Why The Schultz Conventional Wisdom May Be Wrong

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not even formally announced his independent candidacy for president, and already conventional wisdom has solidified: It will only help President Donald Trump.
 
The logic goes something like this: Schultz basically has left-of-center views and, therefore, will pull votes away from whichever of the 100 or so Democratic candidates eventually emerges as the party’s nominee in the fall next year.
 
The conventional wisdom is wrong, or at least, far from certain.
 
First, the consensus. From the right, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on “Fox & Friends” urged Schultz to run and strongly suggested it could push Trump over the top.
 
“I fully expect the president is going to be our nominee, and with Howard Schultz in the race, he will have an absolutely smashing victory over whoever the Democrat is,” he said.
 
You can tell how thoroughly the left agrees with that sentiment from the intensity of the anguish that Schultz has inspired. The folks at “Morning Joe” on MSNBC ambushed him with a silly question about the cost of Cheerios. Progressives pounced on his ignorance as evidence that he is an out-of-touch billionaire.
 
Twitter users pounded MSNBC contributor and fierce NeverTrump (former) Republican strategist Steve Schmidt for expressing a willingness to work for Schultz. Some users declared they were unfollowing Schmidt. Pundit Eleanor Clift accused Schultz and Schmidt of “Playing Russian Roulette With 2020 Election.”
 
Eric Garland, executive director of Competitive Futures, insinuated that Schultz might be disloyal to the United States. He tweeted that Schmidt is a partner at a consulting firm that did work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
 
It is impossible almost two full years before the election to predict how the race may play out. Schultz ultimately may not even go through with a bid.
 
But if he does, there are many reasons to believe the effort will amount to very little. First, Schultz has no political experience. Trump, of course, also had no experience as a candidate before his successful run for the White House. But he had spent decades in political environments and in front of TV cameras. He was a professional performer who had given hundreds – perhaps thousands – of interviews.
 
Trump may not have known much about governing or the nuts and bolts of a campaign, but he was intimately familiar with a key ingredient to a successful political run – media savviness.
 
Second, Schultz has no obvious issue or cause to rally a base of support. Ross Perot nabbed 19 percent of the vote in 1992 as an independent candidate largely on the strength of his folksy attention to two issues that resonated with voters and that the major-party candidates either did not talk much about or had no credibility on – the national debt and trade.
 
Perot is the rare independent candidate who made a major impact on a presidential race. Most third-party candidates get a percentage point or two.
 
And Schultz lacks the kind of geographic base that say, George Wallace, enjoyed when he ran as the candidate of the South in the waning days of segregation.
 
Theoretically, Schultz presents as a middle-ground candidate who could appeal to voters turned off by partisan warfare. In practice, it is hard to see who Schultz’s constituency would be. Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters are eager – desperate even – to get rid of Trump. It is unlikely they would fool with Schultz if it jeopardizes that goal.
 
And Schultz is not likely to endear himself to Democratic-leaning voters with comments like this, offered Wednesday to Joe Scarborough: “No, I’m not a Democrat. I don’t affiliate myself with the Democratic Party, who’s so far left, who basically wants the government to take over health care, which we cannot afford, who wants to give free college to everybody.”
 
At the same time, Schultz is not a natural fit for Republican voters. Even those voters who may be leery of four more years of Trump are likely to balk when they examine Schultz’s conventionally Democratic views. He favors abortion rights and gun control. He opposed the tax cuts passed by Congress and is no fan of Trump’s immigration policies.
 
The fact is, independents rarely take substantially more votes from one major-party candidate over another. In Perot’s case, as detailed in FiveThirtyEight’s “The Perot Myth,” the split was down the middle. Exit polls showed 38 percent of Perot voters would have supported Bush, another 38 percent would have voted for Clinton and the rest would have skipped the election.
 
If Schultz runs, a similar outcome is likely – only with a much smaller overall share. He’d maybe get a few disaffected NeverTrump Republicans, a handful of Democrats worried their party has gone too far left and some unaffiliated voters who dislike the two-party system.
 
Whether Trump wins or loses, though, Schultz almost certainly will not be the difference.