Hey Daily Kos community, new member here. My first eligible general election was 2004 and I remember reading Daily Kos to follow Howard Dean's campaign. But I quickly became disillusioned with politics until stumbling onto Andrew Yang through Joe Rogan's podcast this May and now I'm currently 100% Yang Gang (donations, phonebanking, putting up fliers, etc). After reading yesterday's straw poll discussion, I wanted to provide some insights and data into the Yang Gang, discuss why I think the Yang Gang and Andrew’s campaign will only continue to grow, and answer any questions from the Daily Kos community.
Are we all bots?
Nope! Yang Gang loves online polls and Twitter mentions. Create an online poll involving Yang and it'll be quickly found and shared on Discord, Reddit, Twitter and more. But according to TwitterAudit, Andrew's followers are 96% real and very engaged. And according to the campaign, 99% of the $10 million raised in Q3 were from sub-$200 donors. Throughout the campaign, Yang also sold more MATH hats at $35 a pop ($2.4 million) than many lower tier candidates have raised during entire quarters (I'm looking at you Michael Bennett). We are real people who are opening up our wallets in a serious grassroots way.
The Yang Gang is a motley crue of Democrats, Progressives, Independents, Republicans and 1st time voters.
Just about every poll that posts full crosstabs shows that Yang has support from self-identified Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. The 9/30 High Point University North Carolina poll of 1030 residents had Yang at 4% overall with split support between party ID (4% Dems, 5% Republicans, 4% Indy). Additionally, Yang had the lowest unfavorability ratings from self-identified Republicans and Independents (skewed somewhat by his lower name recognition). Anecdotally, there are Yang Gang who are 1st time voters who have never paid attention to politics, voters who have never voted Democrat but are now registered to support Andrew in the primaries, and Democratic-leaning voters who have been infrequent voters.
Once you go Yang Gang, you don't go back.
We spend a lot of time and energy telling our friends and family about Andrew that we’ve even coined a term for turning somebody into a Yang supporter (“I just Yanged my uncle last night!”). And this enthusiasm might even translate to voting preferences. While Emerson's poll that had Yang 4th nationally is a current outlier, Yang’s support was by far the most firm as 72% of his supporters indicated “they would definitely vote for Andrew” compared to 28% that said “there’s a chance I could change my mind”. Comparatively, firm support for the top tier was Biden at 58.5%, Bernie at 53.7%, and Warren at 34.3%. I think this speaks to how much Andrew’s platform and candidacy resonates with those of us in the Yang Gang.
I believe the Yang Gang will only continue to grow
In response to his $10 million Q3 total, which was a surge of 257% compared to Q2, Andrew joked that "my 'mailing list when I started this campaign was my Google address book." The Yang Gang literally started at zero when Andrew launched his campaign and was charitably described by the NYT as a "longer than long shot" candidate and WaPo's June magazine piece was titled "Random Man Runs for President". He is now consistently polling at 6th nationally in RealClearPolitics and has grown slowly but steadily despite still having lower than 50% name recognition in most polls, which suggests the tremendous room for growth. You can see the surge most evident with college students (increase of 5.9% from July to Sept) and young voters in general (25.5% for ages 18-29).
Yes, we can be overly sensitive online
But it also sucks when a candidate that you’re so passionate about is not only getting way less mentions (understandable) but to also be intentionally excluded from chyrons or misnamed and more. I’m sure CNN has failed to include Cory Booker on a chyron before but he also doesn’t have as dedicated of a following as the Yang Gang.
Thanks for reading, would love to hear people’s thoughts!