Dear billionaires: stop!!!

Dear billionaires: stop running for president

If you’re a billionaire who wants to transform politics and our world, there are better ways. Also, you’ll lose.

By Kelsey Piper

What do people want when they have it all? Reasonably often, they seem to want the US presidency.

Several of America’s highest-profile billionaires have flirted with running for president, or actually run, in the past few decades. Ross Perot, in 1992 and 1996, had one of the strongest showings a third-party candidate has ever had, though he didn’t win a single electoral vote. Donald Trump, of course, won the presidency in part on the strength (at least among his supporters) of his reputation as a business leader.

Mark Zuckerberg was rumored for a while to be considering a run for president. Mark Cuban has also toyed with the idea. Michael Bloomberg periodically expresses some interest in a presidential run, though this year he has firmly ruled it out, saying “there is no way an independent can win.”

Not all Bloomberg’s fellow billionaires are convinced, though. The latest to contemplate throwing his hat into the ring as an independent is Howard Schultz, the retired CEO of Starbucks, who made an announcement on Twitter on Sunday.

It’s easy to see why the presidency is appealing to billionaires. I can relate to the experience of looking out at the field of contenders and being deeply frustrated that none of them care about the most important issues — and if you’re rich enough, it’s tempting to solve that problem by running yourself.

Bloomberg, Zuckerberg, Cuban, Perot, and Schultz all made their fortunes by steering businesses to enormous commercial success, and it’s easy for them to conclude that they could do the same for the country. When you’ve earned billions of dollars and have a world of opportunities open to you, of course you’d want to have the chance to make a difference in the world and push for your ideals.

But hey, billionaires: Running for president is actually a bad idea. You’re very unlikely to win, it’s not clear that you have the skills to do the job well, and there are much, much better ways to make a difference in the world with your billions.

The skills that make you rich don’t necessarily make you good at politics

Here’s an argument for billionaires in politics, at least as long as they made their fortunes themselves: It takes an incredible work ethic, good management skills, dedication, and a gift for setting priorities to turn a small company into a prosperous multinational one. Those all seem like skills that’d be useful in politics too, right?

This is the case Perot made for himself, starting in 1992. “See, there’s a lot I don’t understand,” he said in a debate with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “I do understand business. I do understand creating jobs. I do understand how to make things work. And I got a long history of doing that.”

Billionaires since have echoed him. Bloomberg cited the “pragmatic approach” of business leaders. Schultz’s website prominently features his successes at Starbucks. Trump leaned on his business background, telling voters in early campaign ads, “My opponents have no experience in creating jobs or making deals.”

The problem is that it’s not really clear the skills transfer. In the course of their meteoric professional careers, billionaires mostly interact with people who work for or with them, and lots of political concerns that rank highly for everyday Americans aren’t areas they know anything about.

Schultz is no exception here. He frequently mentions the debt and the deficit and seems inclined to make them a focal point of his campaign, while polls show Americans don’t care about them very much right now — they rank the economy, health care, terrorism, and jobs as higher priorities, with the share concerned with the budget deficit steadily falling since 2012. In business terms, it’s not clear that there’s much demand for the product Schultz wants to offer. Even mediocre politicians typically are more attuned to that.

Billionaires often have high approval ratings, but their image tends to take a battering when they enter the public arena. In part, that’s because people were evaluating them as (hugely successful) people, not as politicians, and they’ll inevitably turn off many voters as they start to take stances on the issues. In part, it’s because negative stories that probably wouldn’t have come out had they stayed off the political radar are now more likely to emerge.

And in part, it’s because they typically don’t seem to be good at campaigning. Certainly, not all politicians are charismatic. But especially in a bid for the presidency, charisma makes a big difference, and most of the CEOs in the public consciousness do not possess it — at least not the kind that gets millions of voters fired up. There is no great mass of die-hard Zuckerberg or Schultz fans out there in the country, and that’s not a coincidence.

Money doesn’t necessarily seem to make up for this deficit. Some political science research actually suggests that past a certain point, money does a candidate no good at all. In an environment where both candidates are spending lots of money on ads, they may not change any minds. The most exhaustive research on this study is a meta-analysis of more than 40 studies of persuasion campaigns in elections, which the authors bolstered by conducting extensive studies of their own. The results? Contacting voters in a general election — whether by ads or door-to-door canvassing — just doesn’t seem to change any minds.

One billionaire, Meg Whitman of California, found this out the hard way. In 2008, the New York Times named her among women who might become president of the United States someday. In 2010, she ran for California governor, spending $144 million of her fortune (then valued at $1.3 billion). She lost badly to Jerry Brown, who spent $36 million.

Not all billionaire runs for office have ended in failure — Bloomberg won two mayoral terms in New York, and of course Trump won the presidency (though he arguably got more of a boost from being a TV star than from being wealthy). But if the point is to advance your vision, there seem to be wiser ways to spend your money than running for public office.

Billionaires have great options for pursuing their vision and ideals

So what are you supposed to do if you’re a billionaire who wants to fix America?

If you really have the itch for politics, you can support recruitment efforts and primary campaigns to get promising candidates into local and state offices, where they’ll build the experience and contacts they need to run for president.

But as many of Schultz’s fellow billionaires have realized, you can make your money go a lot further if you turn to philanthropy.

If you’re worried, as Schultz has said he is, about partisanship and division, there are ways to change that with targeted donations. Many experts think that the way America votes increases partisanship, by making it harder for new political parties to emerge and deterring the candidacies of moderates like Bloomberg who don’t want to play spoiler. Some voting reform advocates have been successful on a local level convincing cities and states to adopt new voting systems like approval voting that seek to combat polarization. By contributing millions to efforts like these, Schultz could do more to change the culture of politics than he is likely to by running for president.

That’s just one idea. He could pour more money into other causes as well, with dozens of options that are likely to get him better results for the money than a quixotic campaign for president.

But is that good for the rest of us? A lot of people have mixed feelings about billionaire philanthropy, at least once billionaires step away from uncontroversially great projects like vaccinating children and combating malaria, areas where individual billionaire philanthropists have saved millions of lives. Rob Reich, a philosopher at Stanford University, has argued that we should be more skeptical of how much leverage billionaires have to advance their civic ideals with their fortunes.

Those are legitimate concerns. My view is that we should judge billionaire philanthropy on the merits — laud them when they do good, encourage better when they waste their money, and criticize those projects that advance goals we don’t share. If Schultz puts his money behind projects that are cost-effective and serve a broader public purpose, I’ll be thrilled for him — and for us.

Going that route may be a little less dramatic than running for president. But CEOs should care about results, right? The $768 million the Clinton campaign spent is more than we’ve spent on efforts to eradicate malaria with gene drives, hundreds of times more than we’ve spent on improving our electoral system with new voting systems, and significantly more than we have invested in managing emerging technologies.

Anyone running on their “business sense” should ask themselves the most cost-effective way to achieve the results they dream of — and typically, the answer won’t be with a campaign for president.