Forget the cries of outrage about Howard Schultz — he should run as an independent, and here's why

In the city he made his home and where he transformed a local coffee chain into a global monster, there is a surprising amount of suspicion about Howard Schultz.

Yes, he grew up in poverty in New York, and yes, he provided decent wages to Starbucks’ employees. But in 2006, having bought the NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics team five years earlier, he sold it to a businessman from Oklahoma. The city has not had a professional basketball team since. Ask most people if they could ever trust this man after what he did, and you get a shake of the head.

Then there’s the matter of him running for president. Having spent most of his life as a member of Democratic Party and backing the party’s modestly liberal agenda, Schultz has announced he is considering running for president as an independent.

“I am living proof of the promise of the country and the American dream and I want to do everything I can to restore it,” he writes in his memoir, From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America.

“I don’t believe it can be restored in a two-party system that is fighting with each other every day, that is dysfunctional, polarised and more engaged in revenge politics than they are in helping the American people.”

The outrage was immediate, and no more so than in Washington state. What was Schultz thinking, people asked? By running as an independent, he would simply split the anti-Trump vote and hand the White House keys to the former Apprentice star for another four years. What chutzpah, what arrogance, what a display of latte-white male privilege.

“I have two words for Howard Schultz on a potential run for president as an independent: Just. Don’t,” said the state’s Democratic Party chair, Tina Podlodowski. “Too much is at stake to make this about the ambitions of any one person.”

Schultz has gone out of his way to insist he will not be “a spoiler”. Over the next three or four months, he will tour the country and assess whether there is enough support for him to carry America with him and win as an independent – the only person do so since the nation’s first president, George Washington, won without the backing of any party.

“Let me be very clear: I have a deep sense of humility about the degree of difficulty of this,” he said last week at Seattle’s Moore Theatre. “I’m not a messiah. I know how stiff this climate will be and that no one has ever done this before. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It would be un-American to say it can’t be done.”

Earlier, at at event in Arizona, he said: “No one in America – trust me – wants to see [Trump] removed from office and not re-elected more than me. I can promise you, I’m not gonna do anything to be a so-called spoiler in all of this.”

Independent candidates have something of a bad reputation in the US. In 1992, businessman Ross Perot secured 19 per cent of the national vote, and was blamed by George HW Bush for allowing Bill Clinton to win. In 2000, Ralph Nader was blamed by supporters of Al Gore, who lost Florida – and thus the White House – to George W Bush by just 600 votes.

Nader, who got around 100,000 votes in Florida, pointed out that if Gore had not failed to win his home state of Tennessee, he would have been sitting with his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office.

As the record of Perot and others show, may Americans would desperately love to support a third-party candidate if they believed they could win. They are turned off by the divisive nature of the two-party system, a system corrupted by the money of special interests and lobbyists, and a system in which two parties have to pretend to be all things to all people.

That means that at election time, the Democratic Party has to somehow seek to appeal to the supporters of socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as it does to centrist Blue Dog Democrats.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, has to reach out to hardline religious conservatives as well as moderates such as Susan Collins of Maine. Given such a reductive, binary choice, millions of voters simply hold their nose, vote for their usual party’s candidate and hope for the best.

That is one of the reasons Donald Trump is president: millions of Republicans who found his views and language repugnant voted for him because he was their party’s man. What if there had been a viable alternative?

Is Howard Schultz the perfect candidate? Perhaps not, but he is not bad either. He has decided to explore running as an independent because he feels the Democratic Party and its recent demonisation of billionaires and people who are financially successful to be un-American.

While the views of people like Ocasio-Cortez may currently be ascendant in the Democratic Party, the views of Schultz – “I have succeeded in America. I always thought that was something to be celebrated” – are probably closer to the sentiments of most Americans. Another thing the 65-year-old has going for him, in addition to his rags-to-riches story, is that he has money of his own to spend – he is estimated to be worth a little over $3.5bn – on the race.

To win the presidency, a candidate must secure 270 votes from the electoral college, a system weighted for population but which overrepresents rural America. If no candidate gets to 270, and the last time this happened was 1824, the 12th amendment of the Constitution says a candidate is selected by the House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation having one vote. (On that basis, the House currently gives a 26-24 edge to the Republicans, with two delegations, those of Michigan and Pennsylvania, tied.)

What does all this mean? It means that somebody whose vision for the nation could appeal to voters from both parties, who could show themselves not to be in the pocket of corporate donors and special interests, and who has a compelling story to tell, could, with a huge amount of luck, end up winning the White House as an independent.

We live in strange times. Run, Howard, run!