Why start a party instead of creating a caucus within an existing one? No new party has prevailed in the US in centuries, and rarely elsewhere. It doesn't seem to be a solution in the domain of problems it's trying to solve.<p>I get the business side of politics is to represent people and their interests in the democratic process in exchange for financial support, but forking a party to do it may give you more direct access to those funds for efforts instead of having them filtered and allocated by the mainstream party, but at that point, you might as well just be another lobbyist group.<p>I could just start The Billionaires Party, whose goal is to ensure the interests of a few thousand people were represented in the democratic process, and if I could blackmail enough members of other parties, billionaires wouldn't be able to afford <i>not</i> to give donations to support my party. But if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't start a party, I would run a lobby group, or as above, organize a caucus of the establishment party members I could bend or compromise.<p>A party has constraints and restrictions, where a lobby group does not have the same ones, and if you want the benefits of party membership like electability, you give up some of the freedoms of lobbying. Reality is, politics isn't about fixing problems, it's about winning and having your interests prevail, and becoming the people who manage and extract value from problems, not solving them. To adapt a proverb, government isn't in the business of teaching men to fish, it's there to keep him coming back to be fed for a day in exchange for his continued compliance.<p>Of the options available, starting a new party seems so un-strategic as to be a fast filter to find suckers, like spelling mistakes in spam emails, where if people don't see those, they're likely vulnerable to being taken in. Forking a new party seems like a way to do that same thing.<p>That said, by splitting the vote in key areas, he can become a policy kingmaker, as is common with minority governments in the parliamentary system, and that's certainly a play, but it essentially reduces strategically to taking hostages to get policy concessions during an election cycle, which does work, but usually only once, and anything that requires follow through after his leverage is gone is going to be dropped and never touched by any party again. A new party is not the recipe for change.