The prospect of a new political party by Elon Musk is garnering considerable attention. The question for me is whether the focus on third parties will also begin to undermine the American aversion to proportional representation. Ross Douthat has some advice for Musk here. Nate Cohn weighs in here and here. Alexander Burns explains how Musk could succeed. N.Y Times journalists Reid Epstein and Theodore Shleifer outline some of the difficulties that a potential new party would face.

From the article:

Congressional candidates for a theoretical new party face a labyrinthine system of signature requirements that vary from state to state. The most restrictive laws are in Georgia, where candidates outside the two major parties must gather 27,000 signatures from their district. This hurdle has kept third-party congressional candidates from being on a general election ballot since the law was enacted in 1943, according to Richard Winger, the publisher of Ballot Access News, which has tracked election laws since 1985.

They quote this ELB post by Derek Muller.

Even the name America Party could trip up Mr. Musk. New York State, for instance, has a law that forbids the word American — or any variant of it — to be on the ballot as part of a party name, according to the Election Law Blog.

Qualifying a slate of 435 House candidates, were Mr. Musk to take his idea national, would require about three times as many petition signatures as putting a presidential candidate on the ballot in every state and could cost more than $50 million just in signature gathering, Mr. Winger said.