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- Neither Party Has Faced an X Factor Like Elon Musk</p>
<p>Philip ElliottJuly 8, 2025 at 5:12 AM</p>
<p>This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.</p>
<p>As a rule, third party candidates don't win in the United States. Then again, a third-party bid has never had the backing of the world's richest man.</p>
<p>Which is why multi-billionaire Elon Musk's announcement this weekend that he is launching his own political party has pretty much every political pro in Washington gaming out how a ticket-splitting effort rooted in retribution might play out. The United States remains a winner-take-all duopoly, but it is still subject to the effects of an aggrieved spoiler.</p>
<p>Musk unsuccessfully tried to prevent Congress from passing President Donald Trump's legacy-defining domestic tax-and-spend legislation. Trump signed the bill into law on July 4, and military jets buzzed the White House to punctuate his win despite the bill's broad unpopularity. The President was, not long ago, Musk's biggest supporter and not coincidentally the recipient of some $288 million in campaign backing from him. Now Trump says the Tesla chief is "off the rails,"and has threatened to deport him back to his native South Africa despite his U.S. citizenship.</p>
<p>Whether a result of his combative personality, almost bottomless wealth, or fury at being tossed aside, Musk has chosen not to roll over, as so many spurned Trump allies have, and has instead hit back. Now, as the world's richest man goes up against its most powerful, the question is how much damage Musk's "America Party" will inflict on Trump's GOP. Anxious pols are watching for the fallout.</p>
<p>Musk made no secret of his contempt for the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill and all who supported it, promising to primary and defeat those who voted for it "if it is the last thing I do on this Earth." But his threats failed, the bill passed and now Musk's search for retribution will test American politics in new ways. The deep-pocketed upper crust of U.S. donors have long enjoyed outsized influence since super PACs became the de facto governors for cashflow in campaigns. But Musk, the single biggest player in the billionaire-consultant-politician complex, could set new limits.</p>
<p>Both parties' campaign chiefs are trying to figure out the impact of Musk's new independence. The American two-party system tends to shrug off third-party disruptors, but they are hard to control. Republicans worry that Musk will make good on his promise to fund primary challengers against each and every one of them who voted to give Trump a win. They also worry he could run third-party candidates in races where incumbents survive.</p>
<p>Democrats, meanwhile, are all too aware of the unpredictability of a third-party effort. In 1992, billionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate and siphoned enough votes away from President George H.W. Bush to make the patrician insider a one-termer. Perot '92 collected about one out of every five votes that year, but he won zero electoral votes, just the unspoken thanks from Bill Clinton's team in Little Rock. In fact, the last time a candidate who was neither a Republican nor a Democrat won national electoral votes was 1968, and that was avowed segregationist George Wallace. Democrats still bemoan Ralph Nader's presence on ballots in 2000, although the analysis that the consumer-safety zealot cost Al Gore the presidency is less clear-cut than many of them think.</p>
<p>So when it comes to the impact Musk will have on next year's midterms, or even on the 2028 presidential race, the wildcard is just too wild to predict. Musk's resources are unrivaled. His temperament is entirely mercurial. His politics, inscrutable. And his beef with Trump—and those who empowered him to balloon the national debt while scrapping subsidies for Musk's EV empire—is for now at least limitless. So volatile is the situation that, in one day of feud between Trump and Musk, the markets destroyed more value for Tesla than the entire value of Starbucks.</p>
<p>It's quite a turn of fortune for a man who until recently wandered through the federal bureaucracy with a red Sharpie and zeroed-out budgets, fired career professionals, and slashed programs that stood to end HIV/AIDS and malaria in Africa. He had extraordinary access to agency operations, line-by-line spending plans, and databases that held some of the most sensitive information on Americans.</p>
<p>But that didn't make Musk popular, and for Trump, that made him a liability. In January 2024, Musk was about a 6 point positive, according to Nate Silver's analysis of his favorability in polls, but he has sunk to negative 18 points today. By contrast, YouGov's polling shows Trump's unfavorables have swung upward by just 2 points in the same window. Despite his quarter-billion in patronage of Trump last year, Musk had become a fast-sinking anchor.</p>
<p>Musk was also seen as a rival power center in Washington. His neophyte team raided the bureaucracy and summarily killed time-tested programs. The tech bros brought a budgetary scythe to the party. After hours, they hung out at a private club near the White House and joked about how they had upset the federal apple cart. And Republicans in Congress simply stepped aside to let the slashing continue.</p>
<p>Now, Republicans are going to have to contend with Musk's well-financed vengeance, unpredictable as it is. And they are rightly terrified because neither party has faced such an unpredictable X factor.</p>
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<p>Write to Philip Elliott at [email protected].</p>
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