Musk (L-Nowhere)

While Musk continues to muse about his third party, reports have emerged that Libertarians are trying to coax him into their corner.
How successful would Musk's third party be?

The United States appears to have two broad types of "third" parties: national, and local. What it likely needs is one that can span both. To be fair, the Libertarians are trying to cover all the bases, but they don't really come across as competitive in most jurisdictions; currently, they do best in non-partisan mayoral races (of which self-identified Libertarians seem to have won about a dozen currently). It's also worth noting that the Libertarians have a legitimate claim to being the third party in American politics, despite being a very distant third, with only about 3% of the vote in 2016, which was their high-water mark.

The general gist here seems to be that the Libertarians think that with Elon Musk's finances backing them, that they could actually become competitive in elections. And that may be true, but I'm not sure that I would bet on that. Mr. Musk's recent, open, feuding with President Trump likely means that the number of votes he could siphon from the Republicans would be fairly small, there seems to be little concern that the President used Mr. Musk as a patsy in setting up the "Department of Government Efficiency," before pushing for a budget that promptly ate all of the supposed savings that DOGE imposed and then bloated the federal budget even further. Likewise, many Democrats have nothing but anger at Mr. Musk for his role in electing the President and then in taking a chainsaw to programs and initiatives that they believed in. It's entirely possible that a Musk-funded Libertarian Party picks up disaffected voters here and there, but he's likely radioactive enough that large scale defections from both parties are highly unlikely. And defections would need to be from both parties to avoid simply becoming a spoiler, and thus a target for whomever feels their electoral chances are the most damaged.

But a bigger concern might be the obvious one... finding a constituency. Under Donald Trump, Republicans have learned that small government isn't really what they want; they prefer a government that spends lavishly on their priorities and withholds from people they don't like. And Democrats, for all that they seem to be poor at governing effectively, have never met a centralized solution to a problem that they didn't like. Given the haphazard and partisan manner in which DOGE operated under Mr. Musk's direction, I can't imagine he'd be okay with the sort of Libertarianism I have some sympathy for, and the fact that they're openly courting someone that nakedly dishonest leads me to reconsider what sympathies for them I still have.

Still, the Libertarians going from 3.2% in a presidential contest to 10% would be a really impressive showing (even it comes nowhere near what Ross Perot was able to attain), and could really have an impact on American politics, especially if concentrated in otherwise competitive states. (Here in Washington, for instance, if a Libertarian ticket took it's entire 10% share from the Democrats, the Democratic candidate would still win by a comfortable margin.) So the question becomes how many bridges has Elon Musk burned, and can any of them be repaired.