SEATTLE — As cars and pedestrians passed by during the evening rush on Thursday, Paula Harper-Christensen, a retired teacher, smiled and waved her sign with an upside-down Starbucks mermaid. “Don’t spill our chance,” the text said under the logo. Susan Glicksberg’s protest placard was more blunt: “Do Not Run!”

Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks, has returned to his hometown, Seattle, and it has not been a uniformly warm welcome.

Schultz, 65, has come under fierce criticism from many fellow Democrats for being a possible 2020 spoiler after he disclosed his interest in running as an independent candidate for president. He said he will weigh whether to run over the few next months as he undertakes a national book tour describing his vision for fixing America’s ills.

Thursday night was his first major appearance in Seattle since his political announcement. Roughly 40 protesters gathered to greet him before his planned event to promote the book and his possible candidacy. Some, like Mary Hanke, were overtly hostile to Schultz and his record as a businessman.

“He’s just like Trump, and the last thing we need is another spoiled, self-absorbed billionaire,” said Hanke, 69, a retired tech manager.

But many others, like Harper-Christensen, said they were more concerned about the impact of a Schultz independent candidacy in 2020: that a third-party run could split the vote and help re-elect President Donald Trump, who is far more unpopular in Seattle than Schultz is.

“I don’t even like to say his name,” Harper-Christensen said, referring to the president.

Seattle is where Schultz made his fortune as a businessman. He organized an investor group to buy in 1987 what was at the time a modest coffee-bean retailer called Starbucks, with all of 17 locations, and building it into a frappuccino behemoth with nearly 30,000 stores around the world.

Schultz left the company as a billionaire in 2018, and yet remains relatively little known to many Seattle residents, compared to other Seattle business leaders who have become household names — notably Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Bill Gates of Microsoft.

But the Starbucks brand, with which many Seattle residents have a complex love/hate relationship, is everywhere you look. The historic nonprofit theater that Schultz hired out for Thursday evening is only a few blocks from the early 1970s-vintage Starbucks store at Pike Place Market — preserved like a museum, or shrine, and drawing tens of thousands of tourists a year. The corporate headquarters, with its blue-and-green mermaid logo rising from the rooftop, is a few miles to the south.

In the riots that gripped the city during a gathering of the World Trade Organization in 1999, the shattered glass windows of Starbucks stores became one of the symbols of destruction by anarchists and other groups that roved the city denouncing corporate power.

At least one other billionaire with the means to self-finance a bid for the White House, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is considering a run for president — in Bloomberg’s case, as a Democrat.

But it is Schultz’s possible path as a moderate independent outside the two-party system that has drawn the most attention — and criticism by some Democrats who said they feared that a Schultz candidacy could siphon off more Democratic voters than Republicans.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, a Democrat who is also considering a presidential bid, said this week that he feared a Schultz candidacy could help re-elect Trump.

“Anyone who would run as an independent, and clearly split the Democratic vote, and clearly help Donald Trump — that would be a terrible decision,” Inslee said.

But Schultz, in an interview with The Times and an appearance on “60 Minutes,” said he believed that the two-party system, locked in a war of revenge and spite, was broken, and that Democratic Party leaders had moved too far to the left on some policy issues.

“Both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people,” he said.

A few people who came to greet Schultz at his speech said they agreed with him on at least that point. Jeff Jared, 55, a lawyer and self-described libertarian, carried a sign that said, “Run, Howard, Run.”

“People are starving for a third party,” Jared said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.