Unfortunately, it’s the age we live in.
We live in a viral world, a meme world, a YouTube replay world. He doesn’t have the name recognition the other candidates have, so he has to fight guerilla warfare style. I don’t like it either, but welcome to life in 2019.
How is “there’s lots of asian doctors” guerrilla warfare in a meme world? Did you mean to address criticism of his giveaway announcement? Because that’s viral and YouTube worthy stuff. But it will offend a lot of reliable voters.
Resorting to stereotype reinforcing “jokes” is not a meme.
Whether is Harris and her ganja joke at the expense of the heritage of her father’s side or this and his math schtick.
You accept the negative when you accept the positive.
I mean that he’s doing what he can to gain attention, even if it’s potentially negative. I don’t take Yang seriously as a possible front-of-the-pack candidate, but it’s clear that he knows how to use modern media to market himself. He’s done that arguably as well as any candidate running. He’s willing to risk alienating some voters because he needs voters to know he exists in the first place. He can always apologize and change his position later.
Yang has a lot of good ideas. Unfortunately, he has a few too many nutty ideas.
Zach Graumann, Yang’s campaign manager, released some stats about the debate:
The Yang2020 website has the number of entries by state. One of the Yang Gangers calculated that by population size. It’s amazlingly proportional by population in pretty much every state across the country. There are also stories of how the money would be used by some of the entries.
Politico reported Andrew Yang’s campaign says over 450,000 people have entered debate contest
Early indications were already positive. The day after the debate, some sources were reporting that Yang’s campaign website got 116K hits minutes after the announcement and got donations of $120K within hours.
Yang had the biggest increase of twitter followers than any other candidate. His sub count increased as well. Since my last update, twitter followers increased roughly 100K to 850K. Subs on Reddit increased to 64.3K (increasing 300 while I composed this note) People online at the sub also increased from a high of 3K to a high of 5K over the weekend. Yang’s Google searches were the highest or second highest after the debate. Biden was highest at times with the search word record player.
Yang celebrating at the debate party.
The day after the debate, there were multiple reports in the Yang subreddit of people saying that instead of them having to ask people about Yang, everyone in their workplace or school was talking about him to each other and to them.
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, offered to pay the $120K if the Yang campaign was disallowed.
Yang replied “Alexis you are a class act my friend. Will call you soon. Thank you.”
Multiple people have offered to give one or two people the equivalent of a Freedom Dividend over the course of the campaign. Justin Sun offered to pay for 100 people. They haven’t done it yet because of campaign finance laws.
From the SF Chronicle, Pundits laugh at Andrew Yang. Regular people don’t
A few people felt that the politicians on the debate stage were laughing at them (the people who needed the money). On twitter,
On Reddit:
Some nice remarks from people on the debate:
Ezra Klein of VOX
Cenk Uygur of TYT
Yang was the top rated Presidential candidate at Equal Citizens, Lawrence Lessig’s group.
On Yang’s supporters, a Newsweek journalist notes:
On Yang’s donors, some of the Yang Gang are wondering why Pete Buttigieg spending $300K to charter private jets to travel to campaign events is not frowned upon but Yang giving money to the American people is. Most people in this threadwere proud to give to this cause and gave more after hearing the announcement. Some considered starting a Gofundme campaign for the funds.
Over the weekend, there was a drama with Shane Gillis, a new hire on SNL. A video surfaced where he was making racial slurs. Yang was the target of one of the slurs. Yang reached out to Gillis and offered to talk. He also suggested that Gillis be offered forgiveness and not fired. SNL fired Gillis on Monday. Yang reported that Gillis did reach out to him to talk. CNN’sinterview with Yang, partially on that topic, is now trending on youtube.
On the day of the debate, a podcast released at the NYT that, to me, exemplifies the campaign. A journalist, Kevin Roose, had interviewed Yang at the start of his campaign, wrote an article about it, calling Yang’s campaign a longer-than-long-shot. [Zach Graumann used that phrase to fire up the campaign and create benchmarks for the campaign team] Since then, the journalist revisited Yang since Yang is polling higher than that designation would allow, to try to understand what he missed.
Here’s what Kevin Roose missed.
The day before the debate, Ted Cruz challenged Yang to a basketball matchup. A Yang Ganger told Cruz that he should challenge Yang at basketball (since there were reports of Yang warming up on the courts before the debate. Cruz responded with “Sorry. You gotta poll at 5% or more to play on my court.” Yang included a screen shot of a 5% poll and challenged Cruz. “Ted I would be delighted to beat you in basketball.” Cruz offered to play with 3 of his staff on his team. Yang countered to play one on one.
A couple fun things (to me anyway). A guy created a huge replica of a math hat and put it on top of his van. Another Yang Ganger created an anime video on Yang. It’s amazingly well done. I am in total awe. But wut? Still, the creativity and ingenuity of the Yang Gang continues to amaze me.
Yang held a rally in Boston today. It looked like it was well-attended.
Tomorrow, 9/17/19, there will be another rally in Philadelphia, PA at at 6:30PM.
Then on Thursday, 9/19/19, Yang is scheduled to be on Seth Meyers.
Thanks, Jonathan Chance.
Wow, Yang got lots of web traffic after announcing a big cash give away? Innovative guerrilla tactics.
The DNC released qualifications for the November debate. Candidates need over 165K donors and 4 national polls of 3% or higher or 2 polls of 5% or higher in early states.
Yang has passed the donor mark with over 200K donors. He has hit 3 qualifying polls with 3% or more. He needs 1 more qualifying poll to make it to the November debate with over a month to qualify.
He is a lock for the October debate. Gabbard and Steyer also made it to the October debate. The October debate is scheduled for October 15 and so far, is said to be slated for one night only. 12 people on the stage at the same time.
I was just about to link the debate qualification spreadsheet some guy from Politico is updating, but the Yang Gang crashed it the other day and the author couldn’t update it, so I decided to refrain. Zach (PR mgr) was proud.
Some notable recent polls. Yang hit 10% in a poll (not verified by me) of college students, placing him in third among college students. He hit 7% in California in an Emerson poll, placing him in 4th place in that poll. He also had a 7% in a SurveyUSA poll. Yang also hit 8% in a national Emerson poll.
Some interesting information (from Nerds for Andrew Yang) from that Emerson poll is that Yang is polling higher with hispanics, Republicans, people aged 18-34 and people making over $100K/yr.
Business Insider has Yang ranked at 5th on 9/20.
Yang opened 2 new offices in Iowa to a good reception. There were people going down a long hall, down the stairs and out the door to get a selfie with him.
When Yang showed up to play some basketball with his staff at Georgetown University, a bunch of students showed up to take selfies that created a line around the gym.
There was an interview with a guy who received one of the first Freedom Dividends. He was skeptical at the time, not committing to vote for Yang, but he has since been more positive. He makes a nice analogy of getting a cash benefit as better than a monitored program to getting a cash gift or a gift card that you might not be able to use.
There were several nice interviews with Yang this week. The View did apositive interview. Van Jones also did a nice interview. Firing Line did an interview. He was also on Seth Meyers. Yang was also on Rachel Maddow but got shortened time due to the impeachment inquiry news. The Takeout by Major Garrett released their interview in its entirety in March. They only released a one minute clip in March. It was a pretty nice interview. Too bad they didn’t release that in March. The Hill also did a niceinterview with Yang. The Hill also had a segment on UBI when a poll taken recently showed a big increase in favorability of UBI. After the Houston debate, Nate Silver and team (Galen) ran into Yang at the airport. They decided to do a podcast in the airport lounge. Yang was on CNN’sclimate town hall.
A NYT article by a Harvard economics professor, N. Gregory Mankiw (wiki) compared Yang’s VAT against Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax and found Yang’s plan to be better in practicality and the likelihood of wealth distribution success.
Some fun stuff. The artists and musicians are showing up more and more. I loved this acoustic guitar piece done for the Yang Gang done by Musician for Yang on twitter. There was a amazing piece of art done with a magnifying glass and the sun to burn wood of a medallion of Yang. Yang was parodied on SNL. Yang has been looking forward to this for a while. Yang wrote, “If you give me some notice @nbcsnl I am happy to come in and play myself.” Zachjokes about his life on the campaign trail, “This picture about sums up my life right now. At a steak-fry in Iowa. Yang having more fun than he’s supposed to. I’m holding a plate of something deep fried while fending off a reporter.”
Milk+T in LA made a BobaYang drinkin honor of Yang’s love of Boba tea, as well as a sticker of a Boba drinking Yang. Some of the proceeds get donated to the campaign.
The campaign put out a call to raise a $1.5M about a week before the end of the quarter. In contrast to last quarter, when the call fell short of the goal, the Yang Gang surpassed the $1.5M and is trying for $2M by the end of the quarter. Right now, they’re at $1.675M with about 9 hours to go.
The Yang Gang have been doing community service projects on the weekends, like picking up trash. There are a several groups doing this in different areas.
The Philadephia rally went well. Yang jogged in to the tune of Rocky. He had just hit 7% in CA in the Emerson poll.
Today, 9/30/19, is an exciting day for the Yang Gang. There’s a rally planned for LA at MacArthur Park. The Yang Gang is planning to fly a bannerover the event. It’s also the end of the quarter. Hours before the rally, Yang is seen riding a scooter in LA.
Not reading the thread. Just want to say that The Cult of Yang on social media has been nothing short of off-putting and screaming that the media is giving more time to someone polling at 1% when you’re only getting 3% is not some conspiracy against your outsider candidate. It’s because you are an outsider candidate - the media wants to talk to Senators (Klobuchar, Booker) and elected reps (Gabbard) regardless of their poll numbers. When literally 97% of people are picking someone other than you, it doesn’t take anti-media conspiracy theories to explain the dearth of coverage.
Thank You!!! I am really trying to follow Pete’s rules of the road, but the nastiness of the Yang Gang has really made me angry. When Yang releases his fundraising numbers, I’m not going on Twitter just to troll him. I’m not sure Ron Paul had this devoted of a cult and such fervent conspiracy theories.
The LA rally last Monday was epic. Zach claims there were 5K people in attendance. There were multiple livestreams going on at the same time. Paget Kagy did a livestream as well as Problem Solver Politics andYangstream. Paget spoke in the introduction. MC Jin (rapper) did a rap, and a friend of Yang, Brian Yang (no relation), from back in Yang’s first failed business made some comments. Brian Yang also set up the fundraiser function the next day in LA.
The LA rally had break dancers, pyrotechnics, and people chanting through the whole thing. The whole thing felt electric, even just watching the livestream. After one of the rallies, Yang rode some guy’s skateboard that was trying to get him to sign. Zach posted out the nice parts of the ride that got played on the Colbert show. The owner of the skateboard showed it until the end when he wiped out. Still, he was pretty impressive.
The next week, Yang had interview with the Snapchat CEO, NPR, The Real, John Harwood, Alyssa Milano’s podcast Sorry Not Sorry, Eric Weinstein’s podcast The Portal. He had the largest surge in polling of college students, jumping to 10.4%. Twitter followers passed 900K, reddit subs passed 70K (now close to 72K; reddit being reddit celebrated at 69K and forgot about it at 70K). Yang moved up to #4 in the Business Insider ranking.
The campaign announced that they had picked and notified the 10 Freedom Dividend winners.
Then the Yang campaign announced his fundraising haul of $10M. It was a 257% increase over his $2.8M raised in Q2. The Yahoo Finance graph show who is gaining momentum and who is losing speed.
The Yang campaign gave the exclusive story about his raising $10M in Q3 to CNN. CNN returned the favor by not adding Yang to any of their graphics. Instead they chose to feature Cory Booker with $6M and leaving Yang out entirely. MSNBC did the same but said it was a timing issue. CNN didn’t have that excuse. In protest, the Yang Gang started donating to the campaign and posting their receipts.
*
Rolling Stone* did an article on Yang called Inside the Making of Andrew Yang 2.0
The dark-horse Democrat just raised $10 million. He’s on a hiring spree and building a legit campaign. But how far can he go? This is a great behind the scenes look at Yang’s campaign as it unfolds. It tells of Yang’s new campaign hires and how much political experience they have and a bit about strategy.
Saturday, Oct. 5th was National Yang Gang day. A bunch of the Yang Gang got together and organized a day when Yang Gang from all over the country got together with people in their local area. There were pictures of Yang Gang getting together in cities all over the country. The LA Yang Gang had about 150 people getting together. They were gathered together on the steps near the Santa Monica Pier when a street performer started yelling at them to go away and stop taking his spotlight. The Yang Gang stopped doing what they were doing, went over to the street performer and filled his bucket with donations, then stood as his audience as the guy started singing “Hallelujah” to them. Later, they had a movement going to get that guy’s subscriber count on youtube up to the threshold where he could get his channel monetized. Paget was there livestreaming. It was an incredible moment.
The LA Yang Gang also helped a homeless woman who was telling her story to a camera crew at the gathering. She told Paget Kagy to thank all of them for all the money she received which was about the equivalent of a Freedom Dividend.
Personally, these are the best parts of the campaign for me. I’ve read so many stories of how this campaign has lifted people out of depression or given people hope. There’s a guy who says in twitter that he had tried to commit suicide by setting himself on fire and had lost all hope until he found this campaign. I saw him at the LA fundraiser talking to Paget. Yang retweets a bunch of tweets all the time about people saying that this campaign has lifted them out of depression because they feel hope for the first time. There was a woman at an early rally who gave her story about how the campaign took away her depression. Several people with autism have written about how they feel acceptance for the first time with Yang talking about his son with autism. It’s heartwarming to read these stories about how the campaign has changed people’s lives.
Last night, Andrew Yangshowed up at the Rich Brian of 88Rising opening of the Sailor tour. Yang introduced Rich Brian. When Yang appeared on the stage, the crowd went wild, chanting “Andrew Yang”.
Yang just made the November debate which will take place on November 20 in Atlanta. So far, 8 candidates have made it to that debate in November. Yang is already scheduled for the debate in October on October 15.
By some accounts, the 4th debate went well for Yang. Unlike the past 3 debates where there was more of a consensus of the winners, the 4th debate was a bit of a Rorshach test for the pundits. MSM generally had Warren winning. The progressive left channels had Bernie winning. The Yang Gang had Yang winning.
There were a few places that had Yang winning. Chris Cillizza on CNN has Yang winning. The Humanist Report had Yang winning at minute 27:30. And Saagar at The Hill had Yang winning. There were a number of articles like Vox that had UBI or automation winning. The AP fact check on automation went against Warren, who Yang was arguing against. According to the AP, automation was a major cause of the manufacturing jobs decline. The WP fact check also played in Yang’s favor on the wealth tax being tried in several countries and being repealed.
In the 4th debate, Yang mentioned his friendship with a Republican trucker. Some backstory on that trucker. He’s Fred the felon. Yang went on a ridealong with Fred in his truck when Yang first started his campaign. Fred was dubious when he first heard Yang’s platform, but today, Fred is a huge supporter. Fred put up a crowdsource campaign to get $8.4K to wrap his truck with Yang’s picture and campaign info. He now drives the truck around the country, attending Yang’s events. Here’s his truck in SF before the SF rally. Now they give shout-outs to each other at rallies.
After the announcement of the $10M third quarter, most of MSM left Yang off their charts about it. But since then, some pundits have changed their predictions about his campaign.
Two of the most dismissive and snarky pundits to Yang’s campaign have been Nate Silver and Chuck Todd. Both of them have now said that if Yang finishes in the top 3, they wouldn’t be surprised.
Zach Montellaro, a writer for Politico who is keeping track of the race, tweeted out some news about the cash on hand for the candidates and found Yang to have a decent amount of cash on hand, putting him in cash-positive category.
Someone who was following social media growth after the debate showed Yang with the highest twitter growth following the debate.
After the debate, Yang did a 10 hour AMA that he had announced during the debate. They called Alyssa Milano and David Arquette during the AMA.
One of the leading economists, Greg Mankiw, while speaking at a conference on wealth inequality said that he favors Yang’s plan. He did an interesting thought experiment. He asked some Harvard students to pick between two plans that would help to redistribute wealth. Plan A is a means tested transfer. Under plan A, there would a transfer of $1K for people with zero income, phasing out 20% for every dollar going up to $60K. It would be funded by a progressive tax on people making over $60K. Under plan B, a UBI would transfer $1K/mo to everyone, paid by a 20% flat tax on earning. 90% of the Harvard students picked plan A. According to Mankiw, the plans are identical in term of economic impact. Because of the reduced administrative costs, among other factors, Mankiw favors plan B which he calls Yang’s plan. He noted that his hypothetical plan B is taxing income and not sales. He said that taxing sales is even more preferable because it doesn’t punish higher earnings which is one of the reasons that Yang chose the VAT.
Mankiw notes that journalist and pundits who talk about the taxes without the transfers that accompany them are being misleading to the point of deception.
Greg Mankiw announced in his blog that he will be unregistering as a Republican to vote in the upcoming primary election.
Interestingly, Mankiw considers Yang to be center-left. Others have called him left of progressive. Still others have called him libertarian.
In the midst of this upswing, the polls took a downward dip and the tone of the subreddit turned negative. That’s uncharacteristic of the Yang Gang. It took about a week for people to start questioning what was going on. I suspect that people from the outside were bringing in the negativity because I could see my upvote count of the people who were negative, and they seemed to be new. Things have turned back to positive in the subreddit, thankfully, along with the direction of some of the polls.
There was a UBI march around the world over the weekend on 10/26/19. It started out with Scott Santens’ group starting a NYC UBI march. As word about it spread through the Yang Gang, it turned into an international event. After a poll that showed an upward favorability of UBI, Andy Stern (President Emeritus SEIU and advocate for UBI) noted “The “Yang Effect”: Voter support for universal basic income grows.” Based on some pictures Yangis tweeting out, it looks like a success.
The requirements for the December debate have been announced. Yang has met the donor requirement and has 1 of 4 required polls to make the December debate stage.
On Halloween, Yang called 60 donors in 60 minutes to try to hit $1.5M in a week to end out October well. The goal of $1.5M was reached by the end of the night. Lots of pictures of Yang Gang dressed up as Yang were shared. The campaign made its goal of $1.5M in the last week of October to put out more ads in the early states.
Yang made the cover of Newsweek.
Yang had a cameo appearance in a ZHU video, “Came for the Low.”
On Nov.1, Yang went to an event in Iowa and set up a separate event in the same area called Yangapalooza. Rivers Cuomo of Weezer performed. The Yang Gang traveled out there in full force. Fred the felon drove his truck out there, and a bunch of Yang Gang youtubers and others got together to travel with him. Some people drove for hours and stood in the freezing rain for hours to take part in the event. Then they marched to the Liberty and Justice event where Yang spoke.
The campaign hired Bernie Sanders’ PR firm from the previous campaign, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh. They have been testing ads online for the past week that will be rolled out on TV going forward. The first ads feature Yang’s wife, Evelyn. CNN did an interview with Andrew and Evelyn Yang. The ad airing on TV is called A New Way Forward. They appear to be working. Twitter followers are increasing fast, approaching 1M (currently at 994K).
Either Yang should pay you or you should pay the Straight Dope for political advertising.
Or both.
Sent from my SM-G935P using Tapatalk
And they say Yang doesn’t have a cult.
Who’s this guy Yang, and what’s he all about?
By some accounts, Yang did really well at the last debate in November despite not getting to speak until 32 minutes into the debate. During that time, Yang said that he had raised one hand, then raised both hands and then just started talking. None of those strategies worked. I saw a pundit who was in the room confirm the frustration he saw on Yang’s face as he tried the different strategies to get some speaking time. Despite that, he got some accolades from a debate coach and from a correspondent at 538. Debate coach: Buttigieg and Yang stole the show From Geoffrey Skelley at 538 on the night of the debate:
538 also gave some polling stats that showed Yang having the second highest rise in net favorability post-debate.
Yang also got some positive feedback from a Forbes contributor. Why Andrew Yang’s Democratic Debate Closing Statement Was A Mic Drop Performance
In the backdrop of this positive news, there was some drama happening with MSNBC. In the days prior, MSNBC had left Yang out of a graphic, one of many to date. The Yang Gang protested and MSNBC apologized. They put up the graphic with Yang included but also included every candidate, even the ones polling at zero, which drowned out Yang’s presence on the graph. Zach Graumann, Yang’s campaign manager put out a statement calling out MSNBC’s apology, so tensions were already high before the debate happened.
The lack of coverage during the debate led Yang to put out a statement of the media blackout by MSNBC.
Also in the background, UBI is gaining traction. During the 4th debate, Tulsi Gabbard said she would support it. Castro said he would be willing to trial it. Williamson has been supporting UBI since she met Yang in the beginning of the campaign. The favorability rating in the US has risen. Almost Half of Americans Now Back Yang-Style Basic Income on Sept. 26, 2019.
Support for UBI has risen from 43% in February 2019 to 49% in September 2019.
In a fascinating (to me) Washington Post survey on income inequality originally posted toward the end of November 2019, Elizabeth Warren was listed as “open to it” for UBI. In a Business Insider article, Warren is quoted:
Yang noted that he had sent his book, “The War on Normal People” to Elizabeth Warren and that she had told him shortly after the last debate that she was half way through reading it.
Even the GOP now has a candidate running on UBI - Zoltan2020. He did a youtube podcast with Joe Rogan. wiki He was a reporter for National Geographic and is well-spoken.
Yang released his tax returns. It looks like he took a pay cut to run for President. He had the lowest income of any Presidential candidate still in the debates.
Some headlines:
Can Andrew Yang ride high charisma and innovative ideas into the Oval Office? From The State in South Carolina (opinion piece)
College Pulse CEO: Yang is most electable? among the 2020 candidates (1 in 5 Republican college students would vote for Yang over Trump, 2/3rds of Independents would vote for Yang instead of Trump. Yang has the highest crossover support in the Chegg college voter support poll.)
Researchers Find A Remarkable Ripple Effect When You Give Cash To Poor Families in NPR (cash given to poor families increases the economy of the entire community)
Andrew Yang having fun, but Democrat’s message is serious - AP
Andrew Yang puts his universal basic income plan to the test - CBS News interviews some recipients of the Freedom Dividend giveaway
Some Yang media:
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Jimmy Kimmel
Patriot Actwith Hasan Minhaj
The Axe Files with David Axelrod (podcast)
Useful Idiot/Rolling Stone (starts around minute 40)
The Yang campaign held a Pledge for Humanity effort on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The Yang Gang were asked to give an hour on Sunday to giving back to the community.
The Yang campaign contacted the FBI over death threats against Yang and people in his campaign.
The campaign’s fundraising goals have become more audacious in the past few weeks. Without more media coverage, the campaign is hoping to use more money to fund more ads, particularly in the first 4 states. For the last week of November, the campaign set a $2M goal. It didn’t look like the goal would be hit, but $750K was donated on the last day, most of it within the last few hours. They extended the deadline by a couple hours to make it. The media highlighted the $750K raised in a day. Andrew Yang raises $750,000 in 24 hours: The haul reflects the campaign’s ability to attract funds via grassroots appeals.
Jason Elia, traveling in Iowa,is saying that just visually looking at yard signs, Yang has a chance in Iowa.
Yang is launching a bus tour in Iowa next week.
Yang just had a big rally in Chicago and then a fundraiser in Dallas. Zach Graumann notes:
On a fun note, Yang tweeted out:
Within 20 minutes, the Yang Gang had found the footage. Then they found Zach in a boy band video and a cologne ad. Memes about Riley (Zach’s character) abounded.
The Yang Gang is eagerly anticipating the last poll to qualify Yang for the December debate. They have plans for January called Yangweek where a bunch of them (separate from the official campaign) are clanning to go canvassing for the campaign in early January in Iowa. Kai Watson, a youtuber, is taking a semester off school to do this while another Yang Ganger just quit his job to help.
Yang is scheduled to meet with Obama in early January. (Personally, I don’t feel Yang needs to go ‘kiss the ring’ but I haven’t seen anyone else with this opinion in the Yang Gang. Everyone else seems thoroughly thrilled.)
There’s just so much positivity around that campaign. While acknowledging that his chances are poor, he’s the only guy at 3% who has a real chance to break out and shock people.
Like squirting cream in the mouths of kneeling supporters. Complete with O face.
Yang is the kind of norm breaking candidate I think people think of when they say they want change, not a guy like Donald Trump.
