If Howard Schultz really runs in 2020, he'll be handing Trump a second term – here's why

No doubt Howard Schultz has strong views on strong coffee, and the former Starbucks boss understands plenty about building, and subsequently rescuing, a global business. We also happen to know he is a lifelong Democrat, and he has some fairly conventional centrist views on issues such as the economy, America’s national debt, trade with China, immigration and gun control. He backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. And now he’s announced he wants a run for the White House next year, not as a Democrat but as an independent. There is, apparently, a “Ready for Schultz” movement.

Like one of the nerds inventing yet more exotic variations on the Starbucks macchiato or a new type of mochaccino, Schultz spots a gap in the market – between the liberal Democrats and the Trump-dominated Republican Party. It is, then, a beguiling sort of temptation for a man who has plenty of life and energy in him, and could certainly bring a great deal of common sense to policymaking in the White House. Less tweeting, more thinking, you might say.

As the government shutdown over the infamous wall showed, once again, America is viciously partisan and polarised, and so the “moderate centre” remains unrepresented. As with Macron in France and his En Marche! personal political vehicle, could Schultz and his as-yet unnamed grouping storm the White House as an independent candidate?

The short answer is “no”. Howard Schultz is not Emmanuel Macron, which is to say he is not a smart enough politician. He lacks Macron’s political experience, instincts and charisma. And whereas Macron might be categorised as of the “radical centre”, at least in his aspirations for economic restructuring and European integration, Schultz appears to be more of your split-the-difference type of “moderate”, with fuzzy felt ideas.

Take his tweet launching his bid: “This moment is like no other. Our two parties are more divided than ever. Let’s discuss how we can come together to create opportunities for more people.”

Not exactly FDR; not JFK; not Reagan; not even Trump. Just an entirely negative appeal, the “none of the above”, “plague on both your houses”, “not Donald Trump” choice. It is not quite good enough.

I don’t know enough about coffee to be able to characterise the Schultz political “brand” in Starbucks menu terms, but it would be a fairly tepid, cloudy and mild sort of brew, not the sort of thing that would wake you up with a jolt. At best, a Schultz intervention would make Americans ask a few questions about the divisions in their society. But then again, America has had its share of traumatic episodes and political dysfunction since the Second World War, with some more serious than others: the civil rights movement, assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra, the Lewinsky affair and impeachment of President Clinton, the disputed “hanging chad” election of 2000, the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perpetual shooting sprees and domestic terrorism.

America’s politicians have been fearsomely rude to each other. What did former president Harry Truman say about Nixon during this supposed pre-Trump golden age of cross-party harmony, consensus and politesse? Ah, yes: “Richard Nixon is a no-good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.” Maybe the standard of vulgar abuse was better in those days, though.

Even if Schultz did enjoy Macron’s positives, the US is not France. America has an electoral system that is even less generous to independent candidates than the French one. Besides, the Americans already have their radical insurgent: Donald Trump.

He won’t win, and so we return to an old question: who will Schultz take votes most away from? He would certainly take some from Trump, from the liberal Republicans and centrists appalled by Trump’s conduct and policy. More likely, though, he would attract Democrats. Those floating voters who are repulsed by Trump, but have their reservations about the dominant statist, liberal wing of the Democrats, will be attracted to somebody running on a kind of Obama-Clinton platform.

They want a better yesterday. They want rationality. They don’t want higher taxes. In what might turn out to be another very tight election, if Schultz takes slightly more votes from the Democrat candidate than he is does from Trump, then it will, on balance, help Trump win a second term.

Third party or independent candidates can affect presidential elections, but their impact varies hugely, and unpredictably, according to mixed historical precedents. When Ross Perot – yet another impatient businessman – ran against George HW Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992 he probably helped the Clinton campaign. When the independent segregationist southerner and former nominal Democrat George Wallace ran in 1968, he probably helped Nixon get in, like Clinton, on a relatively modest share of the national vote. Ralph Nader, on the green-red left, did Democrat Al Gore no favours in that famously close 2000 contest; and an obscure chap named John Anderson, a former moderate Republican, mostly offered centre voters an attractive alternative to unlucky Democrat president Jimmy Carter in 1980, ironically helping Reagan – the least centrist of the three – to win.

That’s it though for the likes of Wallace, Anderson, Perot and Nader – psephological puzzles, footnotes in history. You have to go way back to before the First World War before you find a candidate leading an American popular movement coming anywhere near actually taking power – the Progressive Party, led by former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most remarkable personalities in American history. He was feared by his rivals, and his movement, almost a personal cult, ran across traditional party lines. It was nicknamed the “Bull Moose Party” because Roosevelt declared himself “as fit as a bull moose” during his vigorous campaign. He didn’t win.

The truth is that Howard Schultz would not only be running against Trump and whatever Democrat turns up on the day, but against the entire party system. He is right it is in a mess, but for many voters, fixing it matters far less than their party loyalty or personal allegiance to President Trump.

America today is already ruled by an “independent”, a maverick, a clown if you like, who could never have won as a formal independent candidate, but did so by capturing, quite audaciously, one of the established parties. The problem with Schultz’s insurgency is that he hasn’t got any insurgents to fight it: no party, no values, no history, as someone in this country once said about such an initiative. Doomed.

There are some heavy lessons from the Trump phenomenon for Schultz. Were Trump more generous of nature, he could explain it all to Howard over a cup of coffee.