Third parties are a fool’s errand in America, and Elon Musk is just the latest fool 

Like a bad penny, the idea of a third party regularly shows up in American political discourse. It never comes to anything.

Seemingly smart people sign up for these doomed efforts. That Elon Musk, Andrew Yang and Mark Cuban are piling in only proves that intelligence in business and engineering is rarely portable into politics. 

Opportunistically, Yang wants to team up with Musk, but says he wants to know “what the path looks like.” How about "dead end?" 

And it’s not because of any conspiracy — although yes, institutions in power do tend to develop a survival instinct. Third parties crash and burn in America because our form of government is structured for a two-party system. To have viable third parties will require changing the Constitution — no easy task.

The founding fathers certainly did not anticipate this result. But their creation — first-past-the-post winners elected geographically in states or districts — naturally favors two parties. Third parties tend to become wasted protest votes and inevitably wither away. When they do become a political force, they either replace one of the major parties, have their ideas absorbed by one (or both) of those two parties, or become regional. 

Of course, third parties have popped up from time to time in America. The Republican Party started as one. As a firmly abolitionist party, the Republican Party swept away the feckless Whigs in the 1850s.

In the late 19^th century, the Populist Party rose out of the Great Plains. But in 1896, Democrat William Jennings Bryan stole their thunder and their platform, with the Populists mostly drifting into the Democratic Party. Later, the Progressives in the 20^th century straddled both parties up to the Great Depression, when they too mostly became Democrats.

The last third-party gasp was Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Perot had his moment in 1992 but cracked under the pressure. His movement was too dependent on his personality and the national deficit as an issue. When these failed, Reform flamed out. 

But this experience is not uniquely American. Both Britain and Canada show how this electoral structure pushes political systems to two parties. 

Britain has been dominated by two parties since the advent of political parties, with third parties occasionally nosing their way into coalitions. At first it was the Conservatives and the Liberals (starting as Whigs). Then, the early 20th century saw the rise of the more left-wing Labour Party. But Labour did not become a third wheel — it replaced the Liberals, who went from leading the government in 1910 with 274 seats to just 59 seats by 1929. 

While the party now known as the Liberal Democrats have occasionally had bursts of electoral success, they have not been able to maintain momentum. They grabbed 57 seats in 2010 and entered into coalition with the Conservatives, only to collapse to just 8 seats in the next election, wiped out by a geographic party, the Scottish National Party. 

And it is only these geographically based parties that can gain representation. Despite never gaining more than 5 percent of the British national vote, the SNP has been able to regularly outperform the Liberals. In 2017, with less than half the votes of the Liberals, the SNP gained 35 seats to the Liberals’ 12. 

Canada demonstrates a similar dynamic with the same system as Britain. Again, Conservatives and Liberals have faced off against each other for more than a century. But two other parties have been part of the political story: the New Democratic Party, a leftist national party and Bloc Québécois, a regional party. 

Like Labour, the New Democratic Party rose up to challenge the Liberals from the left. Unlike Labour, it failed to replace them when it had the chance. In 2011, the NDP outpolled the Liberals and gained 103 seats to the Liberals’ 34, but the next election, the party collapsed to just 44 seats. It has only weakened from there, holding just seven seats after the latest election. 

The Bloc has mostly stayed relevant, despite never gaining more than 10 percent of the vote. It currently has 22 seats, holding the balance of power in the Canadian parliament, with the Liberals (169 seats) just short of a majority.  

And that is the dynamic that stymies third parties while keeping regional parties relevant. Being a geographic also-ran without proportional representation is a disaster. With voters scattered across the country and thus diluted in each district, third parties cannot win seats, whether parliamentary, congressional or in the Electoral College. 

Voters don’t like wasting their votes and tend to drop out or go to the least objectionable major party. In parliamentary systems, holding the few seats for a coalition government means a third party can bargain for some executive power. But in the American federal system, third parties have no power in the executive branch and can only, at best, trade votes in Congress, if needed. 

The independents who do get elected to the House and Senate are from small states with an independent voting streak. Alaska, Maine and Vermont — out-of-the-way states with small electorates — have a record of electing independents.  

However, in their current iteration, it’s worth noting that the two independents, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) are independents in name only. They caucus with the Democrats and vote lockstep with them on everything. When former Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) tried to broker centrist compromises, King and Sanders were nowhere to be found. 

If Musk, Yang and Cuban are as smart as they think they are, they would either plot to replace or take over one of the two major parties. Barring that, they could put together an advocacy group that would involve itself in Republican and Democratic primaries, supporting candidates who circle around a coherent platform. Their group would be a real nonpartisan organization, not the fake “unbiased” PACs that grow like weeds in Washington. 

The bottom line is that Musk’s America Party will eventually go the same way as No Labels and the Forward Party if it follows the same failed playbook — forward to nowhere. 

Keith Naughton, a longtime Republican political consultant, is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.