After months of publicly toying with the idea, Howard Schultz on Friday announced that he will not seek the presidency, suggesting in a letter to supporters that a third-party run could “risk” reelecting Donald Trump—something his many detractors had warned about since he started his game of presidential chicken earlier this year. “My belief in the need to reform our two-party system has not wavered,” Schultz wrote. “But I have concluded that an independent campaign for the White House is not how I can best serve our country at this time.”

Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, said in January that he was seriously considering running as an independent, arguing that both the left and right had become too extreme. But his potential bid immediately triggered backlash, with critics correctly pointing out that such a campaign could split the anti-Trump vote and give the president another four years in the White House. “You’ll help elect Trump, you billionaire, egotistical asshole,” a heckler told the centrist coffee king at one pseudo-campaign stop. At first, though, Schultz seemed to take the exact wrong message from the fact that literally nobody—with the exception of Trump, who egged him on—wanted him to run. “The reaction we got from the extremes is proof positive that we’ve struck a chord,” Greg Strimple, a Republican pollster who does Schultz’s public-opinion work, said in March.

Thankfully, the Starbucks billionaire finally seems to have gotten the memo, realizing at long last what his opponents already had: That he stood virtually no chance of winning, but could be a spoiler for the Democrats. “If I went forward,” he wrote, “there is a risk that my name would appear on ballots even if a moderate Democrat wins the nomination, and that is not a risk I am willing to take.” He also suggested that a back injury, which he said in June had taken him off the campaign trail, factored into his reasoning. The injury and three subsequent surgeries “prevented me from continuing my travels and engaging with people to the degree that is necessary,” he wrote.

Would Schultz actually have gone through with his hopeless third party run were he not sidelined for health reasons? We’ll never know for sure, but he continued to express concern Friday that a “far-left Democratic candidate could result in more votes for Trump—unless a moderate independent is also on the ballot,” suggesting that he still thinks dividing the Trump opposition would somehow mean a better shot at beating him. Barring any further about-faces, Schultz has spared us that scenario for now, opting to stick to coffee and to “invest in people, organizations and ideas that promote honesty, civility and results in our politics, and that move the country beyond two-party gridlock.”

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