← Rick Wilson's The Enemies List
Rick Wilson's The Enemies List
Breaking the Duopoly or Breaking the Bank? Elon’s "America Party" Experiment | Enemies List
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This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Make visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off terms apply. All right, folks, not an enemies list topic, but I've got to say something about Elon Musk and the America Party. There are about 20 people in the country who, who have tried to do, at a serious level, third party efforts, who've tried to put together legitimate third party bids for various enterprises and offices. Whether it's new parties or presidential candidates. I'm one of them. Reid Galen did more work than almost any human being I've ever met on trying to put third party stuff together. And it just is a really high hill. We didn't have the money that Elon Musk has. So I want to talk a little bit about why the America Party is trouble for the Republicans, possibly a little bit of trouble for the Democrats. Keep your eye on that. And finally, there will be a bipartisan immune response to this that we shouldn't, shouldn't have, but we will. Okay, first off, starting a new party is really hard. It's so difficult. It's such a unbelievable multivariate problem space. You got to go out to 50 states and territories, more territories. Gotta get to the 50 states first. Let's keep it there. Some states, it's easy. Some states, you tell the Secretary of State, we form the new party and they go, okay. Other states, you have to get some signatures. And most Republican states have made that process incredibly baroque and involved and expensive and difficult. In some states, you have to go and actually start. It's sort of a tautological problem. You have to win elections to be a party, and you have to win more elections to keep being a party. The duopoly of the Republican and Democratic parties for many, many, many generations had a unified immune response to third parties. They hate them. They do everything they can to fuck them up. I've done so. I've written about it. I've been to this rodeo. In one state in 2016, we've followed every single legal rule, every single legal rule. And the governor's office just went, nope, arbitrarily. They knew if they said no, and we had to go to Court and back and forth. And being about that, it would take forever and it would have. And it would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to litigate it. That was in a Republican state. I understood why that was happening in a Democratic state. Same year Democratic state, Democratic Secretary of state said, you've got to go out and get X number of signatures and you've got to do this and that. So went out and got signatures, paid the filing fee, did the whole thing. It disappeared in the Secretary of State's office like a black hole. Couldn't get updates, couldn't get figured out. And then they said, oh, the deadline's passed. Sorry your application wasn't processed in time. The duopoly does not like third parties. Elon Musk brings something to the table that the duopoly has rarely dealt with. It's money at scale. Bloomberg thought about it and he didn't see a path. Elon, however, is cognitively different than Mike Bloomberg. He doesn't have to have a 50 state party. Now I have Elon Musk. And Elon, by the way, I know that you work with Jeff Rowe and I know that you work with this guy and you think he's the Whama Jama. He lost Wisconsin for you. The Trump team will go after you a hundred times harder because they hate Jeff Rowe so much. Now every, all of us hate Jeff row too, because he did. We're on Desantis. He's an evil son of a bitch. But Jeff has been advising Elon. Nobody hires Jeff Rowe twice as the joke in politics. But Jeff could spend a billion dollars of Elon's money, probably get him into a bunch of states on the ballot. Here's why it's complicated. Then you have to go recruit candidates. Then you have to have people who can run their campaigns. Now, Elon, if you think that Jeff is going to put all this through Axiom and run it that way, you are out of your mind. He has already raped and pillaged you like, like a, like the Vikings rolling into a northern English village in the 900s, you just don't realize it. You're just not that you're smart, but you're not smart that way. But if he does it, if he launches this, if it's even successful in a dozen states or 10 states or seven states and you mount campaigns in those states, a lot of people that are responsive to this message that Elon's pushing about fiscal responsibility and the Constitution and blah, blah, blah, they may be gettable, they may be movable Keep Take all the race shit out of it. Elon, I know that's difficult for you. Take all the race shit out of it and you may actually have something here. The problem though, for Democrats, Elon is not a progressive. He is not a left winger, he is not a liberal, he is not a moderate. Elon Musk is protean. Elon Musk is a South African guy. He's got some weird stuff he believes in that borderlines like rubs up against eugenics. Hard enough to think consider it a date. There's a lot of weirdness if he's if this platform is the weirdness stuff, it's not going to work. But if the platform turns out to be things like bitcoin and corruption in government and balanced budgets, guys, there are some Democrats who will go for that too. Not a lot, not as many as there are Republicans. But keep your eye on that. Keep hey, summer's winding down. But you know what doesn't belong in your epic end of summer plans? Getting burned by your old wireless bill. If you're planning those final beach trips, barbecues and three day weekends, your wireless bill should be the last thing holding you back. That's why we made the switch to Mint Mobile. With Mint, you can get coverage and speed you're used to, but for way less money. For a limited time, Mint mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. So while your friends are sweating over data over and surprise charges, you'll be chilling. Literally and financially. Say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. Mint Mobile. 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New customer offer for the first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gig on the unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Keep your eye on that. We'll be right back. And now back to the show. Now, if Elon wants to go and cause the maximum disruption with this America party, because remember, it's a party, not a pack. And a party can spend a lot of money in a lot of different ways that a pack can't. That's a story for another day. I'm not gonna. I may have Mario Nikolais, our general counsel, on to explain that one day, but I'm not gonna spend Sunday afternoon telling you how PAC versus party money gets spent. But a party can do a lot of things with its money. It can advertise a lot of different messages with its money. And the thing Elon's going to have to do here is going to require serious effort. But in a weird way, if I were the Republicans, I would be worried about this. I'd be worried because do they think the landscape's going to look better or worse a year from now? There's almost zero argument that we're going to see an improving economy by then. And if it looks bad and you get the America Party and it does the branding properly and it starts recruiting people and it does the legal traps in the various states. And by the way, so like I said, if I was Elon, I'd go and get some guys running for state offices. And you're not going to win all those seats. You're not going to win all those seats. But you start disrupting a moribund process, you start breaking the pattern. Gerrymandering on both sides has led both parties in a separate into, into further into their ideological silos. And by the way, folks, if you think that red state gerrymandering is bad, may I introduce you to New Jersey and New York and Massachusetts and elsewhere. I am an equal opportunity hater of this process. I will tell you very clearly that if, if redistricting was done sort of algorithmically instead of politically, Congress and the states would look a lot different. It would not be as conservative in Congress by any stretch, but it wouldn't be more liberal, would get more people in the center. And this is a conversation John Avalon and I've been having for 25 years. How do you get that middle re energized? I wish to God it wasn't Elon Musk doing this. I wish it was any other billionaire funding a third party. It'd be great. We need to break the system that has led to this redistricting conundrum. Redistricting is strongly correlated to political corruption. The more your state is politically disrupted, the more corrupt it is. Unbelievably high. Recently we asked some people about sharing their New York Times accounts. My name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't. And it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in wordle or connections. Thank you, Dana. We heard you introducing the New York Times. Family subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more@nytimes.com family R on that correlation. We'll be right back. And now back to the show. Florida, one of the most redistricted, crafted, districted states in the country. There are people that do this for a living in this state. I know I used to be married to one who have gone into these congressional and state legislative districts and they have written them with a beautiful scalpel. And that redistricting process encourages two things. One, corruption. But it also encourages extremism. You know, there's a member of Congress who lives about 60 miles to the east of me who is so batshit crazy, she makes Marjorie Taylor Greene look like Margaret Thatcher. She makes Marjorie Taylor Greene look as liberal as Hillary Clinton. You, you would not have that if this district was not crafted to produce an outcome of insanity. And these districts have been built. They are bespoke. And so they encourage greater and greater extremism and they encourage corruption. None of those things are good for the. For the state or the country. None of those things are good for anybody. So Elon, doing a new party is a fascinating sort of gedankin experiment right now. How much he spends on it is another matter. If it's $250 million, it's nothing. Gotta be honest. $250 million in this environment is nothing. You gotta spread that peanut butter over 50 states. A lot of them are very legally expensive to do. A lot of them require you to go out and get signatures and have people sign up for the new party. And that is cannot be done by AI that has to still be done by human bodies. And in a lot of these red states, they've now made it so that if you're trying to sign somebody up for a new party, you have to use people from your state and money from your state to do it. It's a very, very high hill. He's got every right to do it. He had every right to spend that money on Donald Trump, folks. You don't like it, I don't like it. But he had the right to do it. Citizens United, which all y' all wanted. McAine Feingold, which all y' all wanted led to this world we live in. The dark money world is real. At the Lincoln Project we get a lot of our our donations from small dollar donors but we get our some donations from large donors. They are on our FEC report. The idea that Elon Musk will be the only guy on the FEC report of the America party. It's okay. This is not going to go easily. It could be enormously consequential if he does it right, if he gets serious people around him and Elon, buddy, we, we, we don't know one another personally. I will tell you there are a lot of people you should talk to before you get Jeff Rowe to spend a billion dollars of your money. Because that will buy Jeff Rowe more beach houses and more airplanes. Anyway, folks, thank you for listening today to the enemies list. And do me a favor, go out and subscribe to Lincoln Square. Go out and follow me on substackwilson. I'm also on all the social media platforms under the Sun. Thanks again. We'll talk to you soon. Olivia loves a challenge. It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes correct complicated recipes. But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way. With Expedia, she bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your trip. Expedia Made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.