Howard Schultz has a problem with his base.

Not only are Democrats ripping the ex-Starbucks CEO’s flirtation with an independent bid for president — now a fellow coffee mogul is, too.

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“I first met Howard in 1984 and he’s done a lot for coffee, but right now he’s out of his depth on a vanity run for the presidency,” Todd Carmichael, the millionaire co-founder of La Colombe Coffee Roasters, told POLITICO. “Of course a billionaire would complain about a tax on billionaires, but it doesn’t mean it’s good policy for America.”

Earlier this month Carmichael endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose plan to tax the mega-wealthy has been lambasted as “ridiculous” by Schultz. Carmichael met Warren last year at a fundraiser he hosted in Philadelphia for female congressional candidates, and the two stayed in touch.

They spoke directly in recent weeks, and Carmichael has offered himself up to Warren as a potential surrogate: He said he’d argue on the campaign trail that her progressive economic policies would not only not harm businesses like his, but would actually help them.

“I am not afraid to say that I want to be taxed more,” he said. “I want better schools. I want people to have better access to health care.”

Carmichael, whose premium coffee shops are located in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities, is an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.

In late November, he wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled, “CEOs don’t make good presidents. I know because I am one.” Afterward, he said, Warren called and left him a lengthy voicemail.

Carmichael also said the Massachusetts senator penned a handwritten letter to him following the September fundraiser for now Reps.-Chrissy Houlahan, Madeleine Dean, Mary Gay Scanlon, and Susan Wild, which took at place La Colombe’s flagship location in Philadelphia. Warren headlined the event.

Carmichael’s swipe at Schultz is especially notable given his beginnings in the coffee industry: He was a barista at Starbucks’ third location.

Schultz’s aides have argued that he could rescue the Democrats from Trump if the party nominates a left-wing candidate.

“It seems that nobody who is speculating about that on Twitter has given any thought to the possibility that the Democratic Party nominates someone who is so far to the left that it guarantees Trump a reelection,” Schultz adviser Steve Schmidt said. “And at that point, the only person who would theoretically be able to stop Trump from a second term is a centrist candidacy of someone like Schultz.”

Carmichael, whose company is reportedly valued at $1 billion, has long been a rumored potential candidate against Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who is up for reelection in 2022. Carmichael, 55, has denied that he is considering running for office.

Carmichael said he decided endorse early in the campaign cycle because Warren, who launched an exploratory committee last month, is “heads and tails above” other declared and potential candidates.

He said Warren is best equipped to handle an economic downturn, which forecasters warn could be around the corner.

“I believe that she has a steady hand, and now remember, the next president of the United States of America will be driving this thing in the deep bowels of hell in the recession,” he said. “That’s almost certain, and so as a driver, you want someone … that can take in a great deal of information, process it, and make a sober decision.”

Warren’s campaign declined to comment for this story.

Carmichael has also argued that other liberal business owners should speak out in favor of policies like Warren’s.

“A lot of times, you have really, really smart people who have done things like teach at prestigious colleges, who are going to be accused of things that aren’t true or fair, like, ‘Well, you might be a genius, but you’ve never started a company,’” he said. “I [run] a live, active, really fast-growing business, and I can show you how [progressive economic proposals are] not killing me.”

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President Donald Trump’s new favorite talking point is a claim that his recent crusade for a Mexican border wall, which draws furious accusations of xenophobia and racism, has made him more likeable to Hispanics.

“When you look at the Hispanic polls, I’m up 19 percent,” Trump said at the White House last week. “And the reason I’m up 19 percent… I think it’s the fact that they understand, better than anybody, what’s going on at the border.”

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It was at least the third time Trump has publicly referenced the surprising number, including in a January 27 tweet arguing that his monthlong standoff with Congress was a political success. It appears to come from a NPR/Marist poll that shows his approval rating among Hispanics soaring from 31 percent in December to 50 percent this month.

“It’s an astonishing number,” Fox News host Pete Hegseth told viewers days after the Jan. 17 poll was released.

But multiple veteran pollsters who spoke with POLITICO called the number highly suspect, citing issues with the poll’s sample size and methodology. Broader polling data shows little sign that Trump’s standing with Hispanics is on the rise.

To the consternation of Democrats, however, it doesn’t seem to be falling, either. Trump’s dire rhetoric about immigration seems to have done little damage to his modest — but not insignificant — support among Hispanics.

Trump’s average support among Latinos and Hispanics in three other polls taken in January — 18 percent (ABC/Washington Post), 30 percent (The Economist/YouGov), and 35 percent (Quinnipiac University) — produced an average of 27.6 percent.

That roughly matches the 29 percent of the Hispanic vote Trump carried in the 2016 presidential election, an improvement of two points over Mitt Romney’s performance with those voters four years earlier.

Any significant shift in Trump’s support among Hispanic voters could have a decisive impact on his 2020 re-election prospects. For instance, in 2016 Trump carried Florida — where about one in six voters are Hispanic— by just over one percentage point.

POLITICO/Morning Consult polling over the past two months also suggests the border wall-fueled shutdown had little impact on Trump’s approval rating among Hispanic voters. In the three weeks last December leading up to the shutdown, Trump’s approval rating among Hispanics stood at 30 percent. That ticked down to 28 percent in the three polls thus far in January — statistically unchanged from the pre-shutdown surveys.

“Generally, Trump is probably around 25% approval among Latinos right now nationally, based on the decrease in his poll standings after the shutdown,” Matt Barreto, co-founder of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions, wrote in an email to POLITICO.

That a president who tweeted in November that “Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries” retains the approval of nearly one-quarter of U.S. Hispanics is a source of worry to some Democrats who fear their party isn’t doing enough to court Hispanic voters on the fence about the president.

“My problem is I’m always sounding the alarm and they’re wanting to shoot the messenger,” said Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster and president of the consulting firm Bendixen and Amandi. Last fall, Amandi warned Florida Democrats they were in danger of losing the governor’s mansion last fall due to their lackluster outreach to minority communities. (Former GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis won the governorship in November.)

“A lot of people are claiming this border wall thing is a distraction in trying to attract minority support [for Trump], but the data shows the opposite is true,” said a pollster for the president’s re-elect campaign. “The only way I could see someone saying, ‘I’m surprised he’s doing well with the Latino community is if they thought the only thing Latinos care about is immigration and that Latinos believe Donald Trump is racist.”

The Trump pollster and Amandi both said a strong economy has helped sustain Trump’s backing among some Hispanics. Federal labor statistics show Hispanic unemployment to be at a historic low.

Trump’s actions on issues like religious liberty and abortion have also won praise among socially conservative Hispanics, many of whom are devout Catholics. And Trump himself argue that he is appealing to a law-and-order instinct among some Hispanics.

Amandi called the economy “single-handedly the most important issue” for Hispanic voters, while adding: “There’s also a reactionary segment of the Hispanic electorate who is aligned with some of the Trump administration’s thinking on immigration and on some social issues.”

The NPR/Marist poll that has drawn Trump’s admiration was released midway through the partial government shutdown caused by Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in border wall funding and congressional Democrats’ refusal to grant it. It was also conducted a few months after a midterm election campaign in which Trump was widely accused of demonizing migrant “caravans” trying to cross into the U.S. from Central America.

Pollsters attribute Trump’s unexpected uptick in the NPR/Marist poll to the poll’s sample size and methodology. The poll included responses from 1,023 U.S. adults, 154 of whom identified as Latino — “too few to yield accurate representation,” as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists puts it. The poll also had an unusually large margin of error, of 9.9 percentage points.

“More than small sample size, their poll did not attempt to get a balanced and representative sample of Latinos,” said Barreto, who noted that the survey included few if any Spanish-language interviews.

Marist poll director Lee Miringoff said of her group’s poll on a podcast last week: “This is not a survey of the Latino population. This is a survey of Americans, of which that is a subgroup. Statistically, there is a difference [from last month] that we’re measuring, but numerically it may or may not be as great as the president would indicate.”

A sudden and substantial swing in support for Trump isn’t unique to the NPR/Marist poll. Murray said it’s something he sees often in his own organization’s national polls, and that a sharp uptick or decline among certain subgroups is most often the result of a narrow sample

The partisan tendency to cherry-pick results is one of the reasons why Monmouth and other well-known polling institutions avoid releasing information on subgroups that are interviewed, or decline to indicate sample size. For example, neither Quinnipiac University or ABC News/Washington Post indicated the sample size of Hispanic participants in their polls released this month, just the broad national sample the results were based upon. Furthermore, the gaps between results underscores the difficulty pollsters have in accurately representing Latino or Hispanic sentiments.

“The problem is that estimates from small survey sub-samples have large margins of error, so the risks of outliers are even greater,” said John Sides, a political science professor at George Washington University. “Just as you shouldn’t focus on any one poll’s estimate of Trump’s overall approval rating, you certainly shouldn’t cherry-pick one poll’s estimate of his approval rating among Latinos.”

Two sources close to Trump’s re-election effort said that it is unlikely to expend major resources trying to expand his share of the Hispanic vote.

On the flip side Democrats will be working hard to drive Trump’s share of the Hispanic vote below its 2016 level, hoping to win back Florida and potentially other states he carried by a narrow margin that year.

The 2020 Democratic presidential nominee will “have to make a real targeted effort for certain racial and ethnic groups in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Florida” to prevent Trump from securing a second term, said the pollster involved in the campaign.

Steven Shepard contributed to this report.