Can Elon Musk shatter America’s 2-party system?

A viable third party is the great white whale of American politics — but Elon Musk appears willing to try it anyway.

Frustrated by Republican lawmakers’ support for the Big Beautiful Bill, the world’s richest man has repeatedly floated the idea of forming a new “America Party” to cater to disaffected fiscal conservatives and libertarians. Musk has even threatened to bankroll primary challenges against GOP members of Congress who backed the bill.

But political experts say his billions would be better spent buying him influence within the GOP’s existing party structure rather than birthing a viable new political force capable of challenging America’s entrenched two-party duopoly.

“Third parties are like honeybees — they sting and then they die,” Georgetown political historian Michael Kazin told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country – the PORKY PIG PARTY!!

Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2025

American history is littered with third-party bids that flared brightly only to fizzle out, he explained. George Wallace carried five Southern states in 1968 and Ross Perot grabbed nearly 19% of the popular vote in 1992 — yet neither cracked the two-party hold on the presidency.

Such efforts tend to hit a structural wall, Kazin said. The Electoral College’s winner-take-all math means a new party would need to win outright in multiple states to have any shot — a virtually impossible task without displacing one of the existing major parties. Congressional races are similarly unforgiving: first-past-the-post voting leaves little room for third party contenders except as spoilers.

Only Maine and Alaska run every statewide race under ranked-choice voting — with the District of Columbia recently mandating it too — even as sixteen mostly red states rushed to ban the system outright. Nearly one in twenty ballots cast in ranked-choice elections were improperly filled out, according to a March Political Behavior study that analyzed more than three million ballots cast in Alaska, Maine, New York City and San Francisco.

Kazin added that when outsider movements do break through, they usually start small.

“Structurally, third parties would have to begin by showing strength in a state or region,” he said, calling it “a mistake … to try to run nationally the first time.” He pointed to the Populists of the 1890s — who won governorships and state legislatures across the Plains before petering out — as well as Wallace’s Dixie stronghold and Perot’s early focus on Texas as evidence that durable change, if it comes at all, builds locally before emerging on the national stage.

If this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day.

Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the people actually have a VOICE.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2025

Yet the public appetite for an alternative is ravenous. Nearly two-thirds of Americans in a 2023 Gallup poll agreed that a “third major party” is needed — a level of frustration with the Republican-Democratic duopoly that has persisted for over a decade. But so far that discontent has never translated into a new party capable of upending the system.

For Musk, the challenge runs deeper than structural impediments. His brand of libertarianism — the philosophy centered on minimal government and maximum individual freedom — lacks the mass constituency needed to sustain a political movement.

The numbers are damning. Libertarian Party candidates have averaged just 1% of the presidential vote since 2000, with Gary Johnson’s 3.3% showing in 2016 being an outlier. Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, arguably the Senate’s most libertarian member, finished fifth in the 2016 Iowa caucuses before dropping out — a humbling reminder that even the state that elected him also sent Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell to Washington.

“Libertarianism was arguably the core ideology about the party under Ronald Reagan … Trump has changed the Republican Party,” Kazin said.

Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025

Yet Musk’s money could still matter enormously within the existing party structure. The Senate Leadership Fund has shown how targeted cash can redraw a primary map; the super PAC poured almost $8 million into Alabama’s 2017 special election to prop up former Sen. Luther Strange over hard-right challengers and later spent roughly $5 million in 2022 to shield centrist Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski from a Trump-backed insurgent, according to The Washington Post — evidence that with enough money, a donor can bend the GOP to his will without resorting to a breakaway party.

Money isn’t a surefire way to win elections, however. Musk poured a record-breaking $22 million into Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race in April — money that supported conservative Brad Schimel but still couldn’t stop liberal Judge Susan Crawford from winning by almost nine points. University of Wisconsin political scientist Barry Burden told the Post that Musk’s presence galvanized liberal turnout, arguing a hypothetical third party should “draw on [Musk’s] resources but keep him in the background.”

Democrats learned the same bitter lesson in 2024. OpenSecrets data shows former Vice President Kamala Harris over $1 billion — yet Trump still landed a decisive Electoral College victory and swept every swing state with less than half the campaign funds.

But campaign finance law could further complicate the future of the “America Party.”

Bradley Smith, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), told CNN that “there is some case law suggesting that some of the organizational activities of a party and starting a party can be funded with larger contributions, until it actually qualifies for party status under the election commission regulations.”

“You can fund super PACs all you want,” he said. “But you can’t fund a political party, as a strange part of American law.”

Ultimately, Kazin suggested Musk’s flirtation with a third-party run would likely remain more rhetorical than practical.

“The idea that he, by himself, is going to be able to found a party which could make a difference — yeah, it seems fanciful to me,” Kazin said, adding that “a lot of people think he’s somewhat foreign. I think that probably counts against him as well, especially among conservatives who style themselves to be great American patriots.”

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