Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz speaks during Starbucks annual shareholders meeting

Absolutely No One Wants Starbucks’ Howard Schultz to Run for President

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Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is reportedly preparing to enter the 2020 presidential race as an Independent candidate, and pretty much everyone agrees that’s an absolutely terrible idea.

The consensus among Democrats and everyone else who doesn’t want to see Donald Trump reelected is that if Shultz entered the race, it would basically guarantee Trump a second term. Because while Schultz says he’d be an Independent, he would inevitably draw far more votes from the left than from Trump’s base.

Schultz seems to have a fundamental lack of understanding of how politics works. He appears to think that there is a substantial pool of unclaimed Independent voters who are living in a political vacuum, untouched by party politics, ready to be swooped up by any great leader. In reality, most Independents have strong leanings towards the ideologies of one party line or the other. Schultz has described himself as a “lifelong Democrat” and even if he runs as an Independent, his socially liberal, fiscally conservative approach isn’t going to draw as many potentially Republican votes as he seems to think.

In an article over at Intelligencer, Jonathan Chait writes of Schultz, “His apparently sincere belief that he can be elected president is the product of a sincere civic-minded commitment to the public good and an almost comic failure to grasp how he might accomplish this. That confusion is probably being spread by his hired staffers, whose financial incentive, conscious or otherwise, is to encourage him to embark on a costly political fiasco.”

It doesn’t help that Schultz seems unable to actually say anything worthwhile about his platform.

Some are already planning a boycott of Starbucks if Schultz enters the race.

The silver lining of all this Schultz news is that people are using it as an opportunity to share stories about Schultz. Because this billionaire, who was the CEO of Starbucks from 1986 to 2000, and again from 2008 to 2017, is possibly the cheapest man on the planet.

(image: Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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