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Elon Musk says he is going to start a new third party. Assuming he's serious, he'll soon learn that the Democratic-Republican duopoly has made it insanely hard to break into their -- emphasis intentional -- system. As The New York Times observes, "Launching a new national political party in the United States may be more difficult than sending a man to Mars."

If the world's richest man is willing to spend enough money over a sustained period of time -- to stay smart and focused -- it is possible.

Ballot access is the most daunting obstacle to expanding American democracy beyond the two major parties. California, the nation's most populous state, requires a new party to collect 75,000 valid signatures from residents willing to switch parties or register for the first time. A new party's candidate needs 219,000 signatures collected over a three-month period. In North Carolina, a political party is only recognized after its most recent gubernatorial candidate gets at least 2% of the vote in the last election -- hard to do when you're starting from zero. Musk's proposed name -- "America Party" -- would be banned under a New York rule that bans parties named "American" or a variant thereof. In virtually every state, Teams Red and Blue have colluded to block new parties through restrictive ballot access, gerrymandering and closed access to debates.

If the America Party -- or whatever it's called after Musk finds out about New York's name rule -- manages to collect the necessary signatures, the two big parties will file countless lawsuits to have those signatures declared invalid. Disqualifying legitimate signatures is ridiculously easy. In New York, where I live and have managed ballot petition drives, signatures must include a voter's full name, as registered with the Board of Elections. For me, that's not Ted Rall. It's not Frederick Theodore Rall, III -- my full legal name. It's Frederick T. Rall, III. It must list each voter's residential address, including street, city and ZIP code, exactly as it appears on their voter registration. 333 E. 37th St. #3G does not pass muster. It's 333 East 37 Street, Apartment (spelled out) 3G. A single trivial mistake and a signature is toast.

Signature collection is an art. To get America Party candidates on the ballot, Musk will need to hire professional petition managers to handle logistics, recruit petition collectors, ensure compliance with state laws and gather more signatures than required to account for invalidations. In 2023, for example, sponsors of Ohio Issue 1 paid $6.7 million to a company called Advanced Micro Targeting to get a measure legalizing abortion on the ballot. Each signature cost $16.

Fortunately, Musk is a billionaire.

Since he wasn't born in the U.S., Musk can't run for president. So he won't be tempted to start his party with a presidential run, at least not with himself as the candidate. That's great, because it avoids the biggest mistake other independent parties make: to focus on the presidency to the exclusion of less glamorous local races.

The constitutional barrier for a third party to win the presidency is virtually insurmountable. A winner needs a simple majority, at least 270 electoral votes. Even if, by some miracle, an America Party candidate for president were to win a landslide plurality in a three-way race of 268 and the Democrats and Republicans each received 135, the America Party would lose. Under the 12th Amendment, the House of Representatives, currently controlled by the GOP, decides such a "contingent election." The majority elects one of their own, the people's will be damned.

The presidential game is rigged. So don't play.

Third parties tend to focus on the race for the White House because they assume that "unearned" media coverage -- unpaid stories -- raise the profiles of their down-ballot candidates. Besides, building a grassroots party capable of fielding candidates to run for the nation's half-million elected political positions is daunting.

Third parties receive little exposure from the corporate media. So the usual top-down strategy means that when a third-party presidential candidate becomes a star of the news, the party disappears after they go away. The segregationist American Independence Party elected a small number of local officials like county commissioners in Alabama and other Southern states in the late 1960s, only to fade away with George Wallace after 1972. The Reform Party elected more than 200 candidates to local office; it all but vanished after its founder and 1992 standard-bearer Ross Perot left politics.

The Populist/People's Party hints at what is possible when a party begins as a grassroots movement. At its peak in the 1890s, the pro-farmer and pro-labor Populists elected seven governors, 10 U.S. House representatives, five U.S. senators and over 1,500 state legislators and local officials, mostly in the Plains and the South. Building on these local wins, 1892 presidential candidate James Weaver won 8.5% of the vote and 22 electoral votes. (The Populists endorsed Democratic firebrand William Jennings Bryan in 1896, never to be heard from again.) The Socialist Party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also had a nice run at the local level before being sunk by anticommunist laws during the Red Scare.

In this two-party system, a third party should begin by running as a second party. Seventy percent of the 76,902 elections held in the United States are uncontested, meaning that the number of candidates on the ballot is less than or equal to the number of seats up for election. Whether it's for state senate, city council or county coroner, unchallenged incumbents always win.

Seventy-eight percent of law enforcement elections have one candidate on the ballot.

A well-funded new party could fill the gap. If the America Party were to recruit strong local-level candidates to challenge incumbents, finance their campaigns and get them onto ballots, a significant number could cruise to victory on the longstanding anti-incumbent sentiment that Zohran Mamdani exploited to become the Democratic nominee for New York mayor.

Between ballot access, standing up a national party organization, campaign financing for local state and federal offices, marketing and legal defense, a broad-based, new, national party will cost tens of billions of dollars per election. Even if Musk is willing to dig deep, his America Party will last just a few elections -- unless it catches fire with donors. And donors will only kick in if they see support from voters.

Where to find new voters? As previous third-party efforts have learned, institutional and legal barriers, including the belief that a vote outside the Ds and the Rs is "wasted," can cancel out the effect of the most appealing policy platform. Even worse, the America Party doesn't have much ideology beyond Musk's vague vision for a mushy ideology and half-baked thoughts about messaging: tech forward (whatever that means), fiscally conservative, pro-energy and centrist.

As Andrew Yang and Vivek Ramaswamy have learned, voters aren't much into tech bros. Nor are there many untapped voter blocs in the constantly shrinking moderate center. Donald Trump found previous nonvoters on the Tea Party far right, and Bernie Sanders found them on the progressive left because populism, left and right, is where the future of American politics lies. If I were Musk, I'd hire some political historians, journalists and analysts to gin up a magic potion of left-right alliance-of-convenience populism that declares war on the elites -- elites like Musk.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

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