Now, here’s Abby…

Despite all the drama surrounding Elon Musk’s very public falling out with Donald Trump—which culminated in a vow from the world’s richest man to launch a third party and to support primary challenges against “every member of Congress” who voted for the “biggest debt increase in history”—virtually every Republican I’ve spoken with over the past week has expressed the same view: We’re not that worried.

Perhaps they’re having flashbacks to Musk’s failure in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, or they’re tracking his –23 percent net favorability, which is even lower than when he left the administration. But there are other, more systemic reasons why his new America Party will have trouble getting off the ground, let alone defeating Republicans who supported the president’s signature, deficit-exploding legislation. As it turns out, even a centibillionaire can’t spend his way out of the stranglehold of the two-party system.

To start, there’s the patchwork of state laws that makes ballot access daunting for third-party candidates. Musk’s deep unpopularity will also make it challenging for him to recruit serious talent, whether consultants or candidates, who fear Trump’s wrath. It’s also increasingly hard for insiders to take him seriously, given that it was only two months ago that he claimed he had “done enough” political spending and would refocus his energies on Tesla. “What month does he lose interest and stop?” a seasoned House G.O.P. consultant mused to me. “The likelihood that he goes through the whole thing in a serious effort, outside of a couple of races, seems low to me.”

Musk, for his part, says that he doesn’t need to win more than a few races to shake up D.C. Indeed, rather than trying to mint a third-party presidential candidate—the most successful U.S. example being Ross Perot, in 1992, when the anti-deficit, populist billionaire (sound familiar?) won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote—the America Party strategy would be “to laser-focus on just two or three Senate seats and eight to 10 House districts,” Musk wrote on X over the Fourth of July weekend. He continued: “Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.” In short, Musk is launching a highly unusual, and likely incredibly difficult, effort to disrupt things now—which means shaking up the coming midterms.

Despite their sprawling geographic scale and billion-dollar price tags, presidential campaigns are actually much simpler than your typical midterm showdown. After all, it’s one thing to spend nearly $300 million on a single candidate like Trump—as Musk did in 2024—and another thing entirely to spread capital and other resources between a dozen or so races out of the 468 seats up for grabs in 2026. And, without a presidential candidate at the top of the ticket, these midterm races will be much more localized, featuring idiosyncrasies relating to specific regions and districts. Candidate recruitment might be Musk’s biggest hurdle, but his party would also need to hire political talent that understands how to navigate these local fights—at the risk of being blackballed in the future. “Money can’t solve everything,” one G.O.P. operative noted to me.

That’s not to say there isn’t an appetite for a third-party option. Increasingly, voters don’t identify with either of the two major parties, and last year, Gallup found that 58 percent of voters felt a third party was needed. But drawing voters into a new camp requires a strong political proposition, and Musk, himself, doesn’t exactly have that kind of crossover appeal. In the aftermath of his DOGE antics, there’s little chance he would be embraced by voters on the left after feeding USAID “into the woodchipper.” An AP-NORC poll from June shows a mere 6 percent of Democrats view him favorably. Musk would also likely struggle to pick off voters from the Trump-aligned MAGA base. Earlier this summer, when he first declared political war on Trump over the Big Beautiful Bill, Musk called the tax and spending legislation a “disgusting abomination,” among other things. At the time, Republicans told me it was a “no-brainer” whose side to choose: the president’s.

Still, the AP-NORC poll found that while Musk’s favorables slipped a few points among Republicans amid the fracas, 64 percent of Republicans still view him very or somewhat favorably. And Musk could easily spoil a handful of campaigns, potentially affecting the narrow balance of power in Congress. After all, even where third-party candidates don’t crack 10 percent in returns, they can pull just enough votes from one side to deliver victory to the other, particularly in the narrowly divided districts where the House is won or lost—although which of the two major parties benefits is unpredictable from race to race. “Third-party candidates are an important aspect of individual races every cycle, but you cannot predict or make a blanket statement about the way they will play out,” Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg told me years ago. “It is very individualized.”

In the long run, of course, the real problem for Republicans is likely much simpler: the loss of Musk’s campaign money. Musk didn’t just spend more than $250 million to elect Trump in 2024—he also contributed $10 million to the Senate G.O.P.’s super PAC and coordinated with the House G.O.P. campaign apparatus. Yes, Republicans have done just fine fundraising in 2025 without Musk: The Congressional Leadership Fund, the House G.O.P.’s super PAC, announced today that it has raised more than $60 million so far this year. But given the steady uptick in campaign spending, and the cost of mounting a race at any level, it will hurt for a $20 million-ish donor to “come off the board,” the House G.O.P. operative told me.

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