Elon Musk's new America Party

Does it have a chance?

Oh, people are outraged now! Elon Musk used to be a hero of the MAGA movement for spending $40+ billion to buy Twitter, and convert it into a free-speech platform, thus assisting the re-election of President Donald Trump. Then his DOGE team found enormous amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in the bloated federal budget.

All that goodwill vanished overnight when Musk proposed the creation of a new political party. All the MAGA accomplishments in the world mean nothing if one dares to disagree with President Trump about anything; just ask America’s governor Ron DeSantis. Biblical warnings about belief solely in God, not man, mean nothing when red baseball caps are offended.

For the time being, the America party is merely a fantasy of Mr. Musk, until he decides to share his program with the general public. If it is based on expanding the H-1B visa program, Musk’s support will consist solely of Silicon Valley billionaires.

The America party, like the No Labels project, the Reform party, the Green party, the Libertarian party, and others, has very little chance of success in a presidential election due to Duverger's law. That is why they prefer to compete for House seats in very close congressional districts, and even there they have an uphill battle.

What kind of platform would be the most attractive to American voters? We can get a hint by examining a 2017 study of the 2016 presidential election, conducted by a Democrat leaning organization. Researchers interviewed Clinton and Trump voters on a range of issues. The issues fell into two broad categories: economic (social safety net, trade, inequality); and social-cultural (moral issues, attitudes towards minorities). They graphed the results in the following scatterplot.

The lower-left quadrant represents traditional liberals. The upper-right quadrant represents traditional conservatives. It is interesting that Democrat voters are crowded down into the lower-left corner, having more extreme positions, whereas Republican voters tend to straddle one of the two axes.

I want to focus on the search for the middle of the electorate. For years, we have been told that the true center is fiscally conservative and socially liberal, a mild version of libertarian. That group finds its home in the lower-right quadrant of the graph. Look at the graph again. How many voters do you see in the lower right? Very few!

In contrast, there are a lot more voters in the upper-left quadrant, which the researchers call the populists. They are fiscally liberal and socially conservative. You can call them traditionalists, or Reagan Democrats, or perhaps MAGA.

The researchers count the number of voters in each quadrant as follows:

• consistent liberals: 44.6%

• populists: 28.9%

• consistent conservatives: 22.7%

• libertarians: 3.8%

Within each quadrant, even among the libertarians, most voters chose candidates from the two major parties. Thus the libertarian influence on the election results is minor.

The true center of the American political spectrum is to be found among the populists. These people want to preserve the social safety net and are concerned about economic inequality, but are proud of our country and want to defend its borders. Generally, such voters are better received in the Republican party, as shown by the following graphs.

The blue curves are density curves for Clinton voters, and the red curves are density curves for Trump voters, with respect to economic issues (left graph) or social-cultural issues (right graph).

On both the left and right graph, we see the blue curve peaking higher and closer to the edge than does the red curve. This indicates that Democrats enforce more ideological purity than do Republicans. Interestingly, the red economic curve peaks almost in the middle, showing that about half of Republicans are sympathetic to liberal economic positions.

President Trump’s political success consists of capturing the populist center, forcing the contrarian Democrats to alienate the populists by their attacks on traditional American culture, not unlike President Nixon’s re-election in 1972 or President Reagan’s re-election in 1984. It is not clear where Mr. Musk can improve on the Trump coalition, unless Trump decides to forfeit his voters’ good will. That can happen easily, for example, if Trump follows through on his threat to give amnesty to illegal aliens working in agriculture and hospitality. We shall see.