Can Elon's America Party succeed where others have failed?

Probably not. Unless Musk is truly thinking big.

ChatGPT’s attempt to recreate the Jeb! meme, but with Elon.

This is my last week of summer camp, a.k.a. the World Series of Poker¹, and I was hoping to kick it off with a slightly delayed lightning round edition of SBSQ. But the inevitable happened and I went 2,000+ words on the first response, blowing up both my calendar² and the spirit of the lightning round. So let’s run this as a standalone post; the “real” SBSQ will come later this week. It was, nevertheless, inspired by a reader question from John:

How should Elon go about organizing the America Party if his goal is to help create a more moderate government? I would guess it is something like running moderate candidates to primary challenge safe extreme incumbents, running spoiler hard right candidates in swing districts where a far right republican faces a moderate dem challenge and hard left spoiler in swing district with moderate republican vs far left dem? Or maybe just endorsing "moderate" candidates across the board and dumping money in their races? Has this been tried before? Does data on congressional races provide a roadmap?

So, the America Party is actually a thing now — maybe? On Sunday, an FEC filing appeared for the America Party, listing Vaibhav Taneja, the CFO of Tesla, as the party’s Treasurer and Custodian of Records. But as of press time for today’s newsletter, Musk hasn’t confirmed the filing, and some reports are uncertain whether this is authentic or someone is just trolling. I’m going to proceed on the premise that either this is real or Musk will follow through soon, though that isn’t a safe assumption with anything involving Musk.

If it’s real, I lean slightly toward the view that this is a bigger deal than the pundit class might want to acknowledge. Their reasons for skepticism are obvious and probably correct, but if there’s a 5 percent chance this could be a huge deal and a 25 percent chance it could be a moderately big one, that’s still at least worth some Silver Bulletin coverage.

To a first approximation, I’m doubtful that political writers — and I very much do not exempt myself from this — are any good at predicting macro political trends. The rise of Trump wasn’t particularly well-predicted; to take a more recent example, neither was the rise of Zohran Mamdani. Instead, there’s a lot of fighting the last war and extrapolating out the most recent trend into the indefinite future. After Obama’s reelection in 2012, the conventional wisdom was that the GOP needed to moderate on immigration; instead, Trump succeeded on an anti-immigrant platform. After 2024, there were assumptions about a conservative vibe shift that already look imperiled in various ways.

So why be skeptical about third parties? Well, this is one area where the pundit class has a pristine record: there’s a long history of third parties failing in the United States. While there have been various U.S. Senators who ran as independents or on vehicles created especially for them, like Connecticut for (Joe) Lieberman, the last Senator elected³ as part of a longstanding third party was in 1970, when James L. Buckley won election to the Senate from New York as a member of the Conservative Party. And the Conservative Party is local to the Empire State; before that, you have to go back to Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who was elected on the Progressive Party ticket in 1940.

Meanwhile, the last time a third party won any states in the Electoral College was George Wallace as part of the (similarly named) American Independent Party in 1968. Change happens, but it’s generally within the two-party system. Trump’s rise to power was in some ways a hostile takeover of the GOP, including his repudiation of John McCain and other recent Republican nominees.

And then there’s the Musk factor. His political instincts have proven far from canny, as we’ve covered extensively at Silver Bulletin. He is not a popular figure, and he’s only become more unpopular after washing out of the White House. So while Musk potentially brings a big bag of money, he also brings a lot of baggage.

Voters routinely express incredible frustration with the major parties, but the number of Americans who affiliate with one of them is only down slightly. In 1994, the height of the Ross Perot Era, 71 percent of Americans listed their party affiliation as Republican or Democrat when first asked, and most of the rest “leaned” toward one of the major parties when probed further. As of 2023, that fraction is down, but only to 65 percent. It’s hard for independents to win elections when they start out with only about one-third of the vote, especially when many of those ostensible supporters are IINOs: Independents In Name Only.

If you’re looking for bright spots for third parties, though, here’s one. Younger voters are considerably more likely to be disengaged from the major parties, and particularly young men, who have become a swing demographic as we covered in the last SBSQ. These men might be disillusioned by a Democratic Party that doesn’t seem to have their interests in mind and who have had their fill of wokeness, but also aren’t exactly traditional economic or social conservatives.

A lot of pundits, especially on the left, think that American democracy is on the verge of collapse, or that the world is about to enter a period of rapid change driven by AI and other factors. Such profound technological change often begets political change: the Industrial Revolution catalyzed, at least in part, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. There’s a certain myopia in assuming that if the world is on the brink of such a period, the kludgy old two-party system, tended to by back-to-back presidents who entered their terms at 78 years old, will nevertheless survive mostly intact.

A third party might be viable, but not necessarily the America Party

But … what would an America Party platform look like? Well, Elon was piqued by The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, describing it as wasteful. Deficits are indeed a valid concern in an era of higher interest rates, but they are traditionally one for older voters living on fixed incomes on their retirement savings. Perhaps there’s a bit of daylight with some clever marketing — some young men are pretty into crypto as a supposed inflation hedge, for instance, and interest rates affect the cost of buying a home. But it’s a bit of an esoteric concern, at least up until the point that the U.S. actually faces a fiscal crisis.

If Elon is just formulating the America Party out of spite, as some former friends suggest he is, mostly to challenge Trump from a libertarian-ish direction, that could still be problematic for Trump and Republicans. In 2024, four U.S. Senate races and 11 U.S. House seats were decided by two percentage points or less. So an America Party that got just 2 percent of the vote in competitive districts, mostly coming from Republicans, might qualify as an embarrassment for Elon, but could nevertheless hurt the GOP in what is already likely to be a difficult midterm for the party.

But let me take John’s question more at face value. What if the America Party actually did want to aim at moderate or heterodox independents? What policies and what messages would it emphasize?

This isn’t so obvious either. When I asked ChatGPT to construct a platform to reflect popular ideas neglected by the major parties, it suggested something called … the Abundance Party (!), running on economic progress, “clean but cheap energy”, “pro-family, pro-growth immigration”, reducing corruption, defusing the culture wars and perhaps some “good government” reforms like term limits and ranked-choice voting.

This speaks to how large language models ingest a lot of text from the Internet and reflect the conventional wisdom — Abundance has been a very popular book — rather than necessarily thinking more deeply about a problem. Personally, I like the sound of this — but I’m not sure that’s a good sign because I’m hardly your typical disengaged swing voter. These are technocratic goals, not populist ones, and Elon is perhaps exactly the wrong person to capture any sort of anti-elite spirit. In Europe, more friendly to minor parties with its proportional voting and parliamentary systems, you’ll sometimes get minor parties with political agendas that are unrecognizable in the United States. In Germany, for instance, the newly formed political party BSW ran on a platform of essentially economic socialism coupled with cultural conservatism on immigration and other issues. It wasn’t successful exactly: BSW fell just below the 5 percent threshold required to win seats in the Bundestag. Still, in countries like Denmark, liberal parties have sometimes found support by veering right on immigration, putting them in the opposite corner from the “fiscal conservative but socially liberal” direction that wealthy political elites often support in the U.S.

And although I hate the culture wars, I’ll concede that they are somewhat successful in engaging voters. In some cases, a robust middle may exist. On immigration, for instance, Americans are often more tolerant than Europeans. Skilled immigration and a pathway to citizenship for people who have been in the country for a long time are fairly popular ideas, but so is increased border enforcement. There’s probably some middle ground there, exploiting the reluctance of the major parties to avoid offending their interest groups. Likewise, on LGBTQ and reproductive rights, a good number of voters support abortion choice and gay marriage, but are skeptical of the direction of the trans movement.

Still, it can be tough to form a durable majority in cases like this. On COVID, for instance, say that 60 percent of the country is pro-vaccine mandates and 60 percent are anti-lockdowns. So pro-vax and anti-lockdown might seem like the “popularist” approach. But it might nevertheless make for a lonely crowd if only 20 percent of the country is both pro-vax and anti-lockdown, while 40 percent take what became the left-wing view on both issues (pro-vax and pro-lockdowns) while the other 40 percent are antis on both.

Nor are these necessarily the goals that Elon is interested in. The America/Abundance Party that ChatGPT envisions only obliquely addresses the issue of deficits. But DOGE also doesn’t provide Musk with a lot of success to point to on the basis of cutting deficits through reducing waste alone. A Big Beautiful Bill that did less to inflate deficits by further trimming entitlement programs might find some support among wealthy, right-leaning Americans, but overall, it would be even more unpopular than the actual OBBB.

Can Elon play the long game?

So it’s a very uphill climb, although not necessarily an impossible one. Personally, if I were Elon, I’d take this seriously by:

• Hiring an eclectic mix of smart young people to study these issues and look for blind spots in the major party agendas. Some of these ideas might be related to technological or social change, skating to where the puck is going on issues where the political establishment is behind the curve. AI is an interesting one: it’s very likely to rise in importance, and the political establishment has no clue about it. And Elon actually has some credibility on the issue by being a technologist who has historically expressed concern about AI safety. The fertility crisis is another pet Elon issue that’s been somewhat neglected by the major parties.

• Taking a more of a backseat to the broader project of the America Party, providing funding and mentorship, but not being the public face of the party. If I were Elon, I’d work on rehabilitating my image, not tweeting about every single damned issue, and recognizing that Silicon Valley often has poor instincts for diagnosing America’s political climate.

• And then I’d focus on obtaining ballot access and identifying candidates who are good fits for their states and districts. I’d do six months of homework and legwork before doing too much bragging. The tactical questions that John asks are smart, but I see them as downstream from this process.

The catch is that all of that requires a lot of hard, devoted work. And although Elon works very hard by all accounts, it’s a different method than the improvisational approach he often takes to politics.

Untangling America from its Gordian knot of partisanship is a worthy goal, and I’d be among the first to argue that the agendas of the current Democratic and Republican parties aren’t philosophically coherent in any broader sense. But they nevertheless reflect what you might think of as an emergent equilibrium from a highly competitive process: no American presidential candidate has received more than 53.4 percent of the vote since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

This is not altogether different from a profit-maximizing equilibrium in business, and although I’m verrrrrrry skeptical that Elon’s skill set can translate well to politics, he probably deserves at least a little bit of credit for gambling on “disruptive” ideas that people thought were impossible but ultimately found success.

Still, equilibria in politics can be particularly sticky because of partisan loyalty. Even though the Southern Strategy was “invented” by Nixon circa ~1968, Democrats more than held their own in the white, rural South as late as 2008, even after nominating a Black man for president:

So if I were Elon, here’s one trait from Silicon Valley that might translate well: I’d want to have a long time horizon, thinking a decade or more ahead. Where are the parties ripe for disruption, particularly at their intersection with technological and cultural change? It’s not necessarily in the departments that might first come to mind for pundits like me, and it probably won’t be in response to any particular piece of legislation: those can have significant effects, but such shifts are often thermostatic and short-lived.

What will American politics look like in 10 to 15 years if and when there’s some combination of the following: AI has displaced many jobs but perhaps also produced higher growth; both parties widely acknowledge the fertility crisis and the population is aging; the U.S. has largely lost its global leadership position to China or other countries; the national debt has also threatened our economic leadership and made the fiscally irresponsible choices of both parties untenable; the effects of climate change are more acute; the rule of law and the democratic system is undermined by some combination of an increasing tolerance for authoritarianism and a further accumulation of wealth and power in technological elites (or there’s a significant backlash to this); and the Zoomers with their various hang-ups and formative experiences are finally in charge instead of the Boomers and theirs?

Well, I don’t know. But that’s what I’d be thinking about instead of just wanting to get revenge on Trump, or applying a template for third parties that has failed so often before. Treat the America Party as a moonshot, not as a whim. It will still probably crash on launch, but at least you’re shooting for the stars.

1. It’s been a slightly frustrating WSOP so far: a half-dozen cashes, but no truly deep runs. But we have a decent stack in the Main Event and are playing our Day 2 today.

2. I hope I’ve been able to do a pretty good job of keeping the newsletter running at two-thirds speed while out here, but I’m looking forward to getting back into the routine.

3. As opposed to appointed, as Minnesota’s Dean Barkley was as part of a remnant of the Reform Party in 2002