Most Third-Party Efforts Are Jokes. Musk’s Might Not Be. Here’s Why.

This is why that overhyped No Labels nonsense from 2024, which got a lot of silly press, was ridiculous (and run by hustlers, picking the pockets of gullible, ill-informed rich people). Joe Manchin was never going to be president. He was never going to be much more than an asterisk. To get elected president in this country, you have to be a Democrat or a Republican.

But the presidency is not Musk’s goal. He posted on July 4 that his goal would be “to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.”

Now that is a different kettle of fish. That is doable, at least in theory. And that really would alter American politics immediately.

First, the obstacles. They’re formidable. There’s this thing in political science called Duverger’s law. French political scientist Maurice Duverger studied party systems in the 1950s and found that countries that elect their legislatures in winner-take-all single-member districts (as we do in the United States) tend to narrow down to having two parties.

This video does a pretty good job of explaining why. In sum, if voters know that only one person will represent a legislative district, the factions that can tolerate one another will pool resources to block the factions they hate. In such a system, third parties don’t have much of a chance—unlike proportional representation systems such as Israel’s, where they don’t have single-member districts and each party is allotted seats according to its national vote total, no matter how small.

So let’s apply Duverger’s law to Musk’s effort. He’s going to be fielding candidates under his America Party banner in a handful of (presumably) carefully chosen congressional districts. The question is, can an America Party candidate for the House win 34 percent of the vote in a three-way general election?