Five reasons a third party won't happen
To put it bluntly, Musk's is a non-starter
Elon Musk intends to form a third party with the goal of, at the very least, winning enough House and Senate seats to hold the balance of power in Congress. The idea is to break the two-party deadlock that has left the country in spiraling debt due to Republicans’ addiction to tax cuts and Democrats’ addiction to spending.
But there are at least five major reasons why third party start-ups face astronomical odds. Musk’s in particular seems doomed, similar to No Labels’ failed attempt last year.
FIVE OBSTACLES TO THIRD PARTIES
People wishing for an alternative to Democrats and Republicans fasten on polling that indicates dissatisfaction with the two parties and a distinct turn to self-identification as “independent” among respondents. Gallup found in a 2024 poll that 43% of voters call themselves independents, while Democrats and Republicans split most of the remaining voters with 27% each. However, as has been developed in this space, more nuanced takes show why these results are misleading. For one thing, most so-called independents are actually among the most reliable partisans (see #1 and #2 below), and, for another, true independents tend to avoid politics. There seems to be a limited market for an alternative to the two parties.
Republican voters are by and large happy: According to Pew1, about half of regular Republican voters are conservative down the line. The other half is made up of economic conservatives with moderate views on social issues and populists who are conservative on culture but tend toward supporting government spending. The thing is, both the economic conservatives and the populists care much more about the issues where they take conservative stances than the ones where their views deviate from the party line. For the former it’s all about deregulation and low taxes, and for the latter it’s immigration and other hot button topics.
Democratic voters are by and large happy: Like Republicans, Democrats have a strong contingent of the ideologically pure (see Pew cite above). Having said that, a large group of Democrats, predominantly working class and minority, don’t fully toe the liberal line, taking more moderate or conservative stances on social issues. But, like their GOP counterparts who aren’t perfect fits for that party, the issues that matter to them — government programs and civil rights — are their top priorities and drive voting behavior.
Winner-take-all elections are a problem: A political system that awards all the electoral spoils to the candidates who finish first is by its very nature unfriendly to third parties. As compared to many parliamentary systems that allot seats in legislatures to other-than-first-place candidates, our system gives you nothing for silver or bronze medals.
Party establishments make things difficult: The contemporary party establishments are nebulous compared to bygone days when you could identify specific state and local officials who controlled nominations for public office. With the advent of primaries in the early to mid-20th century it became more complicated to exert control over outcomes. What developed over time in each party was a complex web of fundraisers, consultants, media figures, and elected and unelected party officials who tried to orchestrate things to favor their preferred candidates in primaries. For today’s Democrats the web of party influentials almost always prevails in getting its way. For Republicans that was once also true, but cracks in the system — populist candidates defeating those more moderate choices favored by the establishment — began to show more and more as this century wore on, culminating dramatically in Trump’s vanquishing of that establishment in 2016. Eventually he and his followers executed a full replacement in 2024. Which is a good segue to #5.
In point of fact alternative options are not shut out in our system: The very openness of the nomination process with the adoption of primaries made it possible, albeit difficult, for non establishment-endorsed candidates to secure nominations. This has happened periodically at the congressional level in both parties — more often in the GOP as we have seen. The path of least resistance is to join rather than confront the establishment, but as Barry Goldwater (1964), George McGovern (1972), and Donald Trump (2016) all showed, taking on the established order can even be done at the presidential level. The bottom line is: why run as a third party candidate when your chances of winning an election are much better with a D or R label by your name. In a sense, then, third parties have little reason to exist when, if you have a real movement as Trump did, your odds are better vying for a major party nomination.
TWO BIG TAKEAWAYS
First, the barriers to success for third party candidates are substantial. If you want to be nominated and elected, and your views don’t neatly fit either of the two parties’ platforms, you’ve got a better chance in a primary than as a fringe party candidate. You can win — just ask Dave Brat who took down party leader Eric Cantor in 2014, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who ambushed Joseph Crowley in 2018. Of course if you accommodate yourself to the party establishment at least a little your odds do go up.
Third parties in America really are for those on the fringes who either for principled reasons refuse to run in a party primary or know they can’t succeed in one.
Second, apparently Musk hasn’t come to grips with the fact that the social moderate/fiscal conservative constituency in the country is tiny. In theory there are economic conservatives with moderate social views in the GOP who could be ripe for the picking. But the reality is most of them seem happy to take their tax cuts and go home without forcing the issue on entitlements and debt. And if Democrats have anyone left truly concerned about debt and entitlements they’ve stayed pretty quiet.
The thing is, you could have a viable third party with exactly the opposite views to those Musk espouses — there are lots of social conservatives who support government spending in both parties. But exploiting that doesn’t interest him.
These Pew data are from 2021. Pew’s study of the 2024 electorate, which came out recently, delves into the evolution of the party coalitions over the last thirty years. The 2021 data still capture the essence of the two coalitions.