According to a new poll, 57% of male Republicans say they are likely to support Elon Musk’s “America Party”
Almost half of voters said they are likely to support a new political party proposed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to fresh polling.
A Quantus Insights survey released Wednesday found that 40% of voters said they would be likely to back Musk’s “America Party,” which aims to serve voters disillusioned with both Republicans and Democrats. Musk shared the poll’s results on X, calling the results “Encouraging.”
Musk first pitched a new political party in early June after he clashed with Donald Trump over the GOP’s multi-trillion-dollar tax and spending bill.
I’m actually very much in favor of Musk starting a political party that effectively splits the Republican vote and makes Democrat victories that much easier. Go Musk!
It looks like it would split the Democratic vote too. Which suggests a lot of Democratic voters (like pretty much all Republican voters) don’t have the first clue what’s going on.
That could be a great thing. If Musk launched a party with large enough base support of clueless morons to destabilize both Rep and Dem parties, that would create space for the creation of a liberal/left party, and suddenly we have escaped the crushing gravity of the two-party system.
That said, I doubt Musks party would have even a fraction of the support that is suggested.
Actually, a new party that successfully pulls from both parties would most likely be centrist at best.
It doesn’t matter if Musk’s party is centrist or far right. The point is, if it pulled enough support to destabilize 2 party elections, that opens up space for more parties to legitimately enter the political arena. It could cause a domino effect that would open space for the rise of a true left party.
Centrist, so… left of the democrats?
Centrists as in centrists. People who are center-right aren’t going to join a party that intends to go far left.
That’s context we don’t actually have.
It’s possible that Democrats are simply clueless as you suggest, but we don’t know how many people supported this not because they intend to join Musk’s third party, but because they also know that it’ll split the GOP vote and make Democrat victories easier.
That would only hurt the Democratic Party if it split at approximately the same ratio as the Republican Party. If half of Republicans split while only a tenth of Democrats split, the results favor Democrats majorly.
That said, we don’t have anywhere near enough data.
My guess is 30 to 40 % Reps leave, 5 to 15 % Dems leave, and a whole bunch of ‘independents’ join as well, various libertarians and crypto/techbro type people.
EDIT:
Yay, I don’t have to do
anytoo much math, they actually did most of the math.Apologies for shitty cell phone image, here’s the whole poll (3rd link in the article, by the way):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4pZVo0ZnrQyElZQzdNtt7CQ1zwTypuS/view
…
So, ballparking a 50/50 male female split:
Likely to Join Elon’s Party:
Very likely: 23 + 14 / 2 = 18.5%
Somewhat likely: 34 + 29 / 2 = 31.5%
Not likely: 31 + 30 / 2 = 30.5%
Very likely: 18 + 11 / 2 = 14.5%
Somewhat likely: 29 + 26 / 2 = 27.5%
Not likely: 35 + 36 / 2 = 15.5%
Very likely: 7 + 5 / 2 = 6%
Somewhat likely: 15 + 16 / 2 = 15.5%
Not likely: 54 + 48 / 2 = 51%
…
So, if you say half of the 'somewhat likely’s actually go for it, then you get this:
Republicans who join Elon Party: 34.25%
Independents who join Elon Party: 28.25%
Democrats who join Elon Party: 13.75%
…
So yep, my ballpark guess was indeed in the correct ballpark.
…
Worth mentioning:
There are more Dem voters, than Republicans.
But there are also more independents than either.
Roughly 32% Reps, 33% Dems, 35% Indp.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/
So, throw that in with those previous calcs, and you end up with:
Reps: ~21%
Dems: ~28.5%
Elons: ~25.5%
Indps: ~25%
or, normalized to remove remaining Indps:
Reps: 28%, Dems: 38%, Elons: 34%
So… theoretically, the Dems are still the largest, Elon is now second behind them, and the Reps are now a third party, less popular than having no solid political affiliation.
… if this actually happened, which it could, Elon has enough money to single handedly start a party, though he’d have to find some actually competent people to… do anything other than spend money…
I think you end up with a good number of corpo Dems leaving the Dems, so the Dems now have an easier time shifting to the left.
The Reps lose 1/3 of their voters, and basically just become a cult of idiot racist nazis, paleocons, theocrats, MAGA nutjobs.
Elon party … basically becomes the ‘centrist’/libertarian/ancap/corpo party.
… and everyone would now have to figure out how to do politics in a much more complex kind of paradigm.
I… don’t think a roughly even balanced 3 party system has ever existed in US history with any kind of stability, that endured more than one or two Presidential elections, 8 years.
Two roughly approximate examples:
The Civil War.
Teddy Roosevelt going Bull Moose Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_eras_of_the_United_States
But uh yeah, not stable.
And these numbers are close enough that a 3 party system might not implode quickly… or it also could.
Especially if the President just gets to remain as functionally a dictator as the last months and years Supreme Court rulings have made him.
???
Yup! Let them fight.