Andrew Yang, the businessman who won national followers as a presidential candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries, will run for New York City, he officially announced Wednesday night.
The race is already full of candidates, with a likely decisive Democratic primary in June 2021.
But Yang stands out. His presidential campaign had an almost singular focus on a universal basic income proposal, or UBI, in which the federal government would provide citizens with a monthly income. Yang, who was once an unknown businessman, had never run for political office before launching his campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, but raised millions of dollars and gathered a huge following of supporters from across the political spectrum who gravitated to around his UBI plan, his warnings that automation would get Americans out of jobs, and his simple English approach to politics. “You can talk to people like people”Said Yang in an interview after ending his campaign at the beginning of last year.
Yang launched his campaign on Wednesday night, his 46th birthday, in a video that portrays the businessman as an ordinary New York man who found a home in the city when he moved to Morningside Heights 25 years ago. “Seeing my city as it is now breaks my heart,” said Yang. In the two-and-a-half-minute ad featuring images of Yang wearing a “Forward New York” mask while walking the streets, the candidate promises to create a guaranteed minimum income, expand access to high-speed internet, “take back control of our subway ”And create a People’s Bank,“ so that it is no longer so expensive to be poor ”.
The ad shows Yang playing a piano on Coney Island, elbowing a barbershop, waving to sanitation workers, talking about the injustice of police violence against blacks (“it’s beyond injustice, it’s inhumane”) and examining the empty showcases of closed companies (“It’s crazy,” he says, sitting down with Queens Assembly member Ron Kim on the closing rate).
“We are going to reopen intelligently to revive our incredible culture,” Yang told voters in the video. “Maybe we can even save the Knicks.”
His campaign said the video was directed by Darren Aronofsky, the filmmaker best known for films a little darker than a campaign ad, including Requiem for a dream and more recently Mother.
The video also features Representative Ritchie Torres, a newly elected Democrat from the Bronx and a young star in municipal politics. Torres does not explicitly endorse Yang in the ad, but a campaign advisor suggested that an endorsement could be coming.
Yang will make his first appearance as mayoral candidate at an event in Morningside Park on Thursday morning.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Yang boosted UBI in a viral manner, first on the internet – during the third presidential debate in Houston, Yang announced on stage that his campaign would donate $ 120,000 in campaign funds in an extension of a UBI pilot program if supporters went to your website and registered for a chance to gain entry to the program. During his last demonstration in New Hampshire, Yang’s supporters encouraged him to run for office again. When Yang ended his campaign last February, after failing to stand out in the first two competitions, he told Buzzfeed News that popularizing UBI was his main achievement.
“This will be the most important legacy: if we accelerate the end of poverty in this country – which I believe we have already done, because I don’t think this idea will go away,” he said.
On Wednesday night, his nascent mayor campaign circulated a proposal for a UBI program that would provide 500,000 low-income residents with $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 a year and enroll participants in what Yang is calling the People’s Bank of the City of New York, with the ultimate goal of “Ending poverty in New York City”, according to a copy of the plan. His campaign said the Yang government would spend $ 1 billion a year on financial aid and would develop the program over time through public and philanthropic funding.
Yang is running for mayor less as a newcomer than as a target for attack by other candidates and as a national figure who had previously focused his attention outside the city. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who also briefly ran for president in 2020, is without a limited term in late 2021.
Yang’s idea of running for mayor had already fluctuated even before his presidential campaign ended. In its primary endorsement, the New York Times editorial board praised Yang as an “engaging and enthusiastic candidate, whose diagnoses are often thought provoking,” but without adequate political experience. “We hope he decides to get involved in New York politics,” they wrote. Yang himself consistently refused to dismiss the idea, telling BuzzFeed News after ending his campaign that he was considering the possibility.
“One of the things I’m most curious about is who the other candidates are in the race and what the race would be like,” he said then. “Because I tend to want to do something that I feel will have a great impact and add a lot of value, so if there is someone who is already competing and who has a positive agenda that is very much in line with mine – I am not someone who is driven just for maximum political advantage. I want to see how much value I can add. “
Already exist Many other candidates, with more to come. They include New York City controller Scott Stringer, Brooklyn District President Eric Adams, Blasio’s former attorney and MSNBC representative Maya Wiley, Obama’s former housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, and former New York City sanitation chief Kathryn Garcia. New York City has never had a woman as mayor and has only once had a non-white mayor – David Dinkins in the early 1990s.
The pandemic puts distinct pressure on the race and overwhelming pressure on whoever wins it. It devastated New York City’s economy, with an unemployment rate almost double the national rate and great uncertainty about how the city’s businesses will survive even after the end of the pandemic, especially if more people can work from home, emptying the dense Manhattan area office buildings and the companies that serve them. This then raises significant questions about the city’s future tax revenues and the city’s programs and agencies that need that money to survive.
Yang grew up north of the city in Westchester County and lives in Manhattan, where he did business before running for president. In 2011, he launched the non-profit organization Venture for America, which intended to sow startups in cities across the country. He previously ran a tutoring company in the city, then called Manhattan GMAT, which he sold to the huge testing company Kaplan. In 2011, he was accused by a former Manhattan GMAT employee of gender discrimination.
The frequency with which he actually stays in Manhattan became a campaign problem before Yang even formally entered the race. Yang and his wife, Evelyn, who featured prominently in his campaign launch video, spent much of the pandemic’s last year outside of New York City, at their weekend home in upstate New Paltz. He defended his decision by pointing to the quarantine situations that thousands, if not millions, of New York residents went through.
“Can you imagine trying to have two children in a virtual school in a two-bedroom apartment and then trying to work alone?” Yang said in an interview with the New York Times in January, a quote that immediately drew the candidates’ contempt in the race.
Conversations about Yang’s candidacy for mayor increased shortly before the holiday, with reports in the Politico about his role in the city and plans, and then on December 11, with the publication of a New York Times article entitled: “Andrew Yang is running for mayor? All signs point to it. “At the time, Yang allies said the suggestion was premature and that a decision had not yet been made. He was still under dispute for a role in Joe Biden’s next government, one said.
Of his considerations, said a person familiar with the candidate’s thinking, the biggest was the immense reality of what would happen if he really won: The next mayor will be “piled up with a lot of crap”, as the person said. In 2019, Yang distinguished his candidacy for president, in what was at times hard work from a 22-month dispute and a total of 27 candidates, while having fun in the campaign. This job would not always be fun.
At times during the past year, Yang told some of his former campaign advisers that he had ruled out a candidacy for mayor. Some of them went on to work for other candidates in the race. In the months leading up to his announcement, Yang had his 2020 campaign manager, Zach Graumann, as well as several employees from Humanity Forward, the political group he founded last March.
Yang also sought advice from Bradley Tusk, a friend and strategist who managed the successful candidacy for the re-election of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2009 in New York City. Bloomberg and Yang had their own friendly relationship when they both ran for president and stayed in touch after the end of Yang’s campaign.
“It’s still me. It’s still what we do, ”said Yang in an interview this spring about his political group. “It is about proving that we are the best at solving our problems.”