Billionaire former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz considers presidential bid. That could be good for Donald Trump, bad for Democrats

Former Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz said he’s seriously thinking of running for president in 2020 as a centrist independent candidate, a prospect that’s already drawing objections from Democrats who say it may throw the election to Donald Trump.

The Brooklyn-born billionaire, who dabbled with politics and thorny social issues as he built Starbucks into one of the world’s largest restaurant chains, announced his possible long-shot bid on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday.

He said Americans were tired of the current system and looking for a better choice.

“We’re living at a most-fragile time,” Schultz said. “Not only the fact that this president is not qualified to be the president, but the fact that both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics.”

Besides the 60 Minutes interview, Schultz also sent his first tweet on Sunday. He said, “it feels good to be here” and “my hope is to share my truth, listen to yours, build trust, and focus on things that can make us better”.

Schultz, 65, whose political ambitions have been widely rumoured for years, would be making his first run for public office. Speculation that he would make a bid for the White House ramped up last June after he announced his retirement as the chairman of Starbucks, listing public service as an option for his next chapter.

At the time, he also laid out a centrist vision for the US, calling Trump’s tax cut reckless and knocking “vitriolic behaviour” from the White House.

Schultz is worth about US$3.5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, giving him the ability to keep a campaign funded as a field of potentially more than a dozen Democrats and the Trump campaign compete for donors over what will be almost two years of campaigning.

Schultz said on 60 Minutes that a price tag of as much as US$500 million to win would not change his mind.

“I’ll say it this way: we’ll be fully resourced to do what’s necessary,” he said.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the prominent Democrats mounting a campaign, has criticised wealthy presidential hopefuls who might use their personal fortunes to fund campaigns and urged the party’s voters to reject such efforts.

“We ought to be building a movement [and] not having billionaires buy these campaigns, whether we’re talking about super PACs or self-funders,” Warren said earlier this month in her initial campaign trip to Iowa, which will hold the first official contest in the nomination race in February 2020.

The potential run also risks ensnaring Schultz’s company, where he remains chairman emeritus. The Washington state Democratic Party tweeted a photo Saturday of a Starbucks coffee cup with the words “Don’t do it Howard!” written on the side.

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No independent candidate has made a successful run for the White House, and the structure of US elections in terms of getting on ballots in all 50 states and fundraising heavily favours the two major parties.

Third-party or independent candidates typical register only a few percentage points nationally in presidential elections.

The last serious independent bid for the presidency was made by another billionaire, Ross Perot in 1992. He got almost 19 per cent of the popular vote but won no Electoral College votes as Democrat Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush.

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The Green Party’s Ralph Nader received almost 3 per cent of the vote nationwide in 2000, and many people blame his 97,000 votes in Florida for costing Democrat Al Gore the White House.

Some Democrats are already saying another billionaire businessman and political neophyte who thinks he can solve US problems as an independent would hive off votes in favour of Trump’s re-election.

“It would provide Donald Trump with his best hope of getting re-elected,” Julian Castro, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and former San Antonio mayor, said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

Given Trump’s approval rating in the low 40 per cent range, “his only hope, if things stay the same – and that’s a big if – is essentially to get somebody else, a third party, to siphon off those votes,” Castro said.

Asked on 60 Minutes whether he’s worried about siphoning votes away from the eventual Democrat candidate and ensuring a second term for Trump, Schultz said: “I want to see the American people win.”

“I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, independent, Libertarian, Republican,” Schultz said.

“Bring me your ideas. And I will be an independent person, who will embrace those ideas. Because I am not, in any way, in bed with a party.”

Schultz said while he’s been a lifelong Democrat, the US now has about US$21.5 trillion of debt and both parties are guilty of “a reckless failure of their constitutional responsibility”.

He said he would “not have given a free ride to business” with the tax cut Trump and Republicans enacted in 2017, and he criticised Democrats for proposing “free health care for all”.