Howard Schultz, Please Don’t Run for President

By Michelle Goldberg,

A bid by an ex-chief of Starbucks would be reckless idiocy.

Unlike Donald Trump, the former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz is a genuinely successful businessman who built a company that’s become part of the daily lives of people across America. For this, those of us who are horrified by Trump’s relentless grifting should be grateful. It gives us something concrete to boycott should Schultz decide to launch a narcissistic spoiler campaign for president.

Shultz appears to share the conviction, endemic among American elites, that the country hungers for a candidate who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

But this frustrated executive’s politics aren’t widely shared by people who haven’t been to Davos. In a 2017 study, the political scientist Lee Drutman plotted the 2016 electorate along two axes, one dealing with social issues and identity, the other with economics and trade. Only 3.8 percent of voters fell into the socially liberal/economically conservative quadrant.

Schultz makes much of the fact that around 40 percent of Americans identify as “independent.” But as anyone who has spent 15 minutes googling should know, independent is not the same thing as centrist.

his candidacy would threaten to siphon away enough votes to give Trump a second term. In 2015 and 2016, Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman whose politics are much like Schultz’s, considered mounting an independent campaign for president. His team looked closely at poll data and focus groups, and found he’d be potentially competitive only in blue states.

Obviously, Trump won anyway, but Bloomberg’s research underscores the folly of Schultz’s trial balloon.

More From The New York Times: