That’s a common theme in the Yang sub. Here’s one exchange.
Of course, that’s just anecdotal, and it’s just a handful of people in a small sub. But if a majority of the people on those platforms turned out, it could make a difference in the election. Most of the people on Reddit are millennials. There are 82 million millennials in the US. For context, there are about 5 million people subscribed to r/politics and about 14 million people subscribed to the administrative subreddit.
I also noticed that some of those people have donor flairs next to their usernames. Yang has raised $1.7M last quarter and close to $2.5M this quarter. I’m thinking that if some people were willing to lay out their hard earned cash to the campaign, they’d make the extra effort to vote.
The bigger question is how to reach people who are not on social media. When Yang was just starting to grow on twitter, he would post that whenever he was getting popular, he would remind himself that something like 72% (don’t remember the exact number) of the population don’t use twitter.
Then again, that’s a problem with almost any media. They say that the debates drew between 15-19 million viewers. That’s a lot of people, but it’s not close to reaching the majority of people.
I should add that Yang is not a fan of identity politics. He didn’t comment on that one way or the other. That was just my personal take on the choice of song.
I’ve been thinking about this and reading other people’s comments about the debates.
Delivering ‘zingers’ is what trolls do. It seems odd to me that people are surprised that there’s a master troll in the White House when people are selecting for that in the debates.
From some of the things I’ve read, I think other people are questioning that as well.
So one song is the theme to a break out comedy that defined “blackness” for much of America in the 70s. The other is a random pop song that uses a chinese word in its chorus. But you see similarities. Also, you think we’re in a “way too easy to offend era”. I hate to break it to you, but you are an example of the era.
Some people on the #LetYangSpeak hashtag suggested that Yang create a podcast to get his message out to more people. Yang put up a tweet, asking people if they’d like to hear a podcast.
The tweet got 56K likes in a day or so. Yang asked for suggestions on guests. I haven’t heard more since then.
The twitter campaign to give away a Freedom Dividend for a year to a person following Yang’s twitter account went pretty well. There were roughly 158K retweets and his twitter following increased by over 200K accounts. The winner was supposed to have been picked on the 4th of July and vetted. The winner is still to be announced. Maybe he will announce the winner on “The View” on Monday.
Yang is scheduled to appear on The View on Monday July 8 at 11 am. That show has a tendency to tear people down, so I’m hoping for the best.
Over the holiday weekend, the Yang Gang has been knocking on doors, putting up flyers and phone banking. They made 6.9K calls in one day this weekend. Someone offered to donate $5 for every person who volunteered to phone bank this weekend.
Yang did the #bottlecapchallenge. It got 1.37M views on twitter. Not sure why so many people were interested in that, but there it is. The media was more interested in the typo in the word challenge.
Yang says Biden spoke to him during one of the breaks in the debate requesting to talk to him later about the 4th Industrial Revolution. Yang was pleased.
Here’s the video. The beginning of the video has a number of people speaking Chinese. I’ve heard Yang speaking Chinese to those groups sometimes.
Too bad Yang didn’t break out in Chinese when asked the question on China in the debate. /s
There’s a picture of Bidenwatching Yang’s speech in South Carolina several days before the debates.
Someone from the UBI study in Canada made a video to give his first hand impressions. His anecdotal impressions were that the money helped people in ways that he wasn’t expecting, giving hope and relieving stress. He couldn’t square his first hand experiences with how he expected things to go.
I’ve been watching the views on the NBC News NY videos of the candidates since the debate. I’ve been trying to make sense of the view counts, but I’m not seeing a pattern. This is not the main NBC news channel youtube. This is a small offshoot youtube channel, so it’s not clear how people would have found the channel.
Yang’s view count continues to rise every day, which might be a good sign. But that small snippet isn’t a very good representation of his platform, so it’s hard to say if it’s helpful. It might be if people use that clip to search out more.
After the appearance on The View on Monday 7/8/19 at 11 am, Yang is scheduled to do a rally in Portland, OR on Saturday 7/13/19.
According to my power rankings, Andrew Yang was in 6th place before the debates and he’s still in 6th place now, despite having had very little opportunity to speak. He’s struggling to get past 1% in the polls, but he clearly has a committed following, so he’ll be around for at least a few more months, most likely.
I think MSNBC was not necessarily a great network for Yang. He might get more attention on CNN and as the debates move away from just left wing outlets.
I was pleasantly shocked by how The View treated Yang. For the most part, they were nice and agreed with him.
Megan McCain started off by telling him that she has a “dear friend” who is Yang Gang. Just about every day, I see someone posting in the Yang sub about how they supported Trump and are now supporting Yang. Megan’s friend puts a “real life” spin on this, although I personally think that many of those people are real too.
As Yang explained UBI, Joy Behar questioned why it was needed. He explained how it would create a trickle up economy as well as redefining what we now consider as work such as for stay at home mothers. Joy liked the idea of compensating stay at home mothers. Yang noted that it would also help the waitress who was getting harassed by her boss and the single mom who might be in an abusive relationship to get some resources to help them out of their situation.
Then when he was explaining the universality of UBI.
Joy: Why should rich white people get a thousand dollars a month?
Yang: The great thing is that it would remind them that they’re still an American.
Megan: I don’t need. . . no one at this table needs, an extra thousand dollars a month. I wouldn’t feel right when there are still veterans on the street.
Whoopi: You could give it away.
Megan: ::shaking her head::
Whoopi: That’s what he means when he says that it would remind people that they’re still American. It’s not just what you do for yourself. It’s also about what you do for other folks.
Megan: ::glaring::
Yang gives the example of Alaska and how their UBI is popular because the universality depoliticizes it, destigmatizes it and eliminates the us vs. them nature of other benefits programs.
It was great for Whoopi to give the assist. Whoopi ended the session saying that Yang had interesting ideas and that she would be keeping an eye out for him. Sunny agreed.
There are a lot of good arguments for universality that I’ve read. Here are some that I like. Creating the arbitrary cut-off line about who receives it will create a lot of debate and divisiveness that might lead to the standard going lower and lower. Eliminating millionaires and billionaires takes so little off the cost that redistributing their share only gives less than $100 to everyone else. Since the Freedom Dividend is opt-in, hopefully people who don’t need it will not bother to opt-in.
A social worker, posting on twitter, polled her clients, asking if they would rather have welfare benefits or UBI. 28 out of 30 voted for UBI.
Later, Yang tweeted about what the hosts on The View had been telling him during the break about how the economy wasn’t as some people were painting it.
Sunny confirmed with
Yang raised $2.8M for quarter 2 2019. 99.6% of the donations were less than $200. There are over 130K unique donors which meets the qualifying number for the next set of debates in September and October. (He has already qualified for the July debate.) He still needs 2% in three more qualifying polls before Aug. 28 to qualify for those debates. He just hit 2% on a qualifying poll - NBC/WSJ.
You were prophetic, at least for the NBC/WSJ poll. Yang’s in 6th place in that poll. (Just saw that you changed the ranking to 8th. That’s probably closer to the overall polling.)
He hit 3% on an Emerson poll, but that doesn’t count toward the debates. The DNC pulled that poll from the debate qualifying polls. The remaining polls are mostly corporate media polls.
MSNBC did aninterview with Yang on Ari Melber. At this point, Yang is one of 7 candidates on track to make the September debate.
Someone posted a link to the subreddit stats on the Yang sub. I found it fascinating. The growth in the last couple weeks has been quite high after steady growth from March to June.
Yang announced the Freedom Dividend winner from the twitter contest. She looked overjoyed.
A comedian who did a parody of Yang (that Yang participated in) for The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng, talks seriously and positively about Yang’s idea and his run for President. Chieng noted that he is not a citizen of the US.
Yang tweeted about Amazon’s $700M retraining efforts.
Tomorrow, 7/13/19, Yang is holding a rally in Portland. On 7/19/19, there will be an AARP forum with Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson in Sioux City, Iowa.
The Yang rally in Portland went great. The energy was great. I enjoyed watching it.
Yang was on Recode Decode (podcast) with Kara Swisher. There was a Facebook video live that was fun to watch.
Yang did an AARP forum with 3 other Presidential candidates (they were all on separately but on the same day). IMO, he nailed it at that one. He differentiated the benefits of the Freedom Dividend over $15/hr min wage.
Yesterday, there was an AMA with Yang on the subReddit. There had been a contest last month between Facebook and Reddit to see who could get to $10K donations to the campaign faster. As a reward, Reddit got the AMA hosted there.
The AMA was crossposted on r/politics and r/AMA and made the front page of Reddit. Because of that, over 2K people (close to 3K) joined the sub in a day. The sub went from 29K to 32K in a day and a half. At the time of the AMA, there were 10K visiting the sub. Some of the questions that Yang didn’t answer were answered by the Yang Gang.
Here’s a graph of the other candidates’ subs’ growth taken before the AMA.
The campaign needs 4 qualifying polls to hit 2% or higher to qualify for the September debates. There was one earlier in the month. A new Fox News poll also counts. There’s still a tiny bit of dispute over whether the NBCNews/Survey Monkey poll counts. If it does, they’re at 3 out of 4 polls. If not, 2 more polls to go. Yang says (from the green room of The Daily Show) that the 3rd counts, so hopefully it does.
The Yang Gangers are phonebanking and canvassing to try to reach more people. The phonebankers say that the people they talk with are all 50 years or older. They’re trying to find ways to reach that demographic. There’s a Boomers for Andrews Yang youtube, but the viewcount is still very small.
Tonight, 7/25/19, Yang appears on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Then on July 31, it’s the second debate on CNN.
Andrew Yang and Michael Bennet goofing around on twitter. Hilariousl
::gif of two penguins, one slapping down the other.
::gifof a penguin with the caption - come at me bro CNN got the joke.
Between the tweets, both Bennet and Yang tweeted out some of their policies.
One of the things I like about the Yang campaign is that he sometimes shows glimpses of what it’s like behind the scenes. At one of his interviews, he said, do you know what we do during the breaks at the debate? We go get our make-up done. The whole thing is manufactured for TV.
The interview with Trevor Noah went well. The audience was great.
Andrew Yang’s second debate went much better than the first.* He got some good press from it, a bunch of social media increases and more donations since the debate.
The Yang Gang was pleased because the idea for Yang to talk about how the debate was like a reality tv show came from the sub. Someone in the sub wrote out a whole statement to read out in the debate. Then someone gave the statement to Yang in the AMA that Yang held for the sub. Yang said he’d take a look at it, which he evidently did.
Secular Talk (Kyle Kulinski, progressive youtuber) thought that Yang did much better. David Pakman, another progressive youtuber, felt that Yang won the debate, along with Biden.
While this isn’t official (a Yang volunteer put it together, it looks like), the chart shows that Yang led the candidates in adding the most twitter followers after the debate. Yang has added roughly about 74K new twitter followers, 25K coming the day of the debate, and roughly about 10K new subs to the Yang subreddit since the debate.
Since the debate, Yang hasraised over $1M, with 87% of the money coming from new donors. The campaign is planning on using that money for ad buys in the early states.
Yang still needs one more qualifying poll with 2% or higher to qualify for the September debate. Last month, Yang had a 2% in a qualifying poll from NBC/WSJ and then one from NBC/Survey Monkey. After asking DNC for direction on whether it qualified for weeks, Yang announced his qualifying with both polls. Within 24 hours, DNC pronounced that only one of the the polls counted.
Yang has been on H3H3 (youtube channel), talked with Ali Velshi and Anderson Cooper. Another Anderson Cooper talk is in the works.
*It turns out that Yang was very ill the day of the first debate. He said he had an IV that day because of his illness. He didn’t mention that to anyone, especially the press. I’m guessing that it would have looked like an excuse. He talks about it here in a recent supporter gathering, contrasting the first debate with the second debate.
If you’re beating 2/3 of the field, which includes people who’ve won statewide offices, you’re not a joke candidate – or if you are a joke, you’re not a funny one to those who aren’t qualifying for the next debate.
When there’s 20+ candidates, that is a unreliable metric for “joke candidate”. I’m going to stick with “he’s got super stupid ideas and lies about them” for my categorizationing. Yes, I’m well aware who that would also cover.
Let’s assume that the debate stage ends with maybe Castro and either Gabbard or Steyer just also making the cut. A total of ten, one night.
This I think will give Yang a bit more of a look-see by some. Yeah, I completely agree that his ideas are stupid and that he lies about them. But that never stopped some from supporting someone. He’d likely move up a few percent, not into contender range obviously, but who would he be poaching from?
Definitely no overlap with Biden. Those who fall off of Biden will go to one of the other three in the pack below him. They are not looking for one of the, as Nate Silver has put it, “more eccentric candidates .”
Sure maybe some of the other dropping out eccentric ones, like Gabbard and Williamson, but I think any potential rise of Yang pulls most of all from Sanders, pulling Sanders closer to his hard cement floor.
Which might help Warren as then some others who saw Sanders as a real contender look elsewhere too, and she MIGHT benefit more from that than Biden would (and pretty sure more than Harris would).
So on net any rise for him is likely fairly neutral to Biden, helps Warren, hurts Harris, and further seals Sanders’ state as at most hoping to spoil it for someone else.
Initially I had thought that Yang might get UBI part of the discussion in the debates. I don’t think so any more. I don’t think many others will engage about it or pick it up.
The fact that Alaska’s version, from the oil based Alaska Permanent Fund, is now resulting in basic services and promised scholarship monies being clawed back to support it, does not play well right now either.
Qualifying for the September debates also qualifies Yang for the October debate since they both have the same qualification.
The H3 main youtube has been viewed 1M times in 2 days and hit number 4 in trending. Ethan broke the video down into several pieces that also got an additional aggregate of about 700K views. It was competing with Bernie Sanders’ interview with Joe Rogan which was topping the chart at #1 and had 6.7M views in the same 2 days. Considering that the second debate had roughly 8.7M viewers, that’s a pretty nice viewership, all concentrated on one person each. I enjoyed both interviews.
Yang spoke at a supporter meeting the day before he qualified for the 3rd debate, talking about some events in the campaign. First, I’m pleased to see that the composition of the crowd is much more diverse than in the early days of the campaign. In the very early days, the demographic was young males. At this meeting, many more groups are represented.
The campaign has currently raised $2.6M for the quarter so far. Since a big chunk of that money came after the debate, Yang is hoping for a big boost after the third debate. He’s aiming for $5M for this quarter.
Yang said that they’re planning a rally in Houston around the time of the third debate. They’re also involved in events hosted by Jack Dorsey (of twitter and Squarespace), Sam Altman (of Y Combinator) and Alexis Ohanian (of Reddit) in the next few months.
He says that the campaign has a stack of resumes from people who are now working on the other campaigns because the Yang campaign is on the rise. They just hired someone to help coordinate Yang’s field operations who used to work for the Sanders campaign in another cycle and is now working on a campaign that is “flaming out”.
Yang also mentions that the Yang 2020 website had been visited over a million times since the debate with most of the people visiting the policies page. There are now over 100 policies on the policies page. They’re now divided into categories.
Yang was in Iowa at the Iowa State Fair. Last year, at this same event was the start of his campaign. As he says, what a difference a year makes. Last year, he couldn’t get anyone to stop to listen. This year, he couldn’t move around without people with cameras impeding his progress. Multiple people ran alongside Yang to ask him loaded questions. I’ve already seen some of them in articles. Zach, Yang’s campaign manager, tried his best to shield Yang away from some of the more obnoxious stuff.
Elon Musk and Dan Carlin (Hardcore History) on twitter:
This tweet was posted in the Elon Musk sub. as well. Maybe because of this (?), there are now 3K people viewing the sub. Two months ago, the average was a few hundred. After the debate, it turned into about a thousand. (The goth comment was about this article and Yang’s high school picture.)
Ethan Klein, of H3H3, confirmed as Yang Gang. He’s been defending Yang in multiple tweets since the interview. An analysis of the individual donors contributing over $200 to a campaign shows that Andrew Yang had the most donors in the 18-34 age category, followed by Bernie Sanders. Yang’s donors were spread fairly evenly across the age spectrum. Elizabeth Warren’s donors, by contrast were almost half 65+ years old. Yang, Tulsi and Castro all had more people of color represented in their individual donor base (more than $200) than the other candidates.
I don’t follow other campaign subs so I don’t know if this happens in other subs, but followers of other campaigns often drop by to donate or lend support to the Yang sub, especially from the Bernie, Mayor Pete, Trump, Tulsi and Marianne campaigns. The other campaigns beyond those don’t have much of a Reddit presence. The other thing that happens often is that people post about changing from Republican to Democrat in the primary to vote for Yang. On a side note, I’ve come to appreciate some of the twitter and youtube commenters who have been unexpectedly gracious and open-minded when given information about Yang.
A Yang Ganger went to Anchorage Alaska to talk to one of the people who started the Alaska Permanent Fund. He says that the problems surrounding the fund today have to do with government corruption. He also interviewed a few people in Alaska about what they thought about the Freedom Dividend.
Yang was in the gun safety forum in Des Moines, IA. He broke down in tears when he heard a woman talking about her 4 year old getting shot while the twin watched. Yang has two boys, 6 and 3. Yang’s proposal is to allow the owners of guns to upgrade their guns to personalized guns, subsidized by the government. That way, only the owner of the gun can shoot the gun.
On preview: I was scooped on the Elon Musk tweet, but I’ll leave it in.
Andrew Yang’s campaign has hit some round number milestone markers.
Donors just hit 200K.
Donations just passed $3.5M for the quarter. (now very close to $4M)
Subs on reddit just past 50K. (now 53.9K)
Twitter followers passed 700K. (now 717K)
A map of Yang’s donors shows they’re pretty evenly spread through the country.
An ex-staffer of the Yang campaign, Jonathan Herzog, is running to challenge Rep. Nadler in 2020 on Yang’s platform of the Freedom Dividend. It’s nice that he’s using the same concepts, but he needs some of his own words. This video is word for word like a Yang speech with a different person. Still, it’s good that more people on running on the Freedom Dividend platform.
David Kim in CA is also running on a UBI platform. There are a couple others as well.
This fun video of Yang has been getting a few mentions. On the campaign trail, Yang jumped into a jazzercise class. Zach, Yang’s campaign manager, got one angle. A reporter shadowing them that day got another angle.
In response to the article, Noah Smith (writer) tweets
Yang’s breakfast of champions is a Belvita breakfast cookie. I’m thinking of trying it. Then again, I’ve seen him eating Doritos, pizza, turkey legs and other assorted junk food. I don’t think I’ll be trying those out.
Tom at Nerds for Andrew Yang did an interview with Scott Santens, who is a staunch advocate for UBI. They talked about Yang’s UBI plan and the campaign. He answered a few questions on how UBI works, the benefits and debunked some concerns. Scott Santens spoke about a march for UBI in September in NY.
The Yang Gang have created a couple tools to explain some of the concepts in the campaign or help find answers. Someone created Yanglinks.com which is a website that people can search for timestamped clips of videos of Yang. There is also a website that some people put together to break down the Freedom Dividend further.
Another Yang Ganger put together a video for the campaign with Yang clips.
There’s so much creativity in the Yang Gang. They often joke that if they’re all bots as so many people in the media insist, then Yang is right, the bots are about to take over.
Some recent random tweets. Vicky Larson (writer) on Yang’s policy of free marital counseling
In the graphic, Yang is shown polling in 6th place, tweeted about during debates in 4th place, articles written about him in 14th place and cable news mentions in 13th place.
There was a CNN graphic claiming to be the top 6 candidates in a Quinnipiac poll. The top 6 included Beto at 1% and excluded Yang at 3%. After the Yang Gang brought it to people’s attention on twitter, CNN later apologized to the campaign and changed the graphic.
To be clear, Yang (and most of the Yang Gang) are not considering any of this a conspiracy theory. But it’s clearly happening and should be pointed out. Chris Cillizza’s take on why Yang is overlooked. Cillizza has been writing about and had a video piece about Yang long before any of this happened. And yet, Cillizza chose to place Steyer in his top 10 ranking instead of Yang, even though Steyer hadn’t made the debate stage (and didn’t make it for Sept.) and Yang had. Cillizza’s take was that Steyer had a better chance because Steyer has more money. Cillizza says that the placement of Steyer over Yang was a mistake and will be corrected in the next ranking.
Cillizza’s reasons for the media ignoring Yang are that he’s an outsider with radically different ideas and the Ron Paul experience.
Mary Jordan on ABC’s This Week, talked about Andrew Yang and then defended him when another person on the panel tried to dismiss him as polling at 2% and not being one of the 3 top candidates. He said that people say that the race is between the top 3 and maybe one or two more. [OK, but Yang is in 6th place, so he only has to overtake one person to be part of that race.]
Mary Jordan: “I’ll tell you why it matters. He’s directly addressing the pain in the country. . . . He’s saying basically that the middle class is hurting. A lot of people talk about the 1% and the poor. But what about us? The average savings in a household in America is only $12K.”
Yang did a climate change town hall on CNN today. Part 1 and Part 2. (not official videos) It looks like it was well received by some.
