"Study hard and carefully for six months before deciding on a course of action or bragging about things" doesn't sound remotely like something Elon Musk is capable of doing.
He is, ESPECIALLY NOW, beloved by about 10% of the active libertarians and hated by about 60%. His 'libertarianism' is corporate communism with a side of land seizures for rich people's projects.
And if you think taking over the Libertarians are as easy as taking over the Green party, by all means, I would LOVE to have someone (Not Musk) actually organize this clown car. But he's not the beloved of the Libertarians, despite how much Conservatives spent trying to sell him as such.
Scary but a hostile takeover is feasible. But, if going that route, why not try to take over the GOP or Democratic party. 2016 gives us two good examples of how that approach succeeded.
Sure - Bernie almost hijacked the D's, but he failed and was probably the best potential shot against the weakest establishment candidate (voters against the name "Clinton" and against women leaders). He did so well in large part because the D's let independents vote in most states, whereas the R's tend not to.
Trump didn't really take over the R's as much as he sidestepped the leadership by messaging to the vast number of R voters who were already there but felt unrepresented.
In contrast, a movement of even 1% of the R's + right most D's would flood the L's.
Biggest issue is that the L's don't have meaningful primaries, so Musk would need to get his people through the delegate selection process, which means activists, not passive voters.
Of course a plan targeted at delegate rich states would probably suffice, and finding 500 enthusiastic supporters would be a lot cheaper than what Musk spent on Trump.
Of course American Libertarians who are basically inverted Communists with just inversions of communist ideology in a kind of opposite world equal ideological rigidityare generally unmanageable so probably not interesting to collaborate with.
But a Trumpish takeover to render Libertarian party as a more effective spoiler, quite possibly reasonable.
Although it migth be just as easy to create a neo-small-l-classic-liberal party called the American Party
What, exactly, does Musk's party stand for, besides more political theater? More chainsaws? Lots of baby mamas breeding a cohort to conquer Mars?
Musk is well known for both of these, as well as making all sorts of claims that he fails to achieve, despite his successes, such as an affordable Tesla or reliable self driving cars. All the Trump Party, formerly known as the Republican Party, has to do is allow BYD to sell its cars in the US and Tesla is toast.
The most Musk can do in the near future is to toss a wrench into the gears of American politics and provide Trump more to rant about on Lies Antisocial.
While a viable third party is possible, it's not probable based on past history. America loves its tribes more than it loves a path to a better quality of life. I expect Musk's America Party to fizzle out faster than Trump's erections.
Whatever breaks the corrupt stranglehold of the two existing major parties will have to make the case that it represents a path forward to economic security for Americans and it will need to be able to counter attacks by its opponents, which will be supported by an entrenched propaganda machine composed of pundits and influencers. That's a tall order and one which will not happen soon and not without some serious study and analysis. All the while the country will continue to morph.
Perhaps the future for America really is some sort of pre-revolutionary France with an aristocracy of Oligarchs, an Authoritarian government, a relatively small mercantile middle class, and a sizable number of peasants.
AI may bring higher productivity, but will that also mean a distribution of wealth? Given the way we do things, I highly doubt it. We're not an intrinsically altruistic species.
Speculation is interesting, sometimes engaging, sometimes irritating. But it's just speculation.
I’m looking forward to Dem primary 2028, especially after the Zohran victory. It will be fun to watch the infighting, maybe a redux of 2016 Hilary vs Bernie wars. It’s so sad that Zohran has crazy policy proposals and is a socialist and can’t run for president, he has been the one politician Dems have found that is actually exciting and likable, you want to look over his flawed policies and cheer for him. High quality candidate
Beshear's speeches run hot and lukewarm. I think it is because he is still growing, but I agree that he is definitely not in the top tier yet.
His 2024 DNC speech was pretty good, and I think deserves a round up on the grade given he was speaking to Harris's platform and talking points rather than his own.
What issues will he campaign on with substantively a more moderate position (or centrist if you prefer that wording) than Harris did? Immigration? Censorship? Economy? Abortion?
Issues are exactly what lost Harris the election. Three in particular: mandates/censorship; economy; and immigration. If Democrats don't realize this then they won't take the WH in 2028.
Democrats keep refusing to learn the lesson that they need to moderate. Two examples but there are many more:
They need to win back folks who lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates, or got the vaccines to keep their jobs. This one issue turned the country from preferring Democrats by 4.5% to preferring Republicans by 1.5%.
They need to say they don't think the federal government should decide the abortion issue (either way) and leave it to voters at the state level. Stay 100% ProChoice is fine, but not mandated by the federal government. Lots of anti-Trumpers who would have voted for Harris (despite disagreeing with her on almost everything) found her pushing for a national law legalizing abortion a bridge too far. They were fine with her arguing for abortion state-by-state. But even that (leave it to the states) tiny amount of moderation was too much for the Democrats.
Citation needed for anti-vaxers being the critical issue.
And the vast majority of the country agrees with the D's on abortion, and the numbers are growing as it becomes clear what happens when the state decides "fertilized eggs are people".
It's not "anti-vaxxers" (those opposed to vaccines), it's those who were opposed to censoring of mRNA vaccine critics and, more importantly, mandating the vaccines. I don't know how "anti-vaxxers" voted; I doubt Covid changed their voting habits. But I've seen zero data on this topic. I'm talking about enthusiastic 2020 Biden/Harris voters who were horrified by the Biden administration handling of Covid w.r.t. information sharing, censorship, and mandates. This group moved in 2021 and never came back.
The Biden administration handling of this critical issue, I argue, moved the polls 6% and the Dems never made that up. Biden won in 2020 by 4.5% and had good popularity numbers until he flipped in August 2021 on vaccine mandates. His numbers tanked and did not recover since. 538 started posting daily averages of polls between Trump and Biden in early March, 2024. Those poll were remarkably, historically AFAIK, consistent with Trump with a tad/about 1.5% lead for months. There was no other issue, I believe, that substantially moved the polls between fall 2021 and March 2024. We live in very tribal times. Then, there was deviation starting with the debate onward, but it regressed back to the 1.5% mean by election day. So 4.5% + 1.5% = 6% move from this one issue. It was baked into all polling afterwards. Maybe the other 94% didn't care.
Is that 100% proof? No,. But the 2024 overall numbers well align with the 2020 numbers when associating the very similar decline in Harris's votes between 2020 (as VP) and 2024 (as President). Unless you think Afghanistan was a major issue that influenced 2020 Biden voters, there's no other candidate for why the polls moved so much then and never recovered.
Moving on to your other point:
Abortion is a good example of how people feel when asked about it in isolation doesn't indicate how it moves swing voters in the end. I've always viewed it as a baked in issue, with it being decisive for many voters on both sides of the issue. Their votes get factored into even the earliest poll. Such voters don't move back and forth between elections.
I'm not saying the anti-Trump, pro Life voters swung the election. They did struggle with their vote. Many voted for Harris, many did not. If they all had voted for Harris, would that have been enough to swing the election? My guess is no but I was just using them as an example of missed votes.
And where in there do they ask which issue was the decisive one for swing voters? In particular, for the 2020 Biden/Harris voters and non-2024 Harris voters?
Despite a lot of evidence at the time that this was going to be a transformational issue in US politics, we haven't polled it. So, we have to revert back to seeing if the hypothesis fits the results, and whether there are other viable explanations. As noted, I didn't claim this was 100% proof. But I have presented you with real data.
That we saw movement in the same direction across most demographics indicate that there's some underlying reason. What makes this one compelling is the timing of Biden's switch, the before/after of the polling. and the consistency in the polls in the before and after periods.
I'm also not saying that this is the only issue that lost Harris the election. A different approach on either immigration or the economy very well could have won her the election. So too in August 2024, when asked what the Biden administration got wrong, if she said: "In hindsight we were wrong to mandate taking vaccine and for censoring those who disagreed with us. We still believe we were right for strongly advocating taking the vaccine, but we went too far in pressuring folks and silencing critics." That alone probably would have won her the election. But here I am speculating on whether this could have won back those voters.
After DOGE, Musk will never appeal to swing voters and moderates. In 2028, there will be many forces vying to tweak MAGA so they can be its leader/controller. In that space, Musk and his money could play/succeed. I expect Vance or Trump Jr. will emerge, but its an erratic organization so a different kingmaker could emerge.
That's a real concern. More generally, whether we'll have somewhat free and fair elections going forward is a legitimate worry. I used to scoff at such statements but can't after J6 and the subsequent widespread embrace of that coup attempt.
I think his problem is recruiting. If you were to create a moderate party in the US, you would try to recruit people like Joe Manchin, Mitt Romney, etc. But would any of these people ally with Musk?
To do a real influential party from the middle, you target deep blue and deep red legislative races.
You provide your Independent Senate candidate to supplant the hopeless Democrat brand in West Virginia, Alabama, Oklahoma etc and to supplant the hopeless GOP brand in Oregon, Illinois, Massachusetts etc. You can hope to take the tipping point of the legislature, and then you play hardball with whoever is president.
To get the US Presidency, you either run a Ross Perot style campaign viable only because it draws equally from both parties, or else you pull the same maneuver of supplanting the weaker party. If you have an unpopular incumbent party, but your Independent movement has been leading the resistance, you might sideline one of the major candidates. And if you split the electoral college, don't worry, you control the tipping point of the Senate!
Excellent! In Oregon last month, there was huge pressure to stop a series of tax increases that would have the largest in the state’s history. If activity was limited to Republicans only, the push would have flopped. Disaffected independents & Democrats made it happen. An opening for a third party?
The odds of the American Party succeeding are incredibly low, considering that Elon has managed to alienate almost everyone except the most die-hard Elon stans. Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans have been alienated by his alliance with Trump. MAGA Republicans have been alienated by his feud with Trump. So you're only left with the small sliver of maybe fiscally conservative people that are also libertarian, but not concerned with Elon's authoritarian bent - i.e. almost no one.
There are many reasons, as you discuss, why a third party is unlikely to succeed but one that I’d add is that if it looked like it was going to become a force the two parties would co-opt its issues and take away its supporters. If a third party did become a force like the other two parties it would likely supplant one of them like the Republicans replaced the Whigs. We’ve always had two major parties since the election of 1800 and that won’t change for more than a cycle or two.
If a third party is going to tack to the left on social policy but to the right on immigration and spending--how is that not Trump and the new Republican Party?
I rather thought from the moment Elon mooted the concept that the demarche is and was a spoiler demarche, a chess move type on to inflict revenge on Trump, from a Libertarianish angle. A spoiler party is at least prima facia quite plausible mechanically - although one can not to have a real spoiler party admit outright it is a spoiler party.
Different angle, also on Substack, from Kevin Kruse, a history professor. When the two parties look virtually identical (which he thinks is not the case now), there's room for a third party to have some modest success. When the two parties look different from each other, third parties haven't done even that well. Gives specific examples of each scenario: https://campaign-trails.ghost.io/third-party-in-the-usa/
"Study hard and carefully for six months before deciding on a course of action or bragging about things" doesn't sound remotely like something Elon Musk is capable of doing.
I don't understand why they don't just take over the Libertarian Party.
A 5% slice of the R's would be enough, and classic fiscal conservative plus isolationism is decent alignment.
Sure they would have to throw out some longtime Libertarian policies, but it would get them on the ballot in most states without breaking a sweat.
We don't want him.
He is, ESPECIALLY NOW, beloved by about 10% of the active libertarians and hated by about 60%. His 'libertarianism' is corporate communism with a side of land seizures for rich people's projects.
And if you think taking over the Libertarians are as easy as taking over the Green party, by all means, I would LOVE to have someone (Not Musk) actually organize this clown car. But he's not the beloved of the Libertarians, despite how much Conservatives spent trying to sell him as such.
Understood.
Nobody wants him.
I am suggesting a hostile takeover.
Scary but a hostile takeover is feasible. But, if going that route, why not try to take over the GOP or Democratic party. 2016 gives us two good examples of how that approach succeeded.
The D's and R's have too much inertia.
Sure - Bernie almost hijacked the D's, but he failed and was probably the best potential shot against the weakest establishment candidate (voters against the name "Clinton" and against women leaders). He did so well in large part because the D's let independents vote in most states, whereas the R's tend not to.
Trump didn't really take over the R's as much as he sidestepped the leadership by messaging to the vast number of R voters who were already there but felt unrepresented.
In contrast, a movement of even 1% of the R's + right most D's would flood the L's.
Biggest issue is that the L's don't have meaningful primaries, so Musk would need to get his people through the delegate selection process, which means activists, not passive voters.
Of course a plan targeted at delegate rich states would probably suffice, and finding 500 enthusiastic supporters would be a lot cheaper than what Musk spent on Trump.
Eh you don't but it would merit some effort.
Of course American Libertarians who are basically inverted Communists with just inversions of communist ideology in a kind of opposite world equal ideological rigidityare generally unmanageable so probably not interesting to collaborate with.
But a Trumpish takeover to render Libertarian party as a more effective spoiler, quite possibly reasonable.
Although it migth be just as easy to create a neo-small-l-classic-liberal party called the American Party
What, exactly, does Musk's party stand for, besides more political theater? More chainsaws? Lots of baby mamas breeding a cohort to conquer Mars?
Musk is well known for both of these, as well as making all sorts of claims that he fails to achieve, despite his successes, such as an affordable Tesla or reliable self driving cars. All the Trump Party, formerly known as the Republican Party, has to do is allow BYD to sell its cars in the US and Tesla is toast.
The most Musk can do in the near future is to toss a wrench into the gears of American politics and provide Trump more to rant about on Lies Antisocial.
While a viable third party is possible, it's not probable based on past history. America loves its tribes more than it loves a path to a better quality of life. I expect Musk's America Party to fizzle out faster than Trump's erections.
Whatever breaks the corrupt stranglehold of the two existing major parties will have to make the case that it represents a path forward to economic security for Americans and it will need to be able to counter attacks by its opponents, which will be supported by an entrenched propaganda machine composed of pundits and influencers. That's a tall order and one which will not happen soon and not without some serious study and analysis. All the while the country will continue to morph.
Perhaps the future for America really is some sort of pre-revolutionary France with an aristocracy of Oligarchs, an Authoritarian government, a relatively small mercantile middle class, and a sizable number of peasants.
AI may bring higher productivity, but will that also mean a distribution of wealth? Given the way we do things, I highly doubt it. We're not an intrinsically altruistic species.
Speculation is interesting, sometimes engaging, sometimes irritating. But it's just speculation.
Pick a card, any card.
Per Betteridge's Law I will not be reading this post
I’m looking forward to Dem primary 2028, especially after the Zohran victory. It will be fun to watch the infighting, maybe a redux of 2016 Hilary vs Bernie wars. It’s so sad that Zohran has crazy policy proposals and is a socialist and can’t run for president, he has been the one politician Dems have found that is actually exciting and likable, you want to look over his flawed policies and cheer for him. High quality candidate
I expect it will be more like 1992, perhaps with Andy Beshear playing the role of Bill Clinton.
Andy Beashar gives nice vibes. But nowhere near the talent of Clinton/Obama/Zohran. Beashar is kinda awkward while talking
Beshear's speeches run hot and lukewarm. I think it is because he is still growing, but I agree that he is definitely not in the top tier yet.
His 2024 DNC speech was pretty good, and I think deserves a round up on the grade given he was speaking to Harris's platform and talking points rather than his own.
What issues will he campaign on with substantively a more moderate position (or centrist if you prefer that wording) than Harris did? Immigration? Censorship? Economy? Abortion?
The white male southern Christian "issue".
Harris didn't lose because of the issues.
Issues are exactly what lost Harris the election. Three in particular: mandates/censorship; economy; and immigration. If Democrats don't realize this then they won't take the WH in 2028.
Democrats keep refusing to learn the lesson that they need to moderate. Two examples but there are many more:
They need to win back folks who lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates, or got the vaccines to keep their jobs. This one issue turned the country from preferring Democrats by 4.5% to preferring Republicans by 1.5%.
They need to say they don't think the federal government should decide the abortion issue (either way) and leave it to voters at the state level. Stay 100% ProChoice is fine, but not mandated by the federal government. Lots of anti-Trumpers who would have voted for Harris (despite disagreeing with her on almost everything) found her pushing for a national law legalizing abortion a bridge too far. They were fine with her arguing for abortion state-by-state. But even that (leave it to the states) tiny amount of moderation was too much for the Democrats.
Citation needed for anti-vaxers being the critical issue.
And the vast majority of the country agrees with the D's on abortion, and the numbers are growing as it becomes clear what happens when the state decides "fertilized eggs are people".
It's not "anti-vaxxers" (those opposed to vaccines), it's those who were opposed to censoring of mRNA vaccine critics and, more importantly, mandating the vaccines. I don't know how "anti-vaxxers" voted; I doubt Covid changed their voting habits. But I've seen zero data on this topic. I'm talking about enthusiastic 2020 Biden/Harris voters who were horrified by the Biden administration handling of Covid w.r.t. information sharing, censorship, and mandates. This group moved in 2021 and never came back.
The Biden administration handling of this critical issue, I argue, moved the polls 6% and the Dems never made that up. Biden won in 2020 by 4.5% and had good popularity numbers until he flipped in August 2021 on vaccine mandates. His numbers tanked and did not recover since. 538 started posting daily averages of polls between Trump and Biden in early March, 2024. Those poll were remarkably, historically AFAIK, consistent with Trump with a tad/about 1.5% lead for months. There was no other issue, I believe, that substantially moved the polls between fall 2021 and March 2024. We live in very tribal times. Then, there was deviation starting with the debate onward, but it regressed back to the 1.5% mean by election day. So 4.5% + 1.5% = 6% move from this one issue. It was baked into all polling afterwards. Maybe the other 94% didn't care.
Is that 100% proof? No,. But the 2024 overall numbers well align with the 2020 numbers when associating the very similar decline in Harris's votes between 2020 (as VP) and 2024 (as President). Unless you think Afghanistan was a major issue that influenced 2020 Biden voters, there's no other candidate for why the polls moved so much then and never recovered.
Moving on to your other point:
Abortion is a good example of how people feel when asked about it in isolation doesn't indicate how it moves swing voters in the end. I've always viewed it as a baked in issue, with it being decisive for many voters on both sides of the issue. Their votes get factored into even the earliest poll. Such voters don't move back and forth between elections.
I'm not saying the anti-Trump, pro Life voters swung the election. They did struggle with their vote. Many voted for Harris, many did not. If they all had voted for Harris, would that have been enough to swing the election? My guess is no but I was just using them as an example of missed votes.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trumps-2024-victory-a-more-racially-and-ethnically-diverse-voter-coalition/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx
Real data, not post hoc ergo propter hoc.
And where in there do they ask which issue was the decisive one for swing voters? In particular, for the 2020 Biden/Harris voters and non-2024 Harris voters?
Despite a lot of evidence at the time that this was going to be a transformational issue in US politics, we haven't polled it. So, we have to revert back to seeing if the hypothesis fits the results, and whether there are other viable explanations. As noted, I didn't claim this was 100% proof. But I have presented you with real data.
That we saw movement in the same direction across most demographics indicate that there's some underlying reason. What makes this one compelling is the timing of Biden's switch, the before/after of the polling. and the consistency in the polls in the before and after periods.
I'm also not saying that this is the only issue that lost Harris the election. A different approach on either immigration or the economy very well could have won her the election. So too in August 2024, when asked what the Biden administration got wrong, if she said: "In hindsight we were wrong to mandate taking vaccine and for censoring those who disagreed with us. We still believe we were right for strongly advocating taking the vaccine, but we went too far in pressuring folks and silencing critics." That alone probably would have won her the election. But here I am speculating on whether this could have won back those voters.
I get that it is your opinion.
But no, "This happened and then that happened" is not data.
I would argue that another event in August 2021 played a bigger role in the dip in President Biden’s approval rating: the Afghanistan debacle.
100%
And polls at the time said that.
If anti-vaxers understood data analysis they wouldn't be anti-vaxers.
After DOGE, Musk will never appeal to swing voters and moderates. In 2028, there will be many forces vying to tweak MAGA so they can be its leader/controller. In that space, Musk and his money could play/succeed. I expect Vance or Trump Jr. will emerge, but its an erratic organization so a different kingmaker could emerge.
Not trying to be a downer, but I'd say there's more than 50% change Donald Trump is the Republican (only?) presidential nominee.
That's a real concern. More generally, whether we'll have somewhat free and fair elections going forward is a legitimate worry. I used to scoff at such statements but can't after J6 and the subsequent widespread embrace of that coup attempt.
I think his problem is recruiting. If you were to create a moderate party in the US, you would try to recruit people like Joe Manchin, Mitt Romney, etc. But would any of these people ally with Musk?
An AI list of people that should be recruited:
Independents and Disaffected Partisans:
Joe Manchin (I-WV)
Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)
Angus King (I-ME)
Republicans:
Mitt Romney (R-UT)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Larry Hogan (Former Governor of MD)
Charlie Baker (Former Governor of MA)
Adam Kinzinger (Former Representative from IL)
Liz Cheney (Former Representative from WY)
Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Democrats:
Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ)
Henry Cuellar (D-TX)
Jared Golden (D-ME)
Jim Costa (D-CA)
To do a real influential party from the middle, you target deep blue and deep red legislative races.
You provide your Independent Senate candidate to supplant the hopeless Democrat brand in West Virginia, Alabama, Oklahoma etc and to supplant the hopeless GOP brand in Oregon, Illinois, Massachusetts etc. You can hope to take the tipping point of the legislature, and then you play hardball with whoever is president.
To get the US Presidency, you either run a Ross Perot style campaign viable only because it draws equally from both parties, or else you pull the same maneuver of supplanting the weaker party. If you have an unpopular incumbent party, but your Independent movement has been leading the resistance, you might sideline one of the major candidates. And if you split the electoral college, don't worry, you control the tipping point of the Senate!
Excellent! In Oregon last month, there was huge pressure to stop a series of tax increases that would have the largest in the state’s history. If activity was limited to Republicans only, the push would have flopped. Disaffected independents & Democrats made it happen. An opening for a third party?
The odds of the American Party succeeding are incredibly low, considering that Elon has managed to alienate almost everyone except the most die-hard Elon stans. Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans have been alienated by his alliance with Trump. MAGA Republicans have been alienated by his feud with Trump. So you're only left with the small sliver of maybe fiscally conservative people that are also libertarian, but not concerned with Elon's authoritarian bent - i.e. almost no one.
There are many reasons, as you discuss, why a third party is unlikely to succeed but one that I’d add is that if it looked like it was going to become a force the two parties would co-opt its issues and take away its supporters. If a third party did become a force like the other two parties it would likely supplant one of them like the Republicans replaced the Whigs. We’ve always had two major parties since the election of 1800 and that won’t change for more than a cycle or two.
"the effects of climate change are more acute" - glad to see people realizing that climate change discourse is more of a panic than reality.
If a third party is going to tack to the left on social policy but to the right on immigration and spending--how is that not Trump and the new Republican Party?
I rather thought from the moment Elon mooted the concept that the demarche is and was a spoiler demarche, a chess move type on to inflict revenge on Trump, from a Libertarianish angle. A spoiler party is at least prima facia quite plausible mechanically - although one can not to have a real spoiler party admit outright it is a spoiler party.
I don’t always care for the snotty tone, but I have all kinds of respect for the sharp analytic mind that produces these opinions. Thank you.
If Elon would just grow up, he could be an effective manipulator just by being an effective spoiler.
Different angle, also on Substack, from Kevin Kruse, a history professor. When the two parties look virtually identical (which he thinks is not the case now), there's room for a third party to have some modest success. When the two parties look different from each other, third parties haven't done even that well. Gives specific examples of each scenario: https://campaign-trails.ghost.io/third-party-in-the-usa/
He wins by weakening the party of Trump. It only takes a little.