Andrew Yang, Political Kardashian
Spring of junior year was my last time on the ballot. I was running for student-council president at the fancy prep school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that I attended on scholarship. I had staked my electoral hopes on witty posters, but a lot of my classmates gravitated toward a new kid with a simple promise: putting a Snapple machine in the cafeteria. Snapple was huge in the late ’90s, and this was the kind of rich private school where not having a chance to pay more for a drink with lunch was the biggest problem most of the student body faced.
These days, that other candidate is the campaign manager for Andrew Yang, whose mayoral bid is inspiring more New Yorkers than anyone would have guessed—and driving everyone else crazy. “It’s hard to defeat Snapple for everyone,” Yang joked when my former opponent and I recounted the story as the three of us sat down for dinner recently in Manhattan. “Universal basic Snapple would prevail.”
New York’s Democratic mayoral primary is less than a month away. The winner will likely be the next mayor of this deep-blue city. But no one has any clue who that winner will be. The polls have been all over the place, and how well the vote-counting will work is uncertain: New York is making its first-ever attempt at ranked-choice voting (each voter will be able to rank up to five choices), giving even the stragglers a sense that they may be able to pull out a win. The city’s famously incompetent Board of Elections will be administering the election and trying to figure out the results.
New York City’s municipal government is the biggest and most complicated one in the country, and the mayor has more unilateral power and a higher profile than nearly anyone else who doesn’t have access to nuclear codes. The race has been a special brew of post-Trump celebrity campaigning, racial politics, and progressive infighting. It’s arriving just as New Yorkers are starting to emerge from the pandemic, full of uncertainty about the city’s future. But Yang is part of every discussion, and in first or second place in nearly every poll so far.
Yang is the first celebrity candidate who’s famous for being a celebrity candidate, a sort of political Kardashian. I asked Yang if he’d be doing this well in the polls if not for his presidential campaign, which got a lot of attention but, in the end, only a
