More terrible news for Howard Schultz

| 3:00 pm EST February 2, 2019
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Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is learning the hard way that Americans aren’t interested in buying what he’s selling, at least not in the political arena. His plan to run for president as a third party independent in the 2020 race has been met with a lack of interest and accusations of playing spoiler. Now he has an even bigger problem: numbers, and ugly ones.

This early on, it’s difficult to find a 2020 presidential race number that really tells us anything. For instance the polling in the 2020 democratic primary race is still mainly about name recognition thus far. But Howard Schultz has spent the past week getting quite a bit of free media exposure, including on TV talk shows that have mainstream reach far beyond the political sphere. What’s that netted him in terms of his favorability rating?

Four percent. No, that’s not a typo. It’s four percent. In other words, his big media splash hasn’t won over anyone. The poll in question says that it has a 2.7% margin of error, so Schultz could be even lower than 4%. Palmer Report always reminds readers not to treat any one poll as if it were the only poll, particularly in close races. But in this instance, what is a competing polling outlet going to come up with? Schultz at five percent? Six? It gets worse.

It’s not just that Schultz has a four percent favorability rating. It’s that he has a forty percent unfavorable rating. That means nearly half the country has already formed an opinion on this guy’s political ambitions based on his big splash this week, and almost everyone who’s made up their mind about him hates him. In an odd sense, this is almost impressive; it should be impossible for anyone to pull off numbers this negative, without being a terrorist or something.

It’s not difficult to figure out why Howard Schultz isn’t appealing to anyone. At this point in American history, you’re either with Donald Trump or you really want him gone. Either way, no one wants this tone-deaf middle ground guy, who has nothing noteworthy to say about politics anyway, to risk screwing up the results by running as a no-shot third candidate in the general election.