Why Elon Musk's Third Party Won't Get Off the Launchpad

Polling is dull until it isn’t. Here’s a question from a recent CNN poll.

Question: "Some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think the government should do more to solve our country's problems. Which comes closer to your own view?"

58% of respondents took Option 2: government should do more to solve public problems. In more than 30 years of CNN asking this question, that’s the highest percentage ever. But in what must be the least surprising finding of all, the CNN analyst notes that “few [Americans] trust either party to do it.”

That’s not to say that the two parties are viewed equally. Asked which of the major parties “can get things done,” 19% say the Democrats; 36% say the Republicans; and 43% say neither party fits the bill. The winner, so to speak, is “you’re both lame.”

This, dear reader, is our pre-modern, two-party, hyper-polarized system in action! Could there be a more vivid reflection of its decrepitude than this poll? A record number of people understand, consciously or not, that a successful society requires an effective government but a near-majority does not believe that our parties – the essential building blocks of effective government in any democracy – can govern well.

Political scientists who study party systems would not hesitate at the possibility such a moment presents: a clearly unsatisfying set of parties should inspire new parties to step into the gap. That is surely what happened before the Civil War as Democrats fractured and Whigs collapsed, with the new Republican Party rising to the challenge of slavery and union. And vital third parties continued to thrive in the post-Civil War era whenever and wherever the major parties were unresponsive to the citizenry.

But all of those third party successes predate the modern era of a legally-enforced two-party duopoly. Major parties simply cannot resist writing campaign rules that favor themselves, and they did so with a vengeance by outlawing fusion voting and fusion parties beginning just before 1900 (go here if you are uncertain as to what “fusion” is). The fusion bans that passed between 1895 and 1921 shut down the ability of new parties to form, grow, and test themselves in the political marketplace because they relegated such efforts to the role of being “spoilers.”

Instead of genuine new parties, we have occasionally experienced the emergence of a gadfly third-party presidential candidate, and once in a blue moon they get a lot of notice for their ideas: consider Ross Perot (running Reform Party) in 1992 on the budget deficit and NAFTA’s “giant sucking sound”, or Henry Wallace (Progressive Party) in 1948 on healthcare and civil rights. But such one-off candidacies are fated to sting the major parties and then die.

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Why Musk and Cohn are Wrong

Still, the idea of a new party never fully vanishes from the American imagination because it’s just a good and necessary idea. Do we really want to live in the two-party doom-loop forever?

Two recent entrants in the “why not a new party” discussion are Elon Musk and Nate Cohn whose names, to my knowledge, have never before appeared in the same sentence.

Musk, winner of last year’s “worst immigrant ever” award (edging out Rupert Murdoch), sent out a tweet to his 200 million followers about the need for a new party that would challenge both Republicans and Democrats. He has presumably already forgotten about it as his Forgiveness Tour gets going in earnest.

Cohn’s more interesting. He’s a brainiac at the NY Times polling desk and in the wake of Musk’s tweet he wrote a piece speculating about whether there might be a base for a new “neoliberal” third party given the level of public frustration with the two major parties. Said Cohn, “a serious third-party candidacy may not be a joke for much longer. While there are plenty of obstacles, the conditions for a successful third party could be coming into place.”

As rich as Musk is and as smart as Cohn is, neither can make water run uphill, no matter how promising the polling. As my colleague Lee Drutman noted in his “open letter” to Musk, the problem is the two-party system itself. “As long as we have our current system of single-winner plurality elections, third parties have no meaningful chance to do anything more than show up as occasional spoilers.”

Drutman’s solution: bring back fusion voting, and eventually consider proportional representation. Sooner or later, we must claw our way to a multi-party, multi-racial democracy.

Watching / Reading / Listening

Last week’s Milwaukee Rotary Club Luncheon: The topic: Transcending the Politics of Division with United Wisconsin and Fusion Voting. The opening presentation by Attorney John Franke is masterful.

Why is this newsletter called The Monthly Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and "fusion" coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.