I’m sorry, that’s really not true. People have long pushed to raise minimum wage and for universal health care. I’ll grant he helped give these ideas oxygen but he hardly introduced them to public debate. Obamacare was supposed to have a public option. The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act was introduced in 2003.
More Yang news updates.
The news is really coming in quickly right now. There’s a question on reddit in r/outoftheloop that’s getting a lot of attention at the moment.
Someone asked:
The comments are really great. People are reading his policies. They’re versed in what he’s saying. Some people like UBI. Others like other policies. People are discussing things like the libertarian view and classical economics. It’s a fast-moving thread with comments growing from 280 to 358 just in the few minutes I was reading and still growing. Some people are saying he’s the Bernie 2020.
Yang also has a blurb on BigThink and a new podcast interview on the Breakfast Club today. [youtube] [some NSFW language] (I didn’t even get a chance to watch it yet. It was just posted literally 15 minutes ago.)
I’ve got word that Andrew Yang raised more money than Kamala Harris for the entirety of February, is there any truth to that?
I seriously doubt it but numbers are little hard to come by yet.
FEC filings are done quarterly. IIRC that means mid April for the quarter that ends this month. I would take any politically charged claims that don’t involve the weight of law enforcing truthfulness with at least a few grains of salt.
I would be stunned if that were the case. Harris is a strong third in polling behind Biden and Sanders.
I can’t find the Harris figures, but here is the info from the (data-driven!) Yang campaign:
“February was the best month ever for our campaign—we received donations from 34,025 different people for a total of $570,954.82! The average donation was $16.78.”
Even more interesting is the breakout of donations:
8% Progressive Activists
11% Traditional Liberals
15% Passive Liberals
26% Politically Disengaged
15% Moderates
19% Traditional Conservatives
6% Devoted Conservatives
He groups the cohorts from Traditional Liberals down through Moderates into what he calls the “Exhausted Majority”. It’s fascinating to me that he’s drawing 25% of his donations so far from self-identified Conservatives. That’s got to be a massive differentiator from the rest of the Democratic field. If there is another D with that kind of crossover appeal I have yet to hear of them. Possibly John Delaney, but he’s even lower on people’s radar than Yang I think.
Back to Harris v. Yang - assuming they’re both still in the race on Super Tuesday, the battle for California will be epic. It could be Bernie or Warren or whomever, but Harris has the home field advantage and the state is 15% Asian American. There can be only one…
From what I’m reading in the r/outoftheloop thread (which was up to over 800 comments last I saw it), after the Joe Rogan interview, Yang caught the attention of 4chan. Since then, they’ve been doing memes similar to The_Donald memes to try to convert that crowd.
But also, Yang has been on Fox News more than any other news outlet, so maybe it makes sense that he’s catching some attention from Conservatives.
I’m interested in the 26% politically disengaged crowd. If he could expand that, that might be super helpful.
From that outoftheloop thread, there’s a bunch of discussion on UBI on both sides, as you’d expect. But the policy that got some pushback that caught my eye was on time banking. That was a weird thing for people to get hung up on. It’s just the concept of creating a system to give credit to people in the community who do community service that they could trade for other people to help them with community service. It’s an existing concept being used by certain groups. The policy would just make the system available to more people in more areas. It’s still a completely voluntary thing. It seemed to spook a bunch of people into thinking that they’d have to be “good”. Heaven forbid. 
I don’t have any proof for this, but the numbers I seem to remember is Harris bringing in $1.5M in the first few days of her announcing and Sanders bringing in $10M in the first week after his announcement. It seems unlikely that Yang did close to that even in a given time period although I guess it’s possible if Harris really had a bad month. Still, $570K is not too bad given his lack of name recognition.
$570K is not too bad?? It’s brilliant! That’s a hell of a lot of seed money to start the actual name-recognition campaign. Let’s frame his fundraising achievement in the proper context. The people donating to Bernie and Harris had already heard of them ages ago. They’ve both had hours and hours of mainstream media attention and have been telegraphing their presidential aspirations on the national stage for a long time. Yang has come out of nowhere and is blowing up on both sides of the political divide. $570K in one month at this stage of the game is outstanding. At this time 4 years ago Trump hadn’t even formed his exploratory committee yet, that’s how early we are in the campaign.
I don’t have any detail on the politically disengaged, but it seems fairly self explanatory. A lot of folks have been turned off by politics over the last few election cycles and many others, particularly young people, have really low participation rates. As for his appeal to Conservatives, that’s really interesting. The main Fox-viewing demographic is decidedly against his agenda of expanded social welfare programs, higher taxes, gun control, etc. Yang skews hard left. Could it be the allure of UBI? I think so. I also think a lot of people are going to rail against him in public then quietly pull the lever for him in private to give themselves $1,000 per month.
For some the time-banking thing smacks a bit too much of the social credit system in China. I am not wild about how it’s being presented, either, primarily because it does bring the spectre of Socialism squarely to the front of his campaign, deserved or not. I’m hoping he’ll tighten up that part of his platform to sound more palatable, or it’s going to give his opponents the cudgel to beat him with.
Agreed.
That’s what people there are saying. Maybe he should do away with that platform. He’s just trying to incentivize people participating in their communities with a system that is self-perpetuating and doesn’t take any money. I guess it’s hard to get that across without people thinking there might be a more nefarious outcome.
People are worried that employers will use the community credit number as a gauge for employment.
But that brings me to the idea of human-centered capitalism. His idea is to measure more human-centered measurements instead of GDP. I’m thinking that those measurements can be used in more sinister ways if you get real imaginative.
How do you think those measurements will be used in a positive way to boost the society? I do like the idea, but does it have the power to change society?
Can we please stop using how much play on Reddit something is getting as indicative of how something will influence the country. It’s entirely a bubble-supported argument.
From a 2017 analysis of Reddit’s demographic’s we see that the people who use Reddit for news skew:
71% male
64% Ages 18-29
70% white
That’s entirely non-representative of the voting populationwhich skews older and more female. In addition, the D primary voting population will be much more non-white than the population as a whole.
Honestly, it’s exactly the same as saying, “I read it on Huffington Post (or here) therefore it’s indicative of the entire country!” Or on the flip side, down here (I’m in ruby red South Carolina) those people who say, “I don’t know anyone who voted for Obama. I can’t believe he won.”
I can believe Yang has internal polling - or he’s a fool or a non-serious candidate - indicating that he can overcome those issues. But appealing to demographics who vote at a lower frequency - young white males - is a recipe for disappointment.
After the first week of March, he’s already at $175K for the month. He’s now at 55K donors of 65K needed.
I was thinking that the Breakfast Club interview might have helped. There were a bunch of comments on Twitter about having seen him on the Breakfast Club, so they donated.
It looks like he’s picking up steam. Hopefully he can keep this going.
Also saw this on his subreddit.
Why as a Trump supporter I’m supporting Yang now.
and Yang was Google Trending higher than Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke.
Google Trends - Andrew Yang is averaging higher than Senator Elizabeth Warren
Silly stuff at the moment, but still fun.
I think Reddit is just another arrow in his quiver. As are Facebook and Twitter, where he also continues to grow his following. And the number of donors, which is more important at this point. This isn’t the *Literary Digest * predicting victory for Alf Landon; it’s just another positive indicator.
Nice pickup on the donations! He’s accelerating. But he’s not been battle-tested yet. I’m not worried he won’t hold his own on the debate stage, but I do wonder how the name candidates and the pols in the DNC plan to counter his threat. And they are good at it. Those people didn’t get to the top ranks of politics by accident. Ideally we’ll see another wave just as with Trump in 2016. The people will speak and the professional pols will have to come along for the ride. Only this time with a sensible person at the helm.
Yes, it’s heartening to see Trump supporters abandoning ship to join the Yang Gang, even if it is only anecdotal at this point. Let’s hope it’s a sign of more to come.
I think Trump defections to Yang are primarily those who are swing voters and independent voters.
In any event, I hope Yang can get some attention - enough to make it to the debates. I think that would be where he could actually get his name on the map, because he would be the most radical thinker at the debate. I doubt the other candidates even take him that seriously, which is fine by me.
Wow, that’s old. I had to look it up. It’s from 1936. You don’t have to go back that far to find a case of polling gone wrong. You can take any poll from the 2016 Presidential election.
Or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says in her interview with Stephen Colbert [youtube at minute 1:30] the night after her win in the NY primary. “I don’t think polling is always right. . . . People try to identify who’s the most likely to turn out and what we did was change who turns out.” Then she tells a story of two 19 year olds who said they voted for her as she went to the victory party.
People in the sub were rumbling earlier that the DNC might change the requirements as the debates got closer. Yang told Fox News that the debates wouldn’t be two-tiered for 2020, and that if the requirements were met, candidates would be split into two days on a random draw. We’ll see.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that Reddit is a great substitute for political polling, but it can be a place to gauge activity. If you look at Google trends, I think Yang’s online interest ranks pretty high relative to much of the field. He has actually garnered more interest than Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, and Elizabeth Warren in recent weeks. Obviously, that’s not fundraising, but it’s attention and it’s building a brand, which is what he’s interested in doing at this stage. Whether that translates into success is anyone’s guess, but I think it’s worth noting, at least.
Society is changing. The question is how do we change it humanely. The robots are coming. In the past you had a man with capital who hired a hundred other men and paid them for their labor. In the future that man will buy ten robots and employ zero men. If we don’t figure out how to share what that one man with capital is reaping we’re all stuffed.
Agreed.
Agreed. He’s still in stealth mode. The debates will be a game-changer, in one direction or the other.
You say “old”, I say “classic”!
It’s supposed to be co-equal debates over two nights. No one’s going to get a lot of mike time. It will be interesting to see who will have the buzz going into the debates. As long as he stays on point and doesn’t bring up the Great Pumpkin (another classic!) I think he’ll survive the cull. Going forward it becomes much more a money game.
Agreed. And in another wee while all the candidate identities will be distilled down to a few words, either positive or negative. E.g. Klobuchar is mean, Booker is cozy with big pharma, Bernie missed his chance, Warren is…whatever. I’m not characterising anybody, just saying we all will. Every candidate is quickly going to crystalize in our minds and in the national conversation. For now, “free-money outsider tearing up the Internet” is a pretty good label to have.
I have a feeling that most of the Trump supporters defecting don’t vote much at all and only “support” him on reddit.
Could be. I think we’re all in agreement it’s just a bit of buzz at this point. It’s not like he’s made Reddit the centrepiece of his campaign. But he’s leveraging the platform, which shows his social media savvy.