Why Can’t We Have More Parties? with Lee Drutman

27:28And, you know, frankly, for a lot of people, I think it doesn't seem to affect their lives all that much or they don't perceive that it affects their lives all that much, whichever party is in power. And there's just sort of a general distrust. So, I mean, I think the U.S. is on the very low side of voter turnout among advanced industrial democracies. And, you know, there are a lot of people who are really disengaged. You know, there are some countries that have mandatory voting, Australia, Belgium, Mexico, Brazil. Yeah. And they charge you like 20 bucks if you don't vote or something. It's small.

28:03So, you know, I'm not, you know, I think it probably improves turnout slightly. I'm not sure it changes politics all that much. And I don't see it ever happening in this country. Okay. But a majority or I guess a plurality of Americans, because it's 43%, believe that the two parties we have kind of suck, right? So they're double haters. The question is, why do we want more of these parties? It's like wanting more toxic boyfriends if you have daddy issues. It's like, why is more parties a good idea in the system of bad two parties? Because political parties are sort of the essential institutions of modern representative democracy.

28:43And it's really hard for modern representative democracy to function without parties to structure and organize political conflict and engagement. So, you know, maybe, you know, I mean, I'm sure there are some nice boys out there. Even if you're, yes, that's a good, a good use of the analogy. There's also the theory that like the two-party system captures evolution. Like, I mean, I hear all kinds of complaints about the two-party system. One is that there aren't really two parties. There are really one, there's really one way of thinking in American politics and they kind of divide on the margins of some 10 % of issues that they'd like to keep in the spotlight of things they disagree on, but they're all the same old guys doing the same old things.

29:22That's a critique you hear. All right. Well, you know, there's something to it. There's another critique you hear where you're like, well, there are actually many parties, and to Madison's point, there are factions within these parties, and those factions are in competition. You see that with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party versus the more moderate wing right now. And in your book, you talk about kind of a four-party system that did once exist of kind of wings within that party. So that's another critique that you've heard and that the two-party system will evolve to expand it. What do you think is the true reality of American politics?

29:54Are we in a real two-party system? Are we in a one-party system? Are we in a four-party system? What is happening? So a bit of a Rashomon analysis here. It depends on how you look at things. Despite the differences between the two parties, there is a lot of overlap compared to many other countries. The U.S. Democratic Party is pretty center-oriented, so there's not a real, genuine left party in the U.S., as there is in some countries. So if that's your perspective, then it does seem pretty similar. Everything depends on your perspective. It's sort of like that famous New Yorker cartoon where the map of New York is very large, and then there's west of the Hudson River, and the rest of the country seems kind of flat and undifferentiated.

30:48Yeah, it's a real Rochard test. Yes. On the other hand, there are real differences within the parties. There are factional fights. And the parties are still very big tent parties. It's just that the tents are really non-overlapping at this point. And so what happens every election is that Democrats say to everybody in the coalition, you may disagree with us on this or you may disagree with us on that, but if Republicans win, it's the end of the country. Yeah. It's the end of democracy. And Republicans do the same thing, say, you know, you may disagree with us on this or that, but Democrats are worse.

31:26So precisely because the parties are these somewhat heterogeneous coalitions, the unifying force is, well, if the other side wins, it's terrible, right? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And this is what you think of as a two-party doom loop, this feedback loop that gets louder and louder. The parties are just more and more opposed to each other, shouting more heavily to each other. I mean, I don't want to state your book. Why don't you tell us what this political doom loop is, right? That's exactly it. It's an escalation of rhetoric. And then, well, I mean, see how terrible Trump is. So we can't have any dissent within the Democratic Party.

32:08We have to get on the same page. Trump says, well, you know, do you want the socialist woke Democrats ruining America? Get with me. And you just get this escalation. And it justifies increasingly extreme tactics. Now, I don't want to say that it's symmetrical because I think that the Republican Party has gone to a much more illiberal extremist position, but everything is a reaction to everything else. So, you know, the Democratic Party, talk about like, you know, the FBI or the DOJ. Now, OK, we're going to like enforce the law and if people breach the Capitol grounds, they should go to jail. Well, so that's like, to me, as a person on the left, that's like legitimate use of government authority.

32:56But person on the right says, oh, they're just weaponizing the Justice Department and weaponizing the FBI. So we have to do it back to them. Then as a person on the left, I say, well, you know, maybe if they're going to weaponize this, maybe we need to do that as well. Right. I mean, so it's like this way in which you justify your behavior based on what other people are doing. And it gives you a kind of moral license to do that if you feel like the other side is worse and the stakes are higher. Yeah. And so this doom loop that we are in, and I do feel, I think many Americans feel we are in this doom loop.

33:33And, you know, many are critics of their own party. They might pick a side and they might still critique that side, as it seems you're doing right now, as you are someone on the left. That reinforces, that doom loop really reinforces the two-party system, right, in your argument. Yes, yes. There's no escaping the two parties because if you're outside of the party, you're against the ideal of America. You're on the other side because there's only two camps to live in. And so this two-party system is propagated by the people and the most extreme voices that would want you to believe that they are fighting for, be it the soul of America or the opportunity to make America great again.

34:10Right, exactly. And, you know, if you're not supporting your side, then you're supporting the other side, right? because it's zero sum. I want to get back to third parties in a minute, but I do think that we have heard this refrain for so long that America is the greatest democracy on Earth. Now, you know, your book kind of challenges whether that's true on our electoral systems basis, whether we have, in fact, the greatest design of democracy of the world. You would say that we do not, correct? We do not. And one way to actually know this is because the U.S. has been involved in nation building around the world and democracy promotion.

34:46Oh, yeah, I'm familiar. Yeah, yeah. And we never tell people to copy our system, you know, to the extent that the U.S. is helping other people write their constitutions. Nobody is copying our constitution. Yeah, Noah Feldman or no other kind of constitutional scholars are going out there saying, hey, this is the best way to do it. Okay, so that's a design system. But then on the vibe system or the, you know, the real tech system, I would say of, I think if you're an American looking at the world to say, you might look at one of two kind of assaults on democracy that we have seen in recent history.

35:20And I'm not equating them, but I'm saying that to people looking at them, they are similar, and you brought them up too. One is the trespass on the Capitol on January 6th of 2021. The other being, for lack of a better term, I'll call it Weekend at Biden's, the Weekend at Bernie's, recreation of the debate where we saw the president's kind of cognitive abilities and the subsequent reporting we've seen from Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper and others to tell us about, hey, there was this kind of fait accompli in the party to let Biden keep running. And then there was a kind of fait accompli that the candidate was going to be Kamala Harris.

35:57Neither of these two things feel like the peaceful transition of power or the kind of great democracy and choice for voters that we've been sold. How does this compare to you as a moment for a third party, given that on both sides, People are feeling pretty frustrated with, if not their own side, at least the other. The moments in which third parties have had the biggest breakthroughs in U.S. political history, you know, recent political history. The last, you know, is like Ross Perot in 1992. He got 19 % of the vote. Of the popular vote, but no electoral. No electoral votes, right. And there have been other third-party candidates, George Wallace in 1968 running on a keep racism alive and well on the South platform.

36:48Strom Thurmond in 1948 running on a let's not desegregate the military platform you mentioned. Discuss Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 as a progressive candidate. So there have been various moments in which third parties have gotten some purchase when their supporters feel like it doesn't make a difference which party wins. I'm willing to take a chance on a third party because the two parties are effectively the same. And in 1992, when Perot runs, I think a lot of people felt, well, we talked about Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Not that much difference between the two of them. They didn't really last.

37:27But to the extent that they got some purchase, it was because people felt like it didn't make a difference. You could vote for a third party. Now, I think part of the challenge for a third party at a national level in this moment within the single winner system, if we keep the current electoral rules, is that a lot of voters feel like, well, I don't love the Democratic Party, but gosh, the Republican Party, they're just evil. So I guess I'll vote for the Democrats. Same with the Republican side is, well, you know, we just got to stop the woke left, right? Like, yeah, I'm willing to tolerate whatever because I want to see the lips being owned.

38:06The desire for the other party to lose is greater than the desire for this candidate to win. Yeah, or as political scientists call it, negative partisanship. Negative partisanship. That sounds about right. So what you're saying is in this moment, it does feel like one of these moments where Ross Perot or Teddy Roosevelt could carry a large number of voters, except for the fact that the other guy is so bad that nobody wants to risk voting for a spoiler. Right. And this is, you know, if we rewind the tape and think about how nobody wanted No Labels to enter the race. No Labels was a political effort that was launched for the 2024 election to see an alternative moderate candidate emerge out of the...

38:52And they got a bunch of money, but they could never get a candidate to actually sit and run. Nobody serious wanted to be the person who spoiled the election. Yeah, nobody wanted to be that asshole. And is it that nobody wants to be that asshole and cost us democracy, or nobody wants to be that out of favor with the potential president or the likely president? What is actually the driver? You spend time in Washington. Yeah, I think it's that they didn't want to see that as their legacy. I mean, like Joe Manchin was the strongest potential, no labels candidate as sort of the last centrist in the Senate.

39:27And now I think ultimately, do I want this to be my legacy? The answer was no. I mean, you know, you know you're going to be attacked brutally, and you're not going to get that many votes. You know, if RFK had stayed in, he might have gotten some, you know, 5 % to 7 % of the vote. I think there were that many people who... But he wouldn't have taken any electoral votes away, so the end result would be the same, right? Probably, although maybe he would have taken some votes away from Trump. And that would have changed the electoral math in certain... Could have. Okay. Who knows? Who knows? Do you have that kind of counterfactual for, obviously, by the way, you've just gone through third parties.

40:05You mentioned Andrew Yang once. He's going to be very upset from his third party. Oh, yeah. Hi, Andrew. Yes. What would have happened if, I hear that Elon is talking to him as well. We should, we'll get to that part of the conversation later. But what would have happened if Bernie Sanders ran as an independent in 2016, you think? It's possible. He, well, he probably would have lost. He probably would have taken more votes from Hillary than he would have from Trump. I think he would have won in 2016 if he had won the Democratic primary. Yeah. Yeah, there is that. The Democratic Party right now just feels like it is embattled because nobody wanted to be that asshole that served democracy to Donald Trump.

40:49But in fact, former President Biden ended up being a person who helped make that happen and the Democratic establishment around him. This seems to be where there's a lot of rift right now. And I have to look no further than my own backyard. So in New York right now, we have a mayoral campaign where we have a former Democrat incumbent mayor who has kind of disavowed the Democratic Party, Eric Adams, running as an independent. you have a person who's won the democratic nomination who comes from a progressive wing of the party from actually from a different party the democratic socialist or amamdani who's going to be running as the democrat on the ticket and then you have a democrat who kind of had a dizzying uh back and forth with the party andrew cuomo who feels the former governor who feels like a Democrat institutionalist in a lot of ways, but couldn't win the primary and is now running as an independent.

41:45So when you look at New York, where the historical Democrats couldn't carry the ticket, what does that tell you? Does it tell you anything about New York? And does it tell you anything about the nation? I'm not sure it tells you that much about the nation. I think if, you know, there's a sort of, you know, generational split going on that I think it is representative. I think people are very eager for a new generation of leaders in politics. I think the gerontocracy is a real issue. I think what happened within the Democratic Party around Biden really destroyed the credibility of the Democratic Party for at least a decade in a way that I don't think we've fully grasped.

42:33And just for people listening, gerontocracy, of course, is governance by the old. Yes. governance by the old. But there's something about the New York system, because in New York, there is this ranked choice voting system. There's something about the system that produced a result that is a different, that is worth kind of exploring outside of New York. They call it a fusion voting system, which makes it sound like French-Vietnamese cuisine or something. What is a fusion voting system? So fusion voting is actually the thing that is really interesting about New York. Okay. What is it? So in New York, you have actually this system that used to be widely legal.

43:12Now it's only legal in New York and Connecticut. And it is a system where you have multiple parties that can endorse the same candidate on the ballot line. So in New York, you have a working families party alongside the Democratic Party. Now, most of the time, working families party endorses the Democratic candidate. But because you have disaggregated fusion and candidates can see how much of their vote came on the Working Families Party and how much of their vote came from the Democratic Party. They know where their support is. So what that means is that the Working Families Party actually has some real influences.

43:46It's probably the most effective third party right now in the United States. And it's effective because it has that fusion ballot line. And actually, there's a case in New Jersey right now to re-legalize fusion voting in New Jersey. There's a case in Kansas and a case in Wisconsin. So there's a real effort to try to re-legalize fusion voting, which was once legal everywhere. So we talked about the split in the Whigs in the 1850s, but actually a number of the anti-slavery parties, the Free Soil Party, the Liberty Party, were fusion parties. and they were able to introduce those issues into the election, the major parties were ignoring because they could endorse one of the two major party candidates on their ballot line.

44:34So actually, I think this is a really important first step to bringing back some multi-partyism in the U.S. Okay. So fusion voting is the path, is like the first step maybe to getting toward a third party system. Even, you know, because the things that we're talking about, moving to a proportional system or moving. Right. I mean, that's a, yeah, that's a decades long project. You know, we might see some state level ballot initiatives and in maybe as early as 2028, but. Okay. All right. If there is going to be a third party right now, is that third party going to be moderate or is it going to be populist to be popular?

45:11That is a good question. And, you is the challenge of any single third party within the single winner system, no third party is going to be successful without electoral reform. There is the potential that you could have a third party that runs in a few House or Senate seats or state legislative districts where one One of the two parties is dominant in a way that the other party doesn't really challenge it, but people want an alternative. But answer the question, because people have been for a long time thinking, okay, it's the moderate middle that's going to bust out of this extremist system, this doom loop that you're talking about, that's going to be birthed out.

45:55It's going to be this moderate middle that will come in and either capture the imagination of one of these two parties or become some kind of third party. I think other people think, really, the trend has been populism. Like, that's the trend that was backing Obama in some way. that's the 20 % that went from, you know, Obama to Trump. That's the Bernie bros culture. That's really what's behind, you know, it's headwinds for Donald Trump. What is the reality? Like, is, where is the force and the kind of energy right now in the country as you look at it? So I don't think it's in the, it's in the quote unquote, moderate middle.

46:29Now, I mean, there's, it's probably, that's probably five, maybe 10 % of the electorate. But I think, a lot of that moderate middle has essentially become part of the democratic coalition at this point. And it was never that big to begin with. I think the populist sort of anti-system part of the electorate is larger, but it's kind of all over the place. I think this is the challenge without parties to organize that and give it some coherence. It just is sort of this amorphous all over the place, bouncing around. I mean, one of the other things that political parties do in addition to organizing and structuring political conflict is they give people a sort of collective identity, right?

47:16Yeah, a platform to run. Yeah. Well, not only a platform, but like, you know, if you think of a map, right, you know, like you could think of a map of a city as just like a bunch of streets and not really knowing where you fit, and then you put in certain neighborhoods and you say, You know, people, you know, these kinds of people live in this neighborhood. These kinds of people live in this neighborhood. These kinds of people live in this neighborhood. Well, now, okay, now I can locate myself, right? I can see where I am. But without that structure, it's very hard for people to see, like, where do I belong?

47:48And then you get in that neighborhood, and then you go, oh, there are people like me. Okay, now we can organize. Now we have some sort of collective identity, where as opposed to just having this big amorphous map, it's sort of hard to know where you belong and where you fit. It's so interesting because I think historically there's been a lot of this conversation around the moderate middle, which you're saying is very small. And then there's this wingtip of either party, like which I think the Atlantic once called it the crunchy granola to conservative access around, you know, people who are kind of on two extremes of both parties who actually might have more in common, but they can't find each other in the same neighborhoods is your point.

48:23Yeah. And, you know, they have important differences too. Like immigration, et cetera. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I think some of this comes, you know, it's sort of, we have this metaphor of politics on this one dimension, like this liberal to conservative dimension. And, you know, we get sort of confused by the idea that there's a middle that's somehow between these, you know, along this flat line and we think about the median voter. But, you know, if you think about politics in multiple dimensions, when I do a scatter, do a scatterplot of the electorate in two dimensions, you see things emerge.

49:02I've yet to figure out a way to effectively represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional screen. You need the Z-axis, I think. Yeah, I mean, I've tried that, but it just always looks really weird. Venn diagrams. It's something about Venn diagrams. Yeah, yeah. You know, Venn diagrams, that's true. I mean, I have a piece that I wrote for the website 538, which sadly no longer exists. But I did a Venn diagram where I looked at the overlap between people who said they were independent, people who said they were moderate, and people who were undecided about who they were going to vote for. And the overlap between those three categories is very small.

49:45One last question here is, is the problem that we don't have more than two parties, or is the problem that we don't have one sense of country? I mean, I guess those are both problems. And I think part of it is that, I mean, there's a way in which they are related problems in that having a binary political system forces us into these two camps that have become increasingly oppositional to each other and picked up on different aspects of what it means to be an American. My feeling is that if you had a less binary political system with more shifting coalitions, more overlap, you wouldn't have this central conflict over the meaning of America.

50:31I mean, it's funny that we, although there's a public opinion poll that came out, never been higher support for immigrants in America. Something like 79 % now think immigrants make America a better country. And actually, America has generally been a pretty pro-immigrant country, much more so than a lot of Western European countries. And yet we have this split over immigration. So it's almost like the party system has created a lot of artificial binaries because people are looking to distinguish themselves in opposition to each other, rather than a more multidimensional, multi-party conflict where it doesn't quite trigger these same us versus them, friend versus foe circuits in our brain.

51:19All right, we're going to take a quick break and then when we're back, we're going to discuss Elon and if he's going to shake this all up and give us a third party, which is ironically called the America Party. I don't even know if that's going to last legal clearance.

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52:06Numbers are numbers, people.

52:14So now we're going to talk about Elon Musk and what's going on with this third party, the American party. Elon and Donald Trump were embroiled in a bit of an argument. Elon was calling Trump's bill utterly insane and destructive. He launches these tweets. Donald Trump says that Elon is off the rails, a train wreck. He might deport him. And the president had this to say about Elon Musk's third-party dreams. Elon Musk starting a third party. I think it's ridiculous to start a third party. We have a tremendous success with the Republican Party. The Democrats have lost their way, but it's always been a two-party system.

52:52And I think starting a third party just adds to confusion. It really seems to have been developed for two parties. Third parties have never worked. So he can have fun with it, but I think it's ridiculous. Do you think it's ridiculous, third parties? No, I don't think it's ridiculous. It's interesting because Trump initially ran in the Reform Party. He tried to get the Reform Party nomination in 2000. It was when Pat Buchanan got the Reform Party nomination. And so he was originally going the third party route and then got nowhere. Then he started going the Republican Party route. So look, I mean, he's going to be dismissive of anything Elon Musk does.

53:36And, you know, I mean, it's not it's not a crazy reaction to say that third parties have been the, you know, have not had any success in the U.S. and that we have an electoral system that's designed for two parties. But who knows? Well, as you know, it's kind of a wildcard moment. Let's maybe talk about the timeline here, which is that Trump and Elon said their goodbyes on May 30th. And on June 5th, Elon Musk tweets out a survey saying, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80 % in the middle? And 80 % of 5 million votes come back on Twitter saying yes.

54:15That tweet also got some circulation. Mark Cuban retweeted it with three checks. It was a buzz. How did you see that as someone who's been kind of studying this two-party doom loop for years? I participated in that survey and said yes. Oh, you did? Okay, excellent. You know, I mean, kind of a double-barreled question, right? Like, do we need a third party, and is that party in the middle? And I mean, it's not in the middle, otherwise no labels would have Joe Manchin in the White House, but... Yeah, SurveyMonkey is not going to hire Elon Musk to design their surveys. This is a complicated question.

54:50But it gets at the issue, which is he brings us up because he's upset about the big, beautiful bill, which is now a law, a big law. I think people will debate its beauty. So you voted and you say yes to this survey. Did you take it seriously at the time? I thought he's raising the issue of third parties. And I did write a little bit about it. I wrote a piece on my substack under current events that was an open letter to Elon saying, welcome to the cause of multi-party democracy, but here's what you need to know, which later Politico republished as an op-ed. I wrote a piece for Vox about how he could disrupt the two-party system by running candidates in a handful of competitive Senate and House districts.

55:42Even if they get 10 % of the vote, they could be spoilers, which apparently he says he's going to be doing. So maybe he took my advice. Did he give you some credit, Lee? Are you sure it was your advice? Do the timelines match? I don't know. You know, it's sort of the obvious, you know, if you're an, as I wrote in that piece, if you're an engineer, you'll quickly see that this is the weak point in the system. Right. And he did. He did quickly see that because his people kind of pooh-poohed his survey saying, you know, this has been tried and tested and never done before. He kind of said, well, what if I just had, you know, two to three Senate seats and I think it's eight to ten House seats that could really kind of push the system into gridlock or out of it?

56:28Yeah. But, you know, in essence, it's like, can you create many Joe Manchins or Kristen Sinemas? Yeah. That are in that era of the Senate. So Elon then, you know, a month later around July 4th says, Independence Day is the perfect time to ask if you want independence from two-party. Some would say uniparty system. And he says, should we create the America Party? 65 % of the 1 million respondents to this poll say yes. And then Elon decrees, by a factor of two to one, you want a new political party and you shall have it. When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.

57:04Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom. He proclaims it so on July 5th or so. Does tweeting a third party make a third party? No. Okay. What actually makes a third party?

57:21Sustained tweeting? Okay. No, I mean, you've got to run candidates and file paperwork and organize and incorporate. This sounds much less fun than tweeting. Well, you can do both. Not either or, as many people in politics have shown. Yeah, that's true. They are great multitaskers in that way. It sounds crazy, but it was early 2022 that Elon was just tweeting out a poll about Twitter. and by October of that year, he owned Twitter. You know, despite there was lots of back and forth in there, he tried to get out of it at some point, but the man has some history of making things happen. I want to get into the practicalities of how that would be.

58:05So, one, Elon spent$250 million to help Trump win the 2024 election. How much would he need to spend to launch a third party that could win what he's talking about, which is, let's say, three Senate seats and 10 House races, How much does that cost? At least that much money. At least$250 million. Yeah, probably. And all the infrastructure and paperwork and everything. You know, I mean, money's a fungible resource, right? You know, you can, you hire enough people. If you have$400 billion, yeah. If you have$400 billion, you know, and you want to spend a million of it, or a billion of it, a million doesn't get you much.

58:43Billion, yeah. He could do it for a billion dollars, you think? I think so. And, you know, that's, you know, to him, that's just not that much money. Yeah. I mean, just to put it in perspective for people,$250 million to Elon Musk is like$500 to$1 ,000 for someone who has a million bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Or like$50 to$100 for someone who has$100 ,000. That makes it much more realistic to us. So asking him to spend four times that is like asking somebody who has$100 ,000 to spend a couple hundred bucks on this dream. It's like taking a weekend trip or something. Yeah. It's like taking the Acela for 100 ,000 air.

59:28I want to compare how Elon Musk is approaching this to how someone like Bloomberg or Howard Schultz or other people with lots of money have approached third parties before. Or lots of people with celebrity status, if Jesse Ventura's case, have approached third parties. Because I guess one is pockets. He has more money. We're saying that matters a little bit. The second is, he, it's not personality-driven. He himself is not the candidate. He is, like, the hype man for this thing. Does that help him or hurt him, you think? I mean, he has a certain negative charisma. I mean, he also controls a massive social media platform.

1:00:11So, like, there's never been somebody quite like Elon Musk to make this kind of proclamation about starting a third party. You seem reticent. You seem reticent to say that it might do something. Is that fair? You know, I mean, count me as skeptical, but not dismissing it as out of hand, given his track record and his sort of berserk negative charisma and energy. You said the whole parties are defined by their negative personality, negative partisanship. It seems like negativity drives a lot of the forces of our politics. Yeah, exactly. So he has that in there. What about the actual strategy here of winning a handful of Senate and House seats?

1:01:04Is that a winning strategy for somebody who's looking to do a third party versus, say, run yourself for president? Yeah, that's a much more savvy strategy. Yes. You say that as you advised him on it. I don't know. You know, he might have read my piece. I hear he's an avid reader. I did post it on X, so. In terms of the timeline here, can he do anything by 2026, even with a strategy on the local races? Like, is he going to be able to be a contender come November 2026? Like, can you even file the paperwork that fast? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, if you have money, you can, you know, either every state has some signature requirements for getting on the ballot.

1:01:45But, you know, plenty of people who will stand outside your, you know, grocery store and gather signatures if you pay them, which, you know, the guy's got money, so you can do that. I mean, no labels, you know, had ballot access in a lot of states. They didn't use it, but. Yeah. So take that example. The no labels movement in 2024. They had money. They had ballot access. They had good organization. But they did not have a person. They did not have personalities that were willing to come in and take the seat. This is at a local level. And Elon Musk, it seems, I think he's talking to some right-wing strategists.

1:02:23He's talking to the Democrat, Dean Phillips, who was the one person who tried to go up against Biden in 2024 in the primaries. So give him some more free advice here, Lee. What does he have to do to get ready? All right. Elon, are you listening? I mean, you recruit some candidates who are charismatic people who are willing to put themselves out there. Give them some training and give them a lot of money. And you might be surprised how well they do. Again, there is that portion of the electorate who says, you know, well, the whole system is broken. And you can organize a party that says this is a vote to upset the system.

1:03:05is broken, vote against the Uniparty, right? And I think there's a segment of the electorate that might genuinely feel that. I think it would be particularly strong among a youngish tech bro-manosphere world. People who he helped bring to Donald Trump, probably, and people who Joe Rogan, et cetera. I mean, there's a lot of kind of sway sway in that election as we talk about the 2024 race. Particularly if you, you know, if you can get those kinds of folks bringing guests on their podcast who are running and drawing attention. I mean, you know, Elon's good at attention. Where would you focus? The eight to 10 House seats, the two to three Senate seats, what do you think in 2026 is up for grabs, are in states that there's a party that's strong enough that it always carries the state, but it's not so strong that people aren't sick of it and willing to upset it?

1:04:07Because that's kind of what you need, right? Right. Well, I mean, there's two strategies here. One is the target the swing states, target the swing house districts, where you would only need to get 5%, 10 % of the vote to show that you can disrupt the system, right? So essentially you're saying, you know, I can give this election to the Democrats by running a candidate. Now you better listen to me because I can take this away. I hold the balance. That small section of the electorate that holds the balance of power in that small number of states is now on my team. That's probably the highest leverage, highest ROI strategy.

1:04:48Yeah, but that doesn't get you people into the Senate or the House. That just gives you power in the local party level to have sway over where the direction of the party candidate or how that party votes. It potentially gives you sway over both parties if you say, you can't win without me. So that's one strategy. The other strategy would be to take a state like, say, Idaho, which is a solidly Republican state. Democrats have no chance. and run a candidate. To take a state that is lopsided for one party, like I'm just thinking about Idaho, for example, a small enough state where you could make a breakthrough, maybe one of the Dakotas, or one of the smaller population states, where the Democratic Party is moribund.

1:05:37And essentially, with enough money, You, you, your candidate becomes the, the candidate most likely to defeat the Republican. Right. Because like the third party, the second, the, in the two party system, the second party is so weak that a third party insurgent could actually upset the whole. Could, could effectively be the second party. And in that world, the second strategy, you could actually end up with seats in House or Senate. Okay. Having met Elon a few times and having produced interviews with him, I would say he's more of a door number two guy than a door number one guy. Okay. That is my sense.

1:06:15Do you think that Elon Musk is Pollyannish in his desire to have a third party and call it? I mean, actually, let me ask you this. There has been conversation about how you can't even call it the America Party because in certain ballots, in certain states, they won't allow you to use the word America in the party's name and still be on the ballot. We saw this with RFK, where RFK was actually only on like 40-something state ballots and not all 50 because of various rules and regulations that happen at the local level. Does that kind of stuff concern you, that this movement is not going to get their paperwork done?

1:06:47Oh, yeah. Look, if he's committed to it and he wants to throw money at it, they'll figure it out. Like, yeah. Yeah. That's a silly obstacle. Is he Pollyannish? I don't know. I mean, it depends what his goals are. But, you know, I mean, I think that's my understanding of his entire career is that he looks at these things that nobody has done before and says, I'm going to do it. He's made a lot of money doing that. So, I mean, he has a certain amount of drive to do these things. So who knows? Would you advise him on it if he called you? I'd take a conversation with him. You have been questing for a third party.

1:07:29I mean, you used to think the path to get there was ranked choice voting. You said you've now moved more towards the proportional model or the fusion model, maybe, it seemed like in this conversation. Yeah, yeah, both, I think. Do you think you're Pollyannish? Do you ever, like, sit there and think, what am I, should I go back to thinking about lobbying? I can maybe make more of a dent in the lobbying, corporate lobbying world than I can in the two-party doom loop. I think we're all, I mean, this is sort of the human condition to be Pollyannish. Like, people buy a lot more books than they read.

1:07:57people to get a lot more gym memberships than they use. We're all overly optimistic. I don't know. I think my view is that I'm, you know, go through life and, you know, try to make a contribution, try to take the skills and advantages that I have and, you know, try to leave things a little bit better than I found them. And, you know, if I succeed, I succeed. And if I don't, then I don't. When you write a book like Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop or Ezra Klein writes a book like Abundance, which Ezra and Derek read a book called Abundance, what do you want to happen with that thought piece or any thought piece that you're putting out there?

1:08:39How does it influence things? Besides you want to sell books, presumably. Well, actually, I don't really care that much about selling books. I would give it away for free. Okay. Well, don't tell that to all the listeners who are going to be buying your book now. I mean, they should buy the book because, you know, but they can also email me for, no, I can't tell it to my publisher. Buy the book. What is the mechanism by which a book like Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop or Abundance works through the system and results in change? And is there an example of that kind of book in the history of politics?

1:09:12I mean, the most famous example is probably Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which was sort of the progenitor of the modern environmental movement, or maybe Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, or maybe most famously, Uncle Tom's Cabin. And, you know, I mean, so I guess you say, here's an idea, here's a way of looking at the world that makes a lot of sense to me. And I want to share it. I want other people to look at the world in this way, because I think it would be a better world if other people saw the world in this way. And I'm going to write it. I'm going to try to make it as compelling and interesting and engaging.

1:09:59as possible. And then I'm going to go out there and talk about it and write about it and see if other people agree with me. And if they do, great. And if they don't, then I give it my best shot. I think it's a noble quest to want to put ideas into the world and people see them. And definitely what we try to do on this show is to help people think about how to think about things, not what to think about things, which is why I want to disclaim and separate the kind of politics from the ideas. And I think a lot of people are questing for that right now. I end my conversations by asking guests what they are dumb about, what they don't know.

1:10:37I asked you a lot of dumb questions about third parties and toxic boyfriends. What is your question that you have not figured out the answer to or would like someone else to go figure out or ask aloud for you? All right. So here's a question. So Americans, we waste a lot of money on food that we throw out. where probably like 35%, 40 % of our food gets tossed. And so we're not very efficient in our own lives. So why do we expect government to be so perfectly efficient if we're so inefficient? Is that a leading question about Doge? But maybe it's that we don't know ahead of time how our week's going to go.

1:11:19And we want to have a... This is a good question. Why do we overpurchase and underconsume? Why are we so inefficient in our own lives? That is a good question. And as you're asking, I'm feeling all kinds of guilt about the kale mix and spring lettuce mix that is definitely going off in my fridge as we tape this. Or is it the over-optimism bias that we discussed? Yeah, could be that. It could be over-optimism. That is a good hypothesis. Lee, thank you so much. We'll figure out the answer for you. So I appreciate you coming on and talking to us. All right. Well, it's my pleasure. Great conversation.

1:12:05I learned so much from Lee Drupman. I think it's because he brought together this really interesting perspective, which had the understanding of politics and money for sure. But it also had this understanding of history and an understanding of how other countries do things that I think fused together in a Venn diagram, the kind Lee Drutman and Kamala Harris love, to give us a perspective that I hadn't really heard before. And three things really stood out to me. The first is this idea of constituencies and how arbitrary they are. I mean, in the U.S., we talk about a popular vote, maybe for the presidency, where everyone could band together and vote one way or another, and we'd figure it out at a national level and not have the electoral system.

1:12:40And that's interesting. But even more interesting was this idea of a legislature where people in California and people in Texas and people in Ohio could figure out that they actually agree on, say, loving animals and vote together in a party. I just think that's a really interesting innovation to think about. The second thing was just the understanding of all these different party systems and fusion voting and particularly like the New York system and how that might look if it expands in the way that Lee is talking about. And it seems like Elon Musk could be a big part of that expansion. which brings me to point three, that Elon Musk really seems to have a fighting chance here of doing something that upends our political system or at least shifts it or grabs some power.

1:13:21Of course, we don't know what's going to happen, just like we don't know that Bernie would have won 2016, though that was an interesting point from Lee. But we do have to wonder about the person who's doing that and also their strategy for change. It reminded me a lot of the conversation I had with Mark Cuban in the first episode of this show, which was called Can Billionaires Save Us? And Mark outlined this path to getting to universal healthcare by going through a really capitalistic route. So I don't know. I think jury's still out on this one. I want to know what you guys think. Does Elon have a shot at this third party?

1:13:51How do you feel about it? Let me know. I'm Naima Raza, 101 at gmail.com. Check out that episode with Mark Cuban. Check out Lee Drupman's book, which he is not going to give to you for free, but you can check out his sub stack under current events. And I believe there's a free option there. This episode was produced with Healy Cruz, Dana Ballou, and Noah Friedman. I'm Naima Raza, your host. Our music is by David Kahn. And we'll be back next week with an all-new episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Please tell your friends about it. Please review the episode. Share it far and wide. Thanks so much, guys.

1:14:21Bye.

1:14:32Should she say that about the kisses? Is that weird? She doesn't care. She presses send. This is the love story of real hinge couple Daniel and Roisin, written and read by me, Rufy Thorpe. Listen to the free audiobook now.