What the ‘Exhausted Majority' Really Wants

New York Times

12-07-2025

transcript
What the 'Exhausted Majority' Really Wants
I just think that people do not understand how fractious the Republican coalition is. Once you just drill down past Donald Trump loyalty, you get one layer below that, and it's just a seething mass of argument and disagreement. Let's just see who gets driven out because they won't release the Epstein files. That's my latest hobby, is watching that online. I'm Michelle Cottle and I cover national politics for New York Times' Opinion. And I am here with the Opinion columnist David French today. David Hello. Welcome, Michelle. It's great to be with you. And it's just the two of us I which means we to get extra juicy. Digging into Elon Musk this week, he has announced that he wants to launch a new national political party. Now, there is a long history of – how do I put this gently? – underwhelming third party attempts in this country at this point. Does anybody even remember what the Forward Party is? I had forgotten Michelle until just now, so thank you. You're welcome. David, that's another service I'm providing here today. But I just acknowledging the fact that Musk was the nation's biggest known political donor last year. And so I want to discuss why. Even with that, it's so hard to get a third party off the ground. And I want to get into if there might be something different about this particular moment, because certainly there are a lot of people feeling like this is a fraught and fragile period in the Republic's history. So let's just dig in you. I want to start us off by kind of orienting us. You're a guy who's open to the idea of a third party, right? I mean, your third party curious. Michelle, not only am I open to the idea of a third party, but I almost mounted a third party campaign in 2016, which is it's whole other story, but it gives me a lot of insight as to the practical problems and practical realities. But to make a long story short, back in 2016, Bill Kristol was trying to recruit a third party candidate. Bill Kristol, who was founded The Weekly Standard, now runs the Bulwark. He asked Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney said no. Asked some other folks. They all said no. And then came like millionth down the list and came to me. And I said, I'll think about it. And I did actually think about it for about 72 hours, which was about 71 hours and 59 seconds too long. But I did I did absolutely think about it, no question. And I think that as a concept, what we're dealing with is a lot of theoretical demand. In other words, there's a lot of people who will say that they want it. The problem is, when you get to the actual person and the actual position, what are the positions. Who is the individual. And that's where it gets so so tricky. Of course because you're moving from the notional where you can fill in all of your ideals. And this is what I imagine a third party would be, and it can just be the perfect utopian little alternative in your mind. Then when actual living human beings step up and say, hey, we've got an idea, we could do that, then you actually then it starts to fracture almost instantaneously. The idea of running a third party candidacy is so delicious. But given your experience, let's go ahead and give me a temperature check on this latest Musk venture. It's he's calling it the America party. Is it remotely viable. My immediate thought is hell no. But let me get you to go in here first. I mean how can I say this. I think of the third party. Say it. Not gently. Yeah O.K of the third party ideas. The concept, one part of the concept of the America Party is actually smarter than a lot of the other third party ideas. I would then say. Elon Musk is exactly the wrong person to implement it, because unlike a lot of people who have a bipartisan appeal, he has a bipartisan sense of revulsion now. So because he has taken on Donald Trump and taken on MAGA. So a lot of Republicans really, really, really hate him. When he switched from being a green techno futurist to being like Donald Trump's wealthiest acolyte. The left and everyone left of center turned on him. So he's in many ways the least appealing person possible to start a third party because he's alienated both wings. He's been driven out of both wings. He's a uniter, David. He's united everyone against him. Yes, it's uniting against is the problem. However, this idea that, no, no, no, we're not trying to sweep away everything. But when targeted races so that there is a third party to contend with in the Senate so that you can't have atrocities like the big beautiful bill that were just passed where you can have some independent voices. I think there's actually some real promise to that idea, in part because it doesn't depend on as many third parties do, with the man on the White horse coming in with all the fame and all the resources and triggering kind of the last thing we need, which is yet another kind of populist revolution. Yeah, I do agree with you that I think the targeted approach is better. I mean, in part because one of the big problems in getting a third party off the ground is that elections are run by the states, and you have 50 different states with a gajillion different rules. And trying to get on the ballot in all those states can be gobsmackingly complicated. And it's not like Musk has some grand vision for the country, as my sense. I mean, in part, he's just he's just irritated that he didn't get his way and he wants to have a lever in which to make everybody's life unpleasant. Yeah I mean, there's a lot about this that just radiates. I'm angry, I'm mad, and I'm wealthy. So what happens. I'm angry. So when you are, or I are angry. Michelle, we do have the pen. We can turn to the pen. We can. We can explain our position. Elon Musk has one of the worlds largest social media outlets that he can use. But that's not enough. That's not enough. He can go further. He can start a party. But look, he is very angry at what's happened and he's very impulsive. And all of this is going to undermine him. And on the one hand, he has helmed multiple very, very successful companies. He actually does have a knack for accomplishing things in the real world. That was pre politics and pre. DOGE was a debacle. It was an absolute debacle. It was a humbling moment for him. Very humbling moment. And unlike what many people do when they have humbling moments where you retreat for a minute, he's just gone ahead and leaned in. Yeah, I mean, this feels like a revenge campaign because he's had a falling out with his presidential B.F.F. and he didn't get his way on the bill. Is there a coalition, though, that could be rallied around a third party at this moment. And what do you think that would look like. That's the big question. There's a quick answer to this, which is very optimistic. And there's a longer answer to this that gets super pessimistic fast. You never bring me anything optimistic, David. So I don't know. I'll start, I'll start. So there is something called the exhausted majority in the U.S. This is a documented phenomenon that does exist. And this is about 2/3 of Americans, actually about 2/3 of Americans who believe that neither party listens to them. They say they feel unseen and unheard in public discourse. They're sick of the partisan vitriol. They're very angry at the tone of politics. In other words, the tone is exhausting. And they actually want compromise. They actually want people to come to the table and come to agreements. And so if you're starting a third party and it says you're not being heard. Everyone's going to yell Yay. 2/3 of the people there is no compromise. Thunderous roar. We need to sit down and listen to each other. thunderous roar. And then you move on to one concrete policy position. And then all of a sudden, this coalition is going to start to just crumble. Because I was waiting for the. But because this exhausted majority isn't the same thing as the moderate middle. It's not a synonym. The exhausted majority actually spans across the political spectrum. So you'll have people who are pretty far on the left who are part of the exhausted majority. You'll have people who are pretty far on the right who are the exhausted majority, but they don't agree with each other, say, on tax rates or health care policy and the nuts and bolts things that put together a party. And so when the Republican Party, which is really our last successful third party emergent third party movement, truly successful, they had an idea, they were against slavery, the expansion of slavery. It was around an idea. They were against polygamy. For example, they had an idea. And so if you're organizing a third party around of a tone or a vibe, that's a lot harder than organizing a third party around an issue or an idea. And so that's so Yes, there does seem like a demand. But no, when you dive into it, it doesn't seem very easy to fill that demand. So I was poking fun at the Forward Party, which is the centrist party that Andrew Yang and a bunch of people got together and launched recently. And I think Elon Musk has, in fact, been talking to Yang, whose candidacy in 2020 Musk endorsed. For me, the forward party's problem is exactly what you're talking about. They are a lot about you're tired of polarization, and we're going to be anti polarization. And they'll throw in some electoral reform to help the process. But beyond that, it's not entirely clear what they're kind of mobilizing galvanizing idea would be. And so I want to be a little less ambitious in my sweeping view of parties emerging and look at the Reform Party in '92, Ross Perot popped up this quirky business guy with a populist view of the American economy and how both parties were driving up the debt and threatening, threatening the American prosperity. And he pulled 19 percent of the electorate, which was basically enough to tip the tip, the scales in Bill Clinton's favor. So it's not that he went anywhere. And the Reform Party hung on for several years, but they did get people talking about the debt and America's profligate spending to the degree that became a real issue during the Clinton years. So they did something. Yeah is there the is there at least the room for a third party to get enough traction that they could impact. And it sounds like that might be what Musk is looking to do, although it's not entirely clear in what directions. I do think there is. And there is a term I believe David shore coined this term called popularism instead of populism. Popularism so, in essence, I don't want to do violence to the definition, but just orient yourself around popular policies that are consistent with your worldview. And are there a set of popular policies that could cement or create, if not a majority, at least a plurality, in certain parts of America. I think, yeah, I think there are a lot of popular ideas that are sidelined because the bases of the party won't allow them to be put forth. They wield an absolute veto. So, for example, in immigration, this is almost the paradigmatic issue where there is a kind of a broad popular policy that is stymied, often by extremes, and one that broad popular policy, just to state it in the broadest brush is more secure borders relief for dreamers and others who are contributing well in America right now. And you have that give and take and you actually can build a coalition there, but certainly on the right, the Stephen Miller side of the world is absolutely, positively no to that. And so it just keeps getting cut off. It just keeps getting stymied. And you can do this in other issues as well. But I'll tell you, Michelle, the area where it's the most difficult to do, this is also the area where third parties often circle back to. And that is the deficit. This was a big thing for Ross Perot, and a lot of people are against the deficit. A lot of people are very concerned. I'm one of them. But here's where the problem it gets really unpopular really fast. If you want to talk about how to narrow the how to narrow that deficit because you've got to have some tax increases, or you're going to have to have some spending cuts that aren't just this foreign aid budget that everyone thinks is like this infinite pool of money that's just being thrown over overboard overseas when it's really a tiny fraction, tiny, tiny percentage. It's just very hard to deal with the deficit without doing unpopular things. Yet that is often the siren song that tries to get people to form a third party. Yeah the devil in the details again. And how do you rally people around that. Is this a moment for a third party to rise up, or is simply an opportunity for one of the existing major parties to rethink what they've got to do and to grab this group in the middle. It feels, Michelle, the easiest path here is to just have the major parties shape up a bit. So, for example, there's been a lot of commentary and a lot of discussion about the insurgent, insurgent Mamdani campaign in New York. And I find that much less interesting, I have to confess, than a lot of people, because I feel like it's kind of an artifact, not of the appeal of socialism, but of the fact that the establishment, the establishment candidate, was a guy who was just run out of office after a sexual harassment scandal. And so if that's what you're doing here if you've got these big establishment parties and look in the drama we just went through with Joe Biden and his obvious cognitive decline and how much there was one part of the establishment that was trying to shield all of that from us and actually trying to put somebody forward to the American public who wasn't fully up to the job. I mean, this is the kind of establishment work that's being done in some of these parties. And then don't get me started on the total capitulation of the Republican establishment to Donald Trump. So part of this thinks that, well, maybe the simplest, most direct route to better politics is just the party establishment of the parties that we have getting better at what they do. But their inability to do that for so much, so very much, a very long time. It's one of the reasons why this third party demand keeps bubbling up. It's the absence, the persistent absence of the best and most obvious solution that leads us to longer shot alternatives. So just the fact that what we seem to have now is an insider outsider split. So in order to as an outsider, bubble up and get people mobilized, it seems to take a particular kind of person. I mean, so this is what Donald Trump started as right. He started as an outsider who not politics as usual. Now, he happened to be able to take over the Republican Party and completely consume it. But it seems like you're almost by definition looking at a kind of politics that's personality or charisma driven by these figures totally, which lends itself to demagoguery. And that just that makes me very nervous. I mean, what is your thought on the dangers of that. Oh, I'm so glad you raised that. Because this is not just relevant to third parties. It's actually relevant to the Republican Party right now, which is demagogues can build personal movements. They're generally not great at building institutions or maintaining institutions. And so one of the things I think you're seeing right now with MAGA is you're actually beginning to see the sneak peek of the demolition of the movement after Trump leaves, because he's assembled this coalition of cranks and outsiders. And the only thing they have in common, really, is they've agreed to support Donald Trump. So you've got a lot this very fractious coalition that's United under the charismatic leader. And then when the charismatic leader is gone, what is that coalition going to do. What is it any longer. I know that there are a lot of people who say, well, it is an America first neo isolationist or spheres of influence approach. You got to that's. That'll be news to an awful lot of Republicans who literally, Michelle, believe it or not, still think that. And I've heard this as recently as this year. Donald Trump is more like Ronald Reagan in any Republican president in my lifetime. And wait, what. What so there are still people who are thinking when they're voting for Trump, they're voting for something that's a no. It's still normal republicanism. Then you've got millions of others who are saying, Nope, we're blowing up everything. That was normal republicanism. And so I think the Republican Party is going to pretty quickly see what it's like when it's organized around a cult of personality and the personality is gone. I know that you're not an expert on the progressive left, but the thing that has and we've talked about this before, the thing in Republicans redounding to their benefit is the fact that the Democratic Party doesn't exactly have its act together as well. Do you think that it would benefit from a few. I don't revolutions, some anti-establishment folks shaking things up the way the Republican Party has going back to looking at the Tea Party. Do they need their own Tea Party. I mean, what. Oh, please. No I don't mean the content of the experience, but. Or even the vibes. You don't even want the vibes of that experience. The vibes of that. You didn't enjoy all those tri cornered hats or whatever. Those were lovely. So as somebody who was present at the creation of the Tea Party and used to represent Tea Party groups in court, I will tell you there was a very rapid devolution of the Tea Party. So at the very beginning, there was a lot of hope and optimism around it, that it was actually a movement designed to rediscover the Constitution and first principles, and so you can know you're interacting with somebody on the Tea Party because they're carrying around a pocket Constitution. Or they had a copy of Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom.' Actually actually, very briefly, was like a new bestseller. And so I say new bestseller, a bestseller again, and so but then it very quickly turned into factional infighting, ideological litmus testing, which the real irony here, Michelle, is that the Tea Party pioneered this idea of cancel culture on the right, where if you didn't agree with the whole litany of conservative positions, if you weren't all the way down the line, this is the 2012 primary. And for example, then you were out. You were a squish because you had this ideological litmus test with no variation. And there were people coming in saying, hey, maybe we need to be more appealing to the working class. And they would say, no, definitely not. And then along comes Donald Trump. And he breaks the paradigm because he's completely outside of the box from the Tea Party on policy. But he's exactly where the Tea Party is on pugilism. And so he had that temperamental match with the Tea Party. And I would just say, when you build a movement centered around populist pugilism within your coalition, get ready, you're not going to be able to control that thing if you build a movement around anger and resentment, even if it has a policy frame to begin with. After a while, the policy will go away, and you're just left with the anger and resentment. And here we are, as the United States of America. So historically, third party candidates have mostly been spoilers. I mean, we're talking about I'm thinking Ralph Nader in 2000. Now that's at the presidential level. But looking farther along, do we think there's a case where they could be something other than spoilers on a national level. I mean, is it just impossible. It's definitely not. I mean, let's go back to Ross Perot. A lot of people forget this, Michelle, but that campaign was so wild because there was a point at which Bill Clinton was in third. Ross Perot was leading in the polls. H.W. Bush was second. Bill Clinton was third. If you want to if you have heard and read a lot of gloom and doom commentary about the Democratic Party after 2024, some of the gloom and doom commentary when Bill Clinton was in third place in the polls, after the Democrats had already lost three consecutive landslide presidential elections, a lot of people were writing the obituary of the Democratic Party at the presidential level, and then Ross Perot drops out. Why one reason is because he thought Republican operatives were going to ruin his daughter's wedding. And I'm not making this up. O.K, sure. Yeah So we think politics are crazy. Now, there have been crazy. There's been a lot of crazy times. So he drops out. He comes back in. I guess the wedding was fine, I don't know. He comes back in after dropping out, and he's still got 19 percent of the vote. And at that point, his reputation that had devolved to the point that he was seen as so Mercurial and crazy that he played the song crazy at his election night celebration. O.K I don't know if you remember all of this. Yes no, I don't remember all of this. Yeah and so it is AI think about that. A guy is leading, drops out, comes back, still gets 19 percent So with a major charismatic national figure, is it possible. I would say Yeah. So what advice as a former almost third party candidate would you give to Elon Musk right now. That's a great question. I would say my first piece of advice would be to hand the reins over to somebody else. That would be my first piece of advice. Advice? that's valid advice. But beyond that, I would say start small, think Target, Target, be smart and target a race or two or 3, a Senate race or two or three. Be strategic. Be disciplined. Don't overpromise. And definitely don't under deliver. So not his wheelhouse. Yeah Oh I but I do think targeting the right races and even going down to the House level, targeting the right races and the right places is going to be very important because I do not see, I mean, a national figure in our extremely divided and polarized time that is so unifying and so universally respected that they could sweep in. And I mean, the only person I can think of who everyone loves in America is Dolly Parton. Yes And and Dolly, we need you on the cultural wall. We don't need you in politics. But I know there's very few people in America who have that kind of universal appeal. I mean, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Dolly Parton, I mean, there are some celebrities, but I guarantee you, the instant that they open their mouth and start talking actual policy, a lot of that shine would start to come off. But Dolly Parton is too smart for that. Yeah, way too smart. Way too smart. But I don't Michelle. I'm not optimistic. But over the long haul, supply tends to meet demand and there is demand for alternatives in American politics. O.K well, we're going to cling to that and we're going to leave it there for now. Although I feel like you need to come back so that we can talk about maybe soft launching your 2028 campaign. Me and my talk to Dolly as an advisor, if you like. Well how we reach my constituency of dozens will be like, what. What's the marketing campaign to reach those dozens of people. That'll be topic number one. O.K we're going to get you hooked up. All right, David. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's always fun. This was fun. Thanks, Michelle.
The New York Times columnists Michelle Cottle and David French discuss whether the moment might be right for a third party. And French tells the story of the time he briefly considered a run for president as a third-party candidate.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion, and I am here with the Opinion columnist David French today. David, hello.
David French: Michelle, it's great to be with you. And it's just the two of us.
Cottle: I know, which means we get to get extra juicy digging into Elon Musk. This week he announced he wants to launch a new national political party.
Now, there is a long history of — how do I put this gently? — underwhelming third-party attempts in this country. Does anybody even remember that there is a Forward Party at this point?
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