Schultz can win (Part II)

The “resistance” is ripping for- mer Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s third-party run because they fear he will split the Democratic vote and re-elect Donald Trump.

In a self-serving expression of hope masquerading as prediction, Democratic candidate Cory “Spartacus” Booker has already declared that Schultz can’t win. Elizabeth Warren has played her class-warfare shtick by denouncing him as just another billionaire trying to buy the White House.

At the least, one suspects that Starbucks is going to pay a heavy price in the next couple years for provoking the pajama boys of the woke left.

But nowhere is it written that the American electorate has to be stuck with another dismal choice between someone like Booker or Warren (or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders) on one side and someone like Trump on the other, that our noses have to again be firmly clinched shut when entering the voting booth on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November 2020.

Hence Schultz, an entrepreneur who apparently senses an unfilled market niche extending roughly from moderate left to moderate right of center, such that the “none of the above” electoral option might be the one most desired at this point by a growing number of voters, perhaps even a majority.

To be sure, the social justice warriors who now comprise the Democratic Party base aren’t going to peel away from whatever Trotskyite their party eventually nominates, particularly if it means enhancing in any way the prospects of the ogre Trump. And Always Trumpers—defined as those he was referring to when he said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose their support—show no signs of dropping out of the Trump personality cult anytime soon.

So safely allocate about 50 percent of the electorate to the usual suspects.

But the hunch is that most of the rest who cast ballots in 2016 did so out of extreme loathing; that “Flight 93” logic led them to vote against rather than for a candidate out of a desperate desire to avoid either a Trump or a Hillary Clinton presidency.

It thus seems likely that independents (the single largest voting group in many surveys) and Trump-skeptical Republicans and maybe even that teeny-weeny sliver of Democrats that could still be considered moderates constitute what Bret Stephens calls the “Exhausted Majority” and might consequently be receptive to a Schultz candidacy.

In 1920 the otherwise dismissible Warren Harding won the presidency following the Great War with the comforting theme of a “return to normalcy”; it’s entirely possible that enough Americans now desire a return to normalcy of a different sort after a different kind of war, a restoration of political sanity after so much fatigue-inducing chaos.

Thus, the opportunity might finally have arrived for the right third-party candidate, one perceived as sufficiently moderate and competent, to do better than Teddy Roosevelt’s 27 percent of the vote in 1912, perhaps even win an actual plurality in a three-way race including Trump and whichever Democrat can sound sufficiently Marxist to receive the blessing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Firm beliefs that this or that can never happen because they never have are held only up to the point that this or that actually does, after which it all acquires the appearance of historic inevitability.

If a certain amount of traction could be acquired, defined as the point when a third-party candidacy actually begins to be taken seriously because it is perceived as having a reasonable chance to win, everything changes and the unthinkable abruptly becomes not just thinkable but perhaps even likely.

Along these lines, the idea that Americans must accept whatever the two major parties are offering even if they don’t want it is profoundly anti-democratic.

When considering the claim that even a popular-vote victory for a third-party candidate would be meaningless because of the structural impediment to third-party success known as the electoral college, it might also be useful to engage in a mental exercise that Schultz and his advisers have undoubtedly already gone through.

That exercise begins with the assumption that solid blue states (defined, for the sake of argument, as every state that Clinton won with 12 percent or more of the vote) will still go in 2020 for the Democratic nominee and that solid red states (defined as every state that Trump won with 12 percent or more of the vote) will still allocate their electoral votes to Trump.

But if you then give Schultz all the others, the more competitive states where the margin of victory in 2016 was below 12 percent, he ends up with no less than 240 electoral votes (compared to just 169 for the Democrat and 129 for Trump).

If polls in the summer of 2020 showed a genuine three-candidate race, with Schultz leading the Democratic and Republican nominees and momentum building on behalf of his historic candidacy, it is also conceivable that he would become highly competitive in a number of other states that weren’t all that far above the 12 percent differential last time around.

So if you toss New Jersey, Connecticut and South Carolina into his camp you get to a certain magic number.

Yes, that one—270.