by Ron Nehring
Citing his issues with the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed in Congress last week, Elon Musk has threatened to form a new third party to rival the Republicans and Democrats for control of Washington.
Legislating is the work of compromise, as intended by the founding fathers. Those compromises inevitably upset some, and on rare occasion it leads to threats to form a third party. Yet, a quick review of the history of those efforts should provide Mr. Musk with a dose of caution.
No successful political party in America has ever been founded by a single figure, even one with vast resources like Mr. Musk.
The most recent example of this historical truism was the 1992 attempt by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot to turn his independent campaign for president into a third party under the banner of United We Stand America. Interestingly, Mr. Perot’s complaints, like Mr. Musk’s, primarily concerned spending and the national debt, and was aimed largely at Republicans.
Today, few can recall UWSA and Mr. Perot has faded into history.
America’s national debt and federal spending are on an unsustainable trajectory, a reality admitted by virtually all Republicans and many Democrats. Yet, this doesn’t create the conditions for the formation of a third party driven by a single charismatic and heavily funded individual.
The handful of political parties which have been successful in the American republic were formed by groups of leaders and organizers driven by a common set of deeply held principles.
The most “recent” example of this was the formation of the Republican Party between 1854 and 1856, driven by opposition to slavery and ignited by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed for the expansion of slavery into the new states of the west.
The Republican Party was not formed out of the wishes of a single individual but came together over the course of roughly two years with meetings, conventions and the formation of alliances across multiple states. The organizers and leading figures in that process – like Salmon Chase, Horace Greeley and Alvan Bovay – have largely been forgotten by history. Yet they were among the organizers who built the party which provided the platform for the new Republican elected officials whom history would remember: leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
Building and sustaining a political party is nothing like funding a super PAC. It is vastly more complicated and difficult in part because it relies upon the sustained interest and sacrifice of large number of Americans — most of whom not on payroll — to serve as activists, organizers, candidates and ultimately elected officials. Sustaining this effort is much more challenging than putting a few million dollars into a bank account and using it to hire a campaign firm to do the work via paid advertising or paid walkers picked up from temp agencies.
None of this is to diminish the vast effort Mr. Musk funded in support of President Trump in the 2024 election. Nonetheless, founding and sustaining a political party across 50 states to be anything more than a blip on the radar screen of history requires an entirely different level of commitment.
Adding to the level of complexity is the challenge of sustaining a party once it is in a position to govern. While the early Republicans were motivated by a common principle in opposition to slavery, agreement on how to implement that principle proved much more difficult. Differences even in Lincoln’s own administration emerged over whether Republicans should be satisfied to limit the spread of slavery, pursue total abolition, and thereafter what would be the rights of newly freed slaves to fully participate in society.
Likewise, while there may be common agreement that the skyrocketing national debt is bad, there has been little movement in resolving it because of the lack of agreement on solutions.
Perhaps this is why third-party movements in America have much less often succeeded than they have become absorbed into one of the two major parties. As a third party grows, it is often seen by one of the two major parties as a target which, with some ideological adjustment by the larger party, takes in many of the activists and leaders of the smaller party.
This is what happened to the Free-Soil Party, the Liberty Party, the Bull Moose Party, and the Anti-Masonic Party among others.
Federal spending and the national debt are vexing problems, but if history is a guide, it is unlikely we will see the successful emergence of a third party to solve them.
Ron Nehring served as Chairman of the California Republican Party from 2007 – 2011.