We begin today’s roundup with reaction to Howard Schultz’s run for president. First up, Damon Linker at The Week:
No one is clamoring for billionaire Howard Schultz to run for president — at least outside of Davos, Switzerland. [...] Schultz seems to believe, and seems to have convinced some very powerful people in the world of media, that he represents "the center" of the political spectrum — and that this supremely reasonable ideological position is on track to go underrepresented in the 2020 race for president because both parties have moved, by contrast, to the extreme left and right.
This is untrue. There is no reason at all why Schultz's preferred mix of policies should be considered "the center" of anything, and it's important that people understand why.
More on Schultz and his quest for the mythical “center” from Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times:
[T]his frustrated executive’s politics aren’t widely shared by people who haven’t been to Davos. In a 2017 study, the political scientist Lee Drutman plotted the 2016 electorate along two axes, one dealing with social issues and identity, the other with economics and trade. Only 3.8 percent of voters fell into the socially liberal/economically conservative quadrant.
Indeed, Trump’s campaign demonstrated that the truly underserved market in American politics was voters who are socially conservative but economically liberal — the photonegative of what Schultz is offering. Such voters — the type who might resent both immigrants and Wall Street — make up 28.9 percent of the electorate, according to Drutman’s study. [...]
Schultz makes much of the fact that around 40 percent of Americans identify as “independent.” But as anyone who has spent 15 minutes googling should know, independent is not the same thing as centrist. Most independents lean toward one party, and as the Pew Research Center has demonstrated, in the past two decades independents have grown more ideologically polarized, not more moderate.