January 31, 2019

What’s Up With Howard Schultz?

Coffee mogul Howard Schultz enjoying his brief time in the limelight.Brian Cahn/ZUMA

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What’s the deal with Howard Schultz? I mean really: does anyone know? He can’t possibly believe he has a chance of winning on a platform of social liberalism and fiscal austerity. This is roughly the platform Gary Johnson ran on in 2016, and even in the midst of the greatest displeasure with the establishment candidates in years, he only polled 3 percent.

So what does Schultz add to that? Well, he’s a billionaire, and billionaires are kind of unpopular right now. On the other hand, as a billionaire he can blanket the airwaves with his unpopular stands. So maybe he could poll around 1 percent.

I don’t get it. He apparently has no real policy proposals to offer. Instead, he’s spent the past week insulting the various Democratic nominees. But I suppose that might be smart. There are people who dislike Democrats—though most of them are Republicans who support Trump—but there’s virtually nobody who’s going to like his policies once he finally gets around to admitting what they really are.

I dunno. I was emailing with a friend recently about why Schultz was running, and my final comment was “Never underestimate ‘unrestrained vanity project’ as a reason, especially when billionaires are involved.” Maybe I should just stop there and not try to make any further sense of it.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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