Andrew Yang is the candidate you should watch at the next Democratic debate — and the YangGang want you to know

You’ve probably heard already that the ones to watch in this week’s Democratic debate are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They’re the frontrunners, after all. There is still a low hum of interest in candidates like Pete Buttigieg (the South Bend mayor responsible for more than one person in Brooklyn walking round in a T-shirt saying “BOOT-EDGE-EDGE”); Beto O’Rourke (who was “born to be in it”, then sorry that he said he was born to be in it); Amy Klobuchar (who famously ate a salad with a comb); Cory Booker (a real-life vegan and animal welfare activist, which upsets some people); and Julian Castro (whose solid debate performances and principled emphasis on immigration have kept him afloat in the polls.) But then there’s Andrew Yang. Who the hell even is Andrew Yang?

Just kidding — I know you know who Andrew Yang is. He’s the one with the #YangGang and almost 800,000 Twitter followers. He’s the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who wants to give out free money to anyone who’ll listen. He’s the candidate who tweeted earlier today: “For those wondering I will be crowdsurfing in sandals at Thursday’s debate” (prompting 12,390 engagements.)

Andrew Yang wants people to go “not left. Not right. Forward”. He believes in that campaign slogan so much that you can buy it on a T-shirt at the Yang 2020 online store. You can also buy one that says: “Math. Money. Marijuana”, as well as a water bottle that professes its support for a “trickle-up economy”. His website is adorned with photos of people at rallies holding up signs that simply say “MATH”. And his central policy is a universal basic income — or Freedom Dividend — for every American over the age of 18, “no strings attached, paid for by a new tax on the companies benefiting most from automation”.

Yang is a startup entrepreneur, which leaves him open to accusations that he’s drunk the San Francisco Kool-Aid and decided he can raid the coffers for all that money without regard for the consequences. He has reassuring credentials, though, including a degree in economics and legal training at Columbia. He believes in the Freedom Dividend so much that he’s already paying three families an annual UBI out of his own pocket as a micro-experiment. He has a chatbot on his website that will direct you towards his main policies (UBI, “human-centered capitalism”, and Medicare-for-All.)

And here’s a strange thing about Andrew Yang: People who used to vote for Bernie Sanders love him. The alt-right love him. People who have never been interested in politics love him. My British fiancé is convinced he’s going to be the presidential candidate. I put out a call on Twitter for anyone who was backing Andrew Yang to get in touch, and within minutes, my inbox was flooded with DMs. There were so many, I was up all hours of the night trying to reply to them. As a test, I tried the same with Bernie Sanders supporters and Elizabeth Warren supporters over the next couple of days; no “Bernie Bros” got in touch, and just three Warren backers did. Even as I was trying to read those, my inbox was filling again with the thoughts of more members of the YangGang.

Who are they? Well, they come from across the political spectrum. A few described themselves as “socially liberal but fiscally conservative”. Others told me they were “100% progressive”. Some could quote sections of Yang’s book off by heart. A large number of them told me they’d been previously disengaged, but were introduced to Yang’s politics via The Joe Rogan Experience, a phenomenally popular podcast which aims to speak to your everyday “American bro” and introduces its audience to “thinkers” in sometimes hours-long discussions with people as disparate as Elon Musk, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Russell Brand.

“I’m a Performance Theatre major, with a minor in English (concentration in Creative Writing),” wrote someone who identified themselves as Jackson. “As an artist, I was immediately drawn to the idea of UBI when I first heard someone mention [Yang’s] campaign about a year ago. Arts aren’t wildly prosperous financially speaking, and I’m often stressed and anxious about making a living in my career path. My best option is usually said to be find stable work in food service or some other industry to make a living and focus on arts as my side job. So when I hear food industry jobs are going to be automated, I realize that I have almost no feasible way to make a living while doing what I love. The Freedom Dividend would essentially allow me to pursue acting, or writing, or any medium of art, without the worry that not landing a gig won’t mean I can’t afford rent or my next meal. It would allow artists to pursue their craft full time, and revitalize local performance and visual art. It would essentially guarantee that I get a prosperous future, and that is a campaign I am willing to give my full support for.”

So far, so progressive. Elsewhere, a tweeter called Nihaar Sinha told me he was a “first-generation American son of immigrants with progressive views” but also a “former investment banker and business owner who believes strongly in (well-regulated) capitalism”. He doesn’t agree with all of Andrew Yang’s plans, he said, but he does feel Yang is the only one “offering 21st century solutions for 21st century problems”.

“The Freedom Dividend, for example, does not neatly fit out current political framework,” he continued. “I can call it progressive (strong safety net) or libertarian (no administrative bloat, money in hands of people instead of the government), socialist (redistribution of wealth) or capitalist (dividend to shareholders of our democracy, paid for my companies who've used public goods like broadband subsidies or public university research to grow). That's because it's not an ideological solution. It's a data-driven solution tailored to the unique 21st century problem of automation displacing millions of Americans, and supporting empirical research showing cash transfer is the most effective form of assistance.

“Especially given how divided we are, I've seen Andrew win over everyone from The Breakfast Club to Tucker Carlson to Joe Rogan to Morning Joe to The Root to Ben Shapiro. He actually can deliver on “healing the divide” to which everyone pays lip service but most candidates ignore.”

Others spoke just as passionately about Yang healing a political divide with his refusal to condemn right or left-wing politics.

Then there were the slightly more kooky responses. One Twitter account whose name is Andrew Yang Is The Singularity (with the strange handle @Yang41344660) DM’d me to tell me that Yang “leads me to envision a future where more people get along, are happy, are optimistic, are more caring, more outwardly and community focused. A complete shift in what we immediately value. I've felt a change happen within myself, and I know other Yang supporters would agree.” The writer continued: “It is this possibility of this drastic shift or leap towards peace and sanity that has me absolutely glued to this campaign.”

Like with Marianne Williamson, many have openly wondered whether the increasingly vocal support behind Andrew Yang is due to (in the words of one of my fellow political writers during a conversation about the YangGang) “Trump folks trying to make trouble”. They wonder about bots, or about entryists trying to make Democrats look ridiculous so Trump doesn’t lose the presidency in 2020.

Even weirder, some Redditors who habituate 4chan have said that Yang has an alt-right following because they believe his Freedom Dividend would destroy the US economy in the same the German economy suffered after the First World War and usher in “Weimar solutions” (it’s a stretch, I know, but I’m not the one who came up with the theory.) Another popular post on Reddit describes someone who had fallen into the depths of far-right ideology and was reintroduced to hope and optimism by the Yang campaign. While cautioning that he’s still “de-programming myself from the hate that I absorbed over the last five years”, the writer says that Yang’s “perception that AI is currently the largest 'unseen' threat to the average American worker — me — couldn't have rung more strongly with me. His solutions just made sense to me in a way that I can't articulate. I tried to poke holes in the argument for a basic income, but could only come up short. For me, a thousand a month would let me spend more time with my sick mother, without working increasingly later shifts at work. It would give me the flexibility to care for my loved ones without sapping my own strength. I don't know why, but seeing the benefit to myself in such a dramatic manner just triggered some otherworldly type of empathy within me.”

There are, of course, plenty of businesspeople and fellow entrepreneurs in the YangGang ranks, as well as many young supporters and ordinary volunteers. And whether or not people are “making trouble” round his candidacy, it’s clear Yang has touched a nerve with a lot of people who aren’t used to having nerves touched. How long do you need to make trouble before real people start listening, anyway? And how much does it matter if someone with new and interesting ideas gets a platform because half the people engaging with him think he sounds nuts? How much does it matter if people fall for your politics because of how you make them feel, as opposed to what you’ll be able to do (it did, after all, work for Trump)?

Andrew Yang is currently polling at 3 per cent, which is pretty healthy for this stage of the game — to put that into perspective, he’s polling well above Amy Klobuchar and Julian Castro, and his numbers are the same as Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke. He has, additionally, promised a “big” surprise at tomorrow’s third Democratic debate, to do something “unprecedented”. He’s popular enough now for that to generate some media intrigue (and I don’t just mean from me.) Along with hundreds of thousands of members of the YangGang, I’ll be looking out for it.