What Yang Voters Really Want
Updated at 9:28 a.m. on December 21, 2019.
If you ask members of the Yang Gang to explain their love for Andrew Yang, they will smile—they love this question—take a deep breath, and begin bragging on his behalf.
“Imagine someone that is, like, really smart,” said AJ Sutton, a 32-year-old attorney, at a trivia night for Yang supporters in Arlington, Virginia, earlier this month. Sutton wore a navy-blue MATH hat—the acronym stands for Yang’s slogan—and gestured excitedly as he spoke. “He sits down and just spends years thinking about various solutions to problems that we're facing, and then he runs for president based on that.”
That’s Yang, Sutton said, and he has “really, really good ideas.”
It’s natural that a supporter of a presidential candidate would approve of that candidate’s proposals. But Sutton and other fans of the long-shot Democrat are different. To them, Yang’s victory matters lessthan whether American voters are sold on his ideas: namely, universal basic income as an aggressive government response to the rise of automation. Indeed, his supporters, who span the political
