Every presidential election cycle, voters get teased by potential third-party or independent candidates, and reliably every time this happens the nation’s partisans gasp in horror. They shout “spoiler” and fall back on myths about independent candidates who supposedly ruined things for their candidate — and the treatment of former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will be no different.
The famed businessman revealed his serious intention to run for president in 2020 on “60 Minutes” this past weekend, and now the media is abuzz, the knives are out, and futile Starbucks boycotts are in their planning stages. Yet this outrage is baseless: There’s no such thing as a spoiler candidate. In a nation of 325 million people, the only people spoiling anything are Democratic and Republican candidates who pander to their base and expect everyone else to simply fall in line.
There are voters you attract and voters you push away, and both parties have clearly forgotten this. Howard Schultz should run as an independent — if anything, just to remind voters they have agency in the tone, outcomes, and extremity of our politics.
We’re headed toward a 2020 election featuring the starkest Left-Right divide in modern history. Democratic front-runners Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are running against private health insurance, the Constitution, and immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, it goes without saying that President Trump represents a new shade of the Republican Party and one that has pushed away scores of moderates.
So it’s no surprise that an October 2018 poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed a midterm electorate disgruntled with the current state of politics and both major parties. Nearly half of Americans weren’t hearing from campaigns about the issues they care most about. Howard Schultz likely struck a nerve for these voters when he said on “60 Minutes” that Washington is locked into “revenge politics,” as anyone who saw the Kavanaugh hearings knows to be true.
Still, as long as Schultz’s name looms over the 2020 race, you can expect to hear a lot about Ross Perot, the independent candidate who famously shook up the 1992 re-election of George H.W. Bush against Bill Clinton. The usual line is that Perot threw the election to Clinton by peeling off Bush voters and finishing the race with 19 percent of the popular vote. Yet to some extent, this is a myth: Steve Kornacki of MSNBC has eagerly pointed out that Bush was at a low point in his approval when Perot entered the race. Voters were probably going to push him out with or without Perot based on a poor economy. The only “spoiler” was the Republican incumbent’s failures.
On principle alone, the claim that independent candidates serve as spoilers is just a sign of the institutionalized power of Democrats and Republicans, both in politics and the media. Americans want more options at the ballot box yet are largely denied it. For state elections, “sore loser” laws exist in 44 states to bar candidates who lose partisan primaries from making an independent run in the general election. Naturally, voices of moderation or outright dissent struggle in the primaries, the hardliners rise to the top, the general election becomes a battle for base turnout, and Washington winds up only further polarized and dysfunctional.
The stringent requirements for ballot access independent candidates currently face are also quite dubious. In my state of North Carolina, an independent must collect petition signatures relative to 1.5 percent of registered voters in recent elections. This number changes regularly but is usually upward of 75,000. It’s a monumental task, and one that is crafted and put in place by state boards of elections controlled by appointees from the two major parties.
On the national level, the odds for an independent candidate’s success are severely constrained by the 15 percent polling rule set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization established in 1987 jointly by the Republican and Democratic parties.
It’s quite the sham when you really think about it. Political parties were never part of the vision for America’s founding, and yet as parties became the dominant vehicles for governance they’ve constructed a series of barriers to guard their power — all while fewer Americans are identifying with these political parties year over year.
The deck is stacked, but Schultz should still make his run official and, outcome be damned, remind voters they don’t have to choose between a border wall and open borders, or outright socialism and the inequity we have today. Nearly twice as many voters identify as independents compared to either Republican or Democrat. They may currently fall into tribal politics and vote like partisans, but the number of independents in this country proves the claim that a Howard Schultz could “spoil” an election dead wrong — Democrats and Republicans do a good job of that all on their own.
Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) is the spokesperson for Young Voices and host of Beltway Banthas, a Star Wars & politics podcast in Washington, D.C.
