Why Howard Schultz's presidential bid was doomed from the start
His third-party run relied on support from voters in ideological "no man's land"
What slice of the electorate is “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”?
The Takeaway: Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, has blamed ideological extremism, partisanship and tactical voting for the demise of his long, long, long-shot presidential bid. In reality, he was always quite unpopular, relying on support from a very small slice of the electorate and probably doomed to failure. But the two-party “doom loop” is still alive and well; it’s embedded in the very systems of America’s electoral institutions. The bigger shame with Mr Schultz’s withdrawal from the race is that he never really understood—or pledged his money to fight—the actual reasons why that’s true.
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Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, has ended his bid for the presidency. Axios reported on Friday, September 6th that Mr Schultz is “abandoning his campaign but still plans to spend big ‘to fix our broken system’” of two-party politics. He said “Not enough people today are willing to consider backing an independent candidate because they fear doing so might lead to re-electing a uniquely dangerous incumbent president”.
While it’s true that tactical concerns may prevent people from voting for a third-party candidate, in fact, Mr Schultz’s bid to upend the two-party “doom loop”—to use Lee Drutman’s term and title of his upcoming book—was destined for failure from the start. That destiny may also have been driven by something else: ideology. The simple fact is that most Americans do not share Mr Schultz’s ideology of conservative economics and social liberalism. This is made clear by a graph posted to Twitter by Hans Noel, a professor of political science at Georgetown University, way back in January:
The graph places voters and candidates in a two-dimensional “space” according to their positions on different policy issues. Speaking from the point of view of spatial voting—an imperfect approximation of voter psychology, to be sure—Mr Schultz never stood a chance.
If he actually wanted to upend the two-party system, Howard Schultz would give his money to groups that advocate for reforms to the country’s electoral rules. Because the winner of an election is the candidate who gets the most votes, Americans are disincentivized from voting for candidates who have a low probability of victory. Such is called “Duverger's law”; if a country uses the first-past-the-post electoral system, the natural tendency is toward two competitive parties.
Of course, the bad news for Howard Schultz is that even if America did fix its “broken” two-party system, he would have been an unpopular candidate regardless.