How Elon Musk's Third Party Gamble Could Succeed

Politico

5 days ago

Elon Musk is reentering national politics after a brief hiatus, vowing to disrupt the midterm elections with a new 'America Party' that will contest a narrow set of federal offices and aim to control the balance of power in Congress.
It's a daring scheme if Musk commits to it, which is by no means certain. His alliance with President Trump lasted less than a year, his role at DOGE just a few months and his recent vow of abstinence from national politics only days.
So what would a serious attempt at this plan look like? The usual third-party fantasy in Washington involves finding unicorn candidates who can claim the ideological center and rally temperate problem-solvers on all sides (see: Unity08, No Labels, Americans Elect, Bloomberg 2016.) This is a recipe for failure in a divided country where most Americans have chosen a side.
Musk's plan can only work if he learns from the most successful political disruptors, including Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left, and identifies places where both political parties are neglecting the real preferences of voters. This means not finding a midpoint on a left-right spectrum but rather seizing issues beyond the standard D-versus-R menu.
Trump built his political rise on three areas of policy where much of the electorate felt unrepresented: immigration, trade and global security. He rejected Clinton- and Bush-era consensus on all three.
For Musk's new party to have a purpose, it must find similar ideological targets of opportunity.
Here are three that might make sense:
— Championing free trade. Trump shattered U.S. trade policy and reorganized national politics around protectionism. In a way, he was too successful. Now, there is no longer a major party that consistently backs lowering trade restrictions and defends free trade as a force for good.
The Republican Party is so deferential to Trump's worldview that even former free-trade conservatives now mouth support for the most aggressive tariff policy in generations. Among Democrats, there are plenty of officials eager to trash Trump's version of protectionism — and far fewer making an affirmative case for free trade. Even the Biden administration tried to coopt rather than roll back MAGA trade policies.
This protectionist consensus excludes most voters.Gallup has found since 2015 that at least 60 percent of independent voters consistently see foreign trade as an opportunity rather than a threat; this spring, that number stood at 81 percent and even higher among Democrats. This is a fat opportunity for a political disruptor willing to defy regional voting blocs and special interests.
— Radical fiscal rebalancing. Most Americans say they worry about government overspending and debt. Neither major party is credible on this issue. The Biden administration grew the size of government, failed to enact promised tax hikes on the wealthy and only proposed raising taxes in the first place to pay for more spending. Republicans, meanwhile, have put tax cuts ahead of fiscal responsibility at every opportunity for a quarter century; Trump's Big Beautiful Bill put America on track to assume trillions in new debt,obscuring that reality with a brazen congressional accounting trick.
It is unclear how many Americans would vote for a take-your-medicine party that advocates fiscal austerity, even if that means asking conservatives to raise taxes and left-leaning voters to give up on resurrecting the New Deal era. Perhaps someone should find out.
Musk — whose sneering, chainsaw-swinging DOGE theatrics alienated much of the public — is not the ideal figure to test this proposition. Other wild-card outsiders, running for office backed by Musk's money, might connect on this issue.
— Securing American technological and scientific supremacy. Both parties say they want the United States to outcompete China and dominate this century. When it comes to scientific research and technological competition, Republicans and Democrats tend to subordinate that goal to factional and cultural politics.
The Trump administration's onslaught against elite universities, its crackdown on foreign students and academics and the grant-slashing spree carried out by DOGE have upended some of America's core strategic assets in a global intellectual arms race. In his post-DOGE persona, Musk also blistered Trump's sprawling tax law for 'severely damaging industries of the future' — a reference to the legislation's attempt to throttle growing parts of the clean-energy sector where the United States is already lagging behind China.
Democrats have not gone on the attack like this against incubators of innovation. But they have treated investment in technology as a vehicle for other social change, rather than as an end unto itself. Exhibit A is the Biden administration's implementation of the CHIPS Act, when a law aimed at upgrading U.S. semiconductor manufacturing became an instrument for advancing progressive workplace equity policies. And Biden kept tech tycoons like Musk himself at a distance, viewing them as malignant oligarchs despite some obvious overlapping interests.
Despite his DOGE record, Musk could be a magnet for this strain of politics: one that says the United States must win the future by amassing all the intellectual and industrial might it can muster, using every available lever of policy — including the tax code, trade deals, immigration policy, energy regulation and more.
High-tech research policy is not typical soapbox fare. But American leaders have a history of inspiring voters with scientific goals, separated from other cultural and interest-group politics. John F. Kennedy did not say the United States would put a man on the moon, so long as rockets were built in compliance with Davis-Bacon. Ronald Reagan did not call for scientists to help make nuclear weapons obsolete, provided that no woke postdocs were working in the lab.
Is all this an agenda for Musk's America Party? Probably not. It's unclear that the party will exist in any organized form or that Musk is even capable of executing a disciplined political strategy.
Still, in an age of churning disorder in U.S. politics, these ideological gaps and blind spots are opportunities for any political entrepreneur — especially one who can freely spend billions of dollars on an electoral experiment.