NEW HAMPSHIRE — The first snowstorm of the season left the roads in New Hampshire icy enough to render the 50-plus enthusiasts attending Andrew Yang’s Keene town hall all the more impressive. Some three feet of snow packed on the benches in front of the Branch and Blade Brewing Company didn’t stop Yang’s fans from driving for hours to see him on a pitch-black Monday evening.
Yang launched his quixotic quest for the presidency more than two years ago. At the time, he was a fairly successful but little-known entrepreneur. The New York Times described his bid, which he bolstered with the marquee issue of a universal basic income, as having a “longer-than-long” shot. As recently as this spring, Yang couldn’t crack a single percentage point in most national polling.
He’s now polling around 3%, good enough for fifth or sixth place nationally, and at more than 3% in the Granite State as well as in Nevada and California. Now, this virtual unknown and political neophyte has already outlasted three senators, three governors, five representatives, and two mayors in the less-and-less-crowded Democratic presidential field. Couple that with surging fundraising — Yang’s campaign is on track to beat his $10 million third-quarter earnings for the end of this year — and he’s a genuinely impressive candidate.
Perhaps the most important asset to the campaign has been the Yang Gang.
Joe Rogan, the massively popular podcast host, introduced Yang to most of the pundit class and plenty of his most vocal eventual supporters. Yang’s February appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the same show that landed Yang-endorser Elon Musk in hot water with NASA for smoking marijuana on air, earned more than 4 million views on YouTube. His Twitter following went from 34,000 to more than a quarter million. It’s now well over a million.
Yang proudly deems himself a Democrat. He supports unfettered abortion access and financial giveaways. But his central message, that the government must temper the effects of the automation revolution with a universal basic income rather than socialist safety nets, has resonated with some on the Right.
Yang’s appeal extends beyond the internet, with a number of young (and potentially former) Trump supporters attending his town halls in New Hampshire. At a New London town hall, a man donning a “Keep America Great” hat shook Yang’s hand with a smile, asserting, “If Donald Trump goes to jail, you have my vote.” Although the media has written off the Yang Gang as either alt-right or unemployed folks looking for free cash, his coalition is far more diverse, grounded, and focused on the future than his haters realize.
Almost all of Yang’s supporters will boast that he’s smart, armed with tangible plans, and not an agent of the establishment. But their case for Yang tends to be much more personal.
His online fan base is visibly male, but in real life, women and mothers have flocked to his campaign. Carly Warner, a stay-at-home mother attending the Keene town hall, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and her husband, for Trump. Next year, they’re both backing Yang, the crucial selling point being his focus on rewarding motherhood through a guaranteed income.
Yang’s appearances on YouTube shows and podcasts first won Warner’s attention. But another contingent of Yang’s base, politically disaffected Gen Xers, discovered him the old-fashioned way.
“When I got hooked, the first time was the first debate when the opportunity he got to speak, which was limited,” Chris Reardon of western Massachusetts said. “I said, ‘This guy is saying something I want to hear.’ He’s looking out for the future of America, for my kids and their kids, not for just the people who have already gone through it, and that’s what I think a lot of these politicians have missed. You’re not talking about issues that are going to affect my grandkids.”
Reardon had traveled more than an hour in the snow with his brother, Matt, to watch Yang speak in Keene. “I’m 55 years old, and this is the first presidential candidate who has talked for me and to me,” he said.
Reardon echoed a recurring theme among the Yang Gang. He voted for Clinton over Trump because he dislikes Trump’s obsession with making America great again, but he ardently believes the Democratic establishment doesn’t have a playbook for the future. Curiously enough, universal basic income isn’t the first, or even the second or third, thing Yang fans mention when they try to describe why they’re hooked.
“It’s not his only solution,” Yang volunteer and former Bernie Sanders supporter Micha Weiss noted after a Hanover town hall. “It is, as he mentioned, the gimmick, the centerpiece of his campaign, and it’s gotten a lot of attention, but if you just look down the line of all the policy solutions that he has, what they all have in common is thoughtfulness … and a really good diagnostic sense of what’s wrong.”
Unlike many Republican protectionists, Yang doesn’t blame immigrants, and contrary to his Democratic competitors, he doesn’t vilify capitalism. Instead, he argues Luddism is a lost cause, and the moment self-driving trucks achieve a collision rate less than human operators, the most common job in 29 states will be lost forever. So, why not expand vocational training and pre-K while replacing the perverse incentives of overhead-costly welfare with a need-blind UBI?
Conservative? Not especially. More like a slightly more compelling case for spending amid a two-party race to blow up our deficit.
The picture of the future Yang paints is far more dire than anyone else’s in the race. It’s easy to claim the wall will keep the immigrants from stealing your job or that we just have to try socialism for the umpteenth time to end poverty. Yang concedes with a smile on his face that we can’t beat markets or technology. But he wants to hack them, and his supporters have become the happiest warriors of 2020 fandom as a result.
Even the most staid of Yang’s events feel fun. In a Hanover community center auditorium flanked by hundreds of audience members on all four sides, Yang still switches between serious warnings of job losses, from call centers to retail, and his casually effective stand-up. He elicits chuckles with offhand remarks — his in-laws were finally pleased “for a week” that he got to introduce his wife to Barack Obama after the administration recognized his business — and cheers and chants with his slogans.
“The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math,” is still a winner half a year later, and on the trail, his fans chant the same answers in unison.
—Where has a UBI already been successful?
—Alaska!
—And how did they fund it?
—Oil!
—And what’s the oil of the 21st century!
—TECHNOLOGY!
Rallies such as “Yangapalooza,” headlined by Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, feel like a spirit squad. Even his most formal events elicit coordinated cheers and chants.
Despite Yang’s penchant for geek speak and self-deprecating jokes, in person, he’s fundamentally relatable. He doesn’t try to pull viral stunts to polish his cool credentials like a certain Robert O’Rourke. The campaign converted a former barber shop into his Manchester field office, one of 10 in New Hampshire. For the office opening, his campaign covered the standalone sink with dozens of posters and had Yang issue an abridged version of his stump speech to the stuffy room, with almost a comedic sense of propriety. But in an unscripted moment, he could be seen shooting whipped cream directly from the can into a supporter’s mouth for the crowd.
It’s curious that the most fatalistic campaign of the race is also the most fun, but it’s obvious to anyone who’s engaged with the Yang Gang online. Easy to spot with blue hat emojis in their social media handles and the liberal use of #HumanityFirst, they have excelled at making their presence known, and for the better. Get too close to political Twitter, and you’ll find yourself at the bottom of a dogpile instigated by hateful Bernie Bros or hyperdefensive Elizabeth Warren fans. Yet if you gripe with the Yang Gang, you tend to find the most placid pushback and usually appreciation that his ideas have even entered the mainstream.
Still, the Yang Gang has elicited ire from the establishment and socialists alike.
The far Left has been critical of Yang, arguing his economic ideas will only serve to perpetuate market economics (this is a bad thing to them). The establishment been far more aggressive, with Clinton cronies Neera Tanden, Adam Parkhomenko, and Claude Taylor attacking Yang for defending fellow 2020 candidate Tulsi Gabbard from swipes at her patriotism. MSNBC gave Yang fewer than seven minutes of speaking time at the last debate, little more than half of that given to Kamala Harris, who polled roughly the same as him.
It’s not hard to understand his appeal on the trail. Yang promises his followers $12,000 annually. As he points out, that’s not a handout to replace a single parent’s income, but a tool to pay off loans, go Christmas shopping, and take hours off work for schooling. In other words, it’s agency.
The opposite of Trump may not quite be an Asian man who likes math, but the opposite of “I alone can fix it” is certainly the core of Yang’s message. He admits he’s just a guy piggybacking off an idea entertained by thinkers from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr. But it’s an idea his supporters believe empowers the people, not the government, to plot the future ahead.
The Yang Gang will likely never get their grand a month, but they got a candidate who upended the expectations of what a prospective president is supposed to say. Of course they’re happy, online and in real life. They finally found someone willing to tell them the truth and a community to spread the message. That’s already a victory.
Tiana Lowe is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
