Running for mayor would be a new ballgame for Yang
Different rules at play in Big Apple than nationally
Running for New York City mayor — if Andrew Yang ultimately decides to do so — will pose an unusual challenge to the entrepreneur who not so long ago was vying for the nation’s highest office.
Unlike any of the other mayoral contenders, Yang recently ran for president, and in that race he made political calculations based on an entirely different set of circumstances.
Now, if he runs for City Hall, Yang will have the advantage of broad name recognition, but he’s also almost certain to see some of his past political calculations and the rhetoric that went with them viewed through a much tougher local prism.
Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College, praised Yang as an experienced campaigner and predicted he would be a “formidable” candidate if he runs. But Sherrill said it’s not a given that his national bona fides will translate well in the Big Apple.
“It will be a test,” he said. “Some smart people meet expectations, and some don’t. That’s why we have tests. That’s why we have elections.”
Richard Flanagan, a CUNY political science professor, was less optimistic for Yang.
“It’s going to be hard,” he said. “He’s like a fully grown tree. But if the soil won’t support his roots, he’s screwed. I’d expect he’s more in the screwed column.”
One of the most glaring examples of an area Yang may try to stake out different terrain centers around his rhetoric about white voters.
In his book “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future,” which was published in 2018 — a year after he filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission signaling his presidential run — Yang begins to set a tone that persisted through 2020.
“The group I worry about most is poor whites,” he wrote. “Even now, people of color report higher levels of optimism than poor whites, despite worse economic conditions. It’s difficult to go from feeling like the pillar of one’s society to feeling like an after-thought or failure.”
In a 2019 interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, Yang suggests that the Democratic Party has strayed from being viewed as a party that’s sympathetic to the white working class.
“There’s now some kind of pathology that if the person who’s suffering is a white man of a certain background then the suffering somehow is like, somehow like diminished, like it doesn’t count as much if they’re a trucker,” he said. “That’s something that I find really destructive.”
Comments like that — as well as his most well-known proposal of a $1,000 universal basic income, or UBI — helped draw support both among liberals and outside the mainstream of Democratic Party politics, including from white nationalists and the so-called alt-right.
When asked about that support during an April 14, 2019, town hall hosted by CNN, Yang said the concern he voiced in his book lay with disaffected whites turning to violence as a result of the perception their status had been downgraded. “It’s been a point of confusion because I don’t look much like a white nationalist,” Yang, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, said to laughs from the audience.
“I’ve completely disavowed any of that support.”
But far-right whites didn’t necessarily interpret it that way. Notorious neo-Nazi and Trump supporter Richard Spencer praised Yang for his vision and compared him to Trump.
“Trumpism was the fantasy that America can be saved. Yangism is the awareness that it can’t,” Spencer said on Twitter. “He acknowledges that the jobs aren’t coming back. UBI is a civilizational bandaid.”
In another vote of confidence from white supremacists, Greg Johnson, editor of the white nationalist site Counter-Currents, wrote that Yang is “the only Democrat who has talked about the problems afflicting white America.”
“White nationalists need to understand exactly why I think Andrew Yang is important,” Johnson wrote. “Andrew Yang seems like an intelligent and sincere guy. He is not white, but he is the only Democrat who opposes anti-white identity politics. ... I will vote for him in the Democratic primary, and I will vote for him as president if he goes up against Trump.”
A spokesman for Yang dismissed remarks like that as nothing more than a distraction.
“If he runs, he’s already talked about his intention to do UBI. That plan would by and large benefit people of color,” Yang’s spokesman Chris Coffey said. “There is certainly a difference between running for president and running for mayor. If he runs, the focus of his campaign will be about restoring and bringing back New York City and being an anti-poverty mayor.”