Howard Schultz, 65-year-old billionaire ex-CEO of Starbucks, is exploring a run for President as an independent.
Howard Schultz will almost certainly never be President.
Howard Schultz intends to run on a platform of milquetoast “centrism,” fiscally conservative but socially liberal. He believes that the welfare state must be slashed in order to balance the budget. This position is to the right of Donald Trump, never mind the Democrats.
It’s also not a terribly popular position. There is a reason why neither major political party has ever settled on “fiscally conservative, but socially liberal” as a platform: because outside of a few think tanks in Washington and op-ed pages, there aren’t actually that many people who support this ideology. This is basically the Libertarian Party’s platform, and the Libertarians rarely break two percent of the vote in elections contested by the two major political parties. They’re little more than an outlet for protest votes.
I understand the concern among many Democrats with a third-party candidacy: that a third-party candidate might split the anti-Trump vote and lead to Trump getting reelected. That’s a valid concern, but there would be more danger to Democrats from a third-party candidate running as an explicitly leftist candidate than there is from, well, this. The reason is simple: “centrist” third-party candidacies in the past have tended to draw from both major party candidates, as well as bringing in a lot of people who don’t normally vote. Clinton still would have beaten Bush in 1992 even without Perot pulling a significant share of the vote; Reagan still would have beaten Carter in 1980 without John Anderson pulling around ten percent of the vote. George Wallace in 1968 pulled a lot of disaffected Democrats, sure, but most of those voters were not about to vote for Hubert Humphrey.
The lone example of a third-party candidate who did, inarguably, play spoiler was Ralph Nader in 2000. Unlike the other examples, Nader was (a) running in an election that was extremely close between the two major-party candidates and (b) running on a platform that disproportionately appealed to voters from one of the two parties.
Donald Trump’s approval ratings are currently below 40 percent. For Howard Schultz, or any other third-party candidate, to play spoiler, he’d probably have to pull 20 percent of the vote should Trump’s approval ratings stay that low. The bigger concern is not a third-party candidate splitting the anti-Trump vote; rather, the concern is that Trump’s numbers might get a dead-cat bounce as the election comes closer and normally Republican voters remember that the other alternative is to vote for a Democrat.
In that context, a centrist third-party candidate might actually help the Democratic candidate by siphoning the votes of people who don’t want to vote for Trump, but don’t exactly want to vote for a Democrat, either. If you think about it, a third-party candidate might end up barring the door for Trump.
