to have Donald Trump out there stumping for his candidates; rather Trump will (more in sorrow than in anger) be opposing those candidates and supporting Republicans.

“I could be wrong, but I could be right “ - Public Image Limited
With a year and a half to go before the 2026 elections, I guess we’ll see how it all shakes out. But I don’t see this ending the way Elon thinks it will.

Hey, if you like what I’m doing, throw me some coffee money. I don’t do this regularly enough to justify offering paid subscriptions, but if you want to throw a couple of bucks my way to finance the occasional iced coffee at Dunkin’ when I’m in Vegas, it wouldn’t go amiss.