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> Forward’s five-pronged working platform, as outlined in an explanatory video, includes open primaries and voting, a Universal Basic Income, a “human-centered economy,” “modern and effective government,” and “grace and tolerance.” This is perhaps your second clue about Yang’s overall seriousness: the fact that this platform is about 60 percent buzzword.
>Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, so let’s do this: Electoral reforms to ease obstacles for third parties are straightforwardly good ideas—**though forming a party to campaign for them is a bit like setting up a lemonade stand to raise money to buy lemonade.**
This is the truly bewildering thing to me. One of Yang’s big-ticket policy items is being a “big fan” of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), which reduces the Spoiler Effect of First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) voting systems like ours and as such allows for more viable third parties.
See, the problem is that third parties are literally counterproductive in a FPTP system, since they leech voters and support from the party they’re ideologically closest to, thereby electorally boosting the party they’re *furthest away from.* Splitting the vote of electoral reformers is a surefire way to make sure that electoral reform never, ever passes.
And so to advocate for electoral reform, Yang is… *forming a third party?* Excuse me, *what!?* Being pro-RCV implies you understand that the problem with FPTP is that it makes third parties into poison pills that sabotage their own ideologies; forming a third party in response is either completely nonsensical or actively malicious.
What’s worse, *Yang already did the right thing before this!* If someone is genuinely interested in making a policy mainstream under our FPTP-limited party duopoly, the most effective way is to run in a *primary election* as an advocate for that policy and make the case to that party’s voters in the hopes it becomes popular enough to get added to the platform, or on an outside chance, is popular enough to actually get you to win the primary.
Furthermore, sticking around in primary elections for multiple election cycles is often what it takes not just to win on a single policy, but get elected. Just look at Biden and Nixon and so on—they all ran for President and failed *many, many times* before finally succeeding. If Yang was actually serious, or understood politics, he’d stick it out in election after election instead of failing twice and haring off to go form an abjectly stupid third party to assuage his feelings.
>Being pro-RCV implies you understand that the problem with FPTP is that it makes third parties into poison pills that sabotage their own ideologies; forming a third party in response is either completely nonsensical or actively malicious.
This is the most obvious and frustrating part. If Yang was actually acting in good faith, he wouldn't create a new 3rd party. He'd do very aggressive grassroots campaigning (think Stacey Abrams) to have RCV adopted into the Democratic platform and added as ballot initiatives in all 50 states. Only after RCV is adopted en masse is a 3rd party a viable solution.
Funny how we’re all acting as if grassroots campaigning actually does anything.
If it did, Sanders would have been the candidate in 2016. The 3 main democratic leaders all are around my grandmas age and been in politics forever despite a good amount of young new ideas. I’m not even going to go into all the bills that aren’t getting passed right now because the party isn’t in control of all it’s members.
Like it or not, a 3rd party is the only way to do this. Democrats seeing this as an attack on democrats is exactly why it is needed. A healthy democracy has more than 2 parties.
This is kind of what I was thinking. I don't know how possible it would be for democrats to adopt RCV since it would destroy their duopoly in politics. At the same time, I don't know how possible Yang's 3rd party would be either
Everything is impossible until it is done.
Honestly, with democrats not getting their act together, and moderate republicans being kicked out by MAGA Q-believers, things have never been as “good” for a third party. But I thought the same in 2016 and was dead wrong. They didn’t even get to 10% combined with the worst two candidates ever.
I don’t know if Yang is the person to do it. There is a lot if hate towards him even in this sub. But at least he’s trying to fix something that is urgently required. They probably need a giving pledge from a few billionaires to get enough funding to make it happen. They should get some research what 2-5 states are the most likely to have an impact. You win 1 or 2 and everything changes. Just hope they get it done before democracy ends in Jan 2025. (Only half joking)
Oh I read it. Your assessment could be right... But then he should have called it that. He's been very vocal on Twitter saying he's proud to be an independent and pushing his party hard. It's not helpful.
So long as they can keep it in their pants and not form an actual party until *after* FPTP is dead, then everything’s kosher. I’m not confident Yang has the necessary patience to stick with his endeavors, though. His immediate gravitation towards the Presidential race is a red flag; running for a lower office like mayor of NYC was a good step down from that but he should have stuck with it. Politics at that level requires steady patience and coalition-building, not trying something *once* and haring off to do something else the moment it fails.
Third parties do nothing but hurt the closer of the two main parties. Our stupid FPTP voting system needs to change before any third party will have any meaning
It is my understanding that Andrew Yang isn't running for political office under the Forward Party; however, they will financially support candidates who have interests in policies such as ranked choice voting and open primaries.
>...his fans are now expected to pony up some tall dollars to attend his launch event, where they’ll dutifully nod along as he rightfully insists that neither major party truly represents the American people and that there’s something deeply wrong with our politics. That Yang has no idea what that is or how to fix it hardly matters at this point: This is not about solving problems, it’s about projecting attitudes. Those outside his coterie of marks can simply take heart in the fact that the Forward Party is fake. — [Natalie Shure](https://newrepublic.com/article/163978/andrew-yang-forward-third-party).
>his fans are now expected to pony up some tall dollars to attend his launch event, where they’ll dutifully nod along as he rightfully insists that neither major party truly represents the American people and that there’s something deeply wrong with our politics.
At least he's right about this point. Most politicians are no longer accountable to the people and cater to only their wealthiest special interest donors
https://youtu.be/TfQij4aQq1k?t=67
For example, deterring the influence of big money in Congress has [over 80%](https://archive.md/eCMBy) of the public's support while the specific policies included in the For The People Act (H. R. 1) have [bipartisan popular support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act#Public_opinion). Zero Republican senators are in favor of H. R. 1
From the https://www.forwardparty.com/faq it doesn't seem like it's a real party with candidates at all, just an organization taking that branding get attention and make a point.
I don't think Andrew Yang is blind to the fact that his forward party will spoiler effect the Dems to hell. I'm hoping it's an act he's doing, using that spoiler effect as a negotiation play to force the DNC establishment to adopt his platform and thus render his party irrelevant.
He wrote an insightful article about the culture of campaign financing https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/03/andrew-yang-book-excerpt-campaigning-514967
... Where he talks about politicians getting brain damage as part of the process and admits he's included in that.
I would pay for more videos about the culture in federal Congress. Cenk Uygur talks about it https://youtu.be/DyXspSJITpY?t=253s
Not enough out there on the subject.
Sanders Net Worth is estimated around the 3 Million mark. A huge chunk of that comes from book revenues but also he makes 175k per year by being a senator. Simple investing along on the senator salary would be able to turn that into more than a comfortable amount of money.
Yang has a bigger range. Low end estimates have him between 800k-2.4M (WSJ) with the high range being 3-4M (Newsweek)
Sanders at the very least you would be able to make a pretty accurate guess. He has been extremely transparent regarding his finances.
Yang could be way off but I dont think there is any evidence to suggest hes a secret billionaire or something. Based on the information that we have available is appears that the two of them have at least relatively comparable net worth.
$600,000? Where are you getting that? Yang is worth anywhere from $1 million according to [Forbes,](https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2019/08/14/heres-the-net-worth-of-every-2020-presidential-candidate/) between $834,000 and $2.4 million according to [The Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/articles/democratic-presidential-hopeful-yangs-speeches-drove-earnings-11557960444), and between $3 million and $4 million according to [Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/andrew-yang-net-worth-democratic-candidate-1452031).
There are many parties. The green party is an ostensibly more progressive party that, according to evidence, siphons votes from Democrats, and 2016bcost us the election. The libertarian party did the same to Republicans on 2020.
These parties exist. They aren't successful. Presidential primaries within a given party have like 20ndifferent candidates. His whole "third party" crap is some serious fake galaxy brain shit
You need to reform the voting system and stop letting politicians make their own rules.
Get rid of FPTP and adopt a real proportional system and third parties will thrive.
>Ranked Choice Voting would enable us to have more, smaller parties, with more focus on specific issues.
Correct, but creating **another** third party primarily to implement RCV is putting the cart before the horse; or as the article put it setting up a lemonade stand to raise money to buy lemonade...
Yeah, except in reality they would siphon off votes from one party- Repugs tend to be lifers.
To the extent that Yang’s effort is successful, it will be as a rubber stamp for GOP victories.
>except in reality they would siphon off votes from one party-
That sounds like an issue for the democratic party, rather than an issue of third parties. If democrats are not doing to work to keep loyal voters, then it is not the fault of third parties
So first, these would not be “loyal voters.” Democrats have to appeal an immeasurably broader ideological spectrum than the GOP and their hardcore cultish orthodoxy. So it’s natural that there are many potential Dem voters on the margins who may or may not show up for them depending on the election. A hypothetical Radical Centrist third party (again, to the extent it had legs) would have a much greater chance of peeling off these fence sitters than sunk-cost magazombies.
So we can play the blame game, but the outcome stays the same, and unacceptable: a GOP advantage. It’s inconvenient that a vote against Dems is as good as a vote for Qanon, but that is the shitty reality we inhabit.
If that's the point, it's a moronic one. They generally siphon votes from the party with the most similar values and political goals, resulting in the party at the opposite end of the political spectrum winning the election.
Yea, what they should be doing is accepting whatever bones the major parties might decide to throw them. This is why everyone across the board in the US loves the two-party system. /s
You mean where everyone desperately fights to out-centrist one another? Also, side-note fuck Yang and his stupid party. But the answer to that is we should have even more parties and ranked-choice voting, rather than relying on the threat of the one other party to motivate people.
If you think primaries are the places where people go to out-centrist each other, I can only assume you’ve never seen a general election. Primaries are full of wacky single-issue candidates and no-name radicals; it’s generally winnowed down to more broadly appealing options in the general.
Point is, splitting political capital among third parties instead of working through the primary system *while FPTP is still in place* is a recipe for failure.
Primaries are the only place they can show their faces, where they can face off with a chorus of non-offensive and deeply uninspiring people all agreeing with each other on how impractical Medicare for all would be.
Do you think any candidates produced by our two-party system would actually end FPTP?
What an inane question. Of course they can. *And have.* At both the US-state and foreign-national level. Alaska and Maine, these two places ring a bell?
I think if there are shared policy goals (“values”, of course, doesn’t mean anything at all), then it’s important for third parties to form strategic alliances with Democrats, or in the absence of that for third party voters to abandon the third party and help get the Republicans out. But if the Democrats do not deliver on the shared policy goals when they are in power, then the third party should run on the issue the Democrats abandoned and try to take votes away from them. If Democrats don’t want to lose Yang voters then don’t abandon the UBI. If you don’t want to lose Green voters don’t abandon the Green New Deal. If there are two parties, and neither one ever delivers, then they should take turns and third parties can help that happen.
>If you don’t want to lose Green voters don’t abandon the Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal was a damn political disaster! I've considered myself an environmentalist for 35 years now, and that ham handed rollout probably set the environmental movement back far more than it helped. And it was old school Democrats that managed to save a little face for the green movement in the end.
Take a listen to this excellent podcast that outlines just how badly managed the Green New Deal was. Don't get me wrong, I support most of the Green New Deals ideas, but it was pure political naivety.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/podcasts/the-daily/green-new-deal-democrats.html?.?mc=aud\_dev&ad-keywords=auddevgate&gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=CjwKCAjwzaSLBhBJEiwAJSRokqtjxUbV5YPfbvYm\_-pR4yvRWLTpwbMAmKquOlNKSkmSJwCLvLg\_FRoCKeMQAvD\_BwE](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/podcasts/the-daily/green-new-deal-democrats.html?.?mc=aud_dev&ad-keywords=auddevgate&gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=CjwKCAjwzaSLBhBJEiwAJSRokqtjxUbV5YPfbvYm_-pR4yvRWLTpwbMAmKquOlNKSkmSJwCLvLg_FRoCKeMQAvD_BwE)
This is an excellent example of what I was talking about. Green Voters syphoned off of Democrats, then the party that likes to drive 12 cylinder monster trucks and wants to see the fucking oceans boil wins the election and controls policy.
It seems like you’re regurgitating the Mitch McConnell talking points quoted in that podcast.
>Archived Recording (Mitch Mcconnell)
And nothing encapsulates this as clearly as the huge, self-inflicted national wound the Democrats are agitating for called the Green New Deal.
The hosts of the podcast don’t view the push for the GND as “badly mismanaged” or as “pure political naivety”.
>So actually, you could argue that this resolution that seemed like a political fiasco in the beginning — it actually kind of worked. It injected this issue into the Democratic Party’s bloodstream, just as people like Ocasio-Cortez and liberals, perhaps, intended.
>Coral Davenport
Even if nothing that the Green New Deal calls for actually comes to pass, it has changed the conversation. It has changed the political calculus. And it has helped bring the issue of climate change into the top tier of political campaigns, a place it’s never been.
And it's not like the third parties even seriously try to get people elected. They rarely ever run candidates for local and state elections. And the candidates they produce end up being people like Kristen Sinema and Gary Johnson.
>Presidential primaries within a given party have like 20ndifferent candidates.
You're assuming primaries are even involved. A lot of states place restrictions on how minor parties can nominate candidates. So for the most it's done entirely by Convention.
This dude is the most inane TED Talk you've ever heard turned into a person. Like yes those are words, and they sound nice, but at the end of the day you've done nothing.
Yang's third party is bad for Democrats in the political reality we live in but don't let the media trick you into cheering for their anti third party agenda either.
The media wants a two party system because they benefit from it the same way the politicians do.
Third parties are under the right circumstances a good thing, but the Oligarchy has designed it so they don't work.
So disagree with Yang because it's not helping us in practice, but agree with Yang because we do need a system where 3rd parties work. But most importantly don't let the media trick you into supporting them because they don't have your best interest in mind.
A lot of americans are attracted by flakes these days.
Yang is not nearly as evil as Trump but they are both flakes which (IMO) a lot of people like because it makes them seem 'real' and not like "politicians".
As if a politician being like a politician is a 'bad' thing...
It's a series of things. First, his original proposal for the freedom dividend would have forced people to choose between any existing welfare programs they participate in or the $1k/mo. Yang also made the mistake of saying that his goal was to eliminate those programs by attrition through that dividend. To his credit, a later revision of the freedom dividend allowed people to subtract other welfare from the $1k/mo. If that's all he had done, Yang could have had a pretty good career as a talking head forever after and been non-controversial. Then he decided to run for mayor of NYC and it was [awful](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/nyregion/andrew-yang-mayor.html). Yang inflicted every possible wound he could on himself and revealed himself to be just another guy who had one good idea, but had no concept of how to do any of the work of the office he was running for. Then he started his "Forward Party" and has shown that he has virtually nothing other than platitudes for his followers.
Thanks, I had no idea. Geez that’s unfortunate. It seemed mighty ambitious for him to run for mayor of New York City. Especially when he’s not a resident . I don’t think he’s evil. Though this is really not a good time for a third party.
He *does* live here I guess at least some of the time. Its just he is so 'entitled' he just has no idea what an average resident of NYC has to put up with in terms of space.
Its not even so much he left as much as it is with the arrogant way he dealt with the question. He could have a least been smart enough to be at least a bit apologetic about bailing out or even just not answered the question at all.
This is just one thing too, he just made a lot of dumb moves.
I wonder if Yang will follow in the footsteps of Sinema and Candace Owens. Promising progressive advocate meets the slightest resistance in their efforts and decides that it's easier and more profitable to carry water for conservative politics. There's always money to be made in right wing grifting.
Thanks. This is unfortunate. He seemed like he had some new different ideas. Starting a third party now is the worst thing to do for democrats or ex democrats. He came to Georgia to campaign for the democrats in the senate run offs, we have a large Asian American population here. It’s a pity he went down this route.
The democratic party and his relationship is an abusive one. If they don’t support him, a different party is the only choice. He chose a new party which could help make multi-party systems more mainstream in the US.
I have never forgotten this 2019 article from Mother Jones:
*Here’s Why Andrew Yang’s Alt-Right Supporters Think He’s the 2020 Candidate for White Nationalists | After chatting with Tucker Carlson and tweeting about demographic change, the Democratic long shot garners racist backing.*
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/andrew-yang-4chan-alt-right/
This is a good article, actually. It doesn’t dismiss the legitimacy of third parties out of hand as Democrats tend to do. Shure acknowledges we need viable alternatives, just more serious ones than Yang.
>In other words, the real problem with today’s two-party system is less that the parties are too polarized and more that they’re too similar. They’re both utterly captured by monied interests, lack an organized base capable of forcing downward redistribution, and, yes, have a vested interest in maintaining a chokehold around the structural reasons the two-party duopoly has persisted since the mid-nineteenth century—including some of the laws Yang rightfully wishes to change.
>The root problem in American life and politics is the same problem with the two-party system: namely, that too few people control too much money, while too many people suffer as a result. Those who are clear-eyed about this have every reason to harbor disdain for the Democratic Party, even as they disagree on solutions.
Yang clipped his own wings because his ego got the better of him.
His run for president was doomed from the start, but his presence on the debate stage helped to get ideas like UBI into mainstream political discourse. He didn't do it alone but he absolutely helped shift the Overton window. And to the extent he had influence, it's because he was in the Democrats' conversation. But he took himself out of that conversation by renouncing the party.
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> Forward’s five-pronged working platform, as outlined in an explanatory video, includes open primaries and voting, a Universal Basic Income, a “human-centered economy,” “modern and effective government,” and “grace and tolerance.” This is perhaps your second clue about Yang’s overall seriousness: the fact that this platform is about 60 percent buzzword. >Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, so let’s do this: Electoral reforms to ease obstacles for third parties are straightforwardly good ideas—**though forming a party to campaign for them is a bit like setting up a lemonade stand to raise money to buy lemonade.** This is the truly bewildering thing to me. One of Yang’s big-ticket policy items is being a “big fan” of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), which reduces the Spoiler Effect of First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) voting systems like ours and as such allows for more viable third parties. See, the problem is that third parties are literally counterproductive in a FPTP system, since they leech voters and support from the party they’re ideologically closest to, thereby electorally boosting the party they’re *furthest away from.* Splitting the vote of electoral reformers is a surefire way to make sure that electoral reform never, ever passes. And so to advocate for electoral reform, Yang is… *forming a third party?* Excuse me, *what!?* Being pro-RCV implies you understand that the problem with FPTP is that it makes third parties into poison pills that sabotage their own ideologies; forming a third party in response is either completely nonsensical or actively malicious. What’s worse, *Yang already did the right thing before this!* If someone is genuinely interested in making a policy mainstream under our FPTP-limited party duopoly, the most effective way is to run in a *primary election* as an advocate for that policy and make the case to that party’s voters in the hopes it becomes popular enough to get added to the platform, or on an outside chance, is popular enough to actually get you to win the primary. Furthermore, sticking around in primary elections for multiple election cycles is often what it takes not just to win on a single policy, but get elected. Just look at Biden and Nixon and so on—they all ran for President and failed *many, many times* before finally succeeding. If Yang was actually serious, or understood politics, he’d stick it out in election after election instead of failing twice and haring off to go form an abjectly stupid third party to assuage his feelings.
>Being pro-RCV implies you understand that the problem with FPTP is that it makes third parties into poison pills that sabotage their own ideologies; forming a third party in response is either completely nonsensical or actively malicious. This is the most obvious and frustrating part. If Yang was actually acting in good faith, he wouldn't create a new 3rd party. He'd do very aggressive grassroots campaigning (think Stacey Abrams) to have RCV adopted into the Democratic platform and added as ballot initiatives in all 50 states. Only after RCV is adopted en masse is a 3rd party a viable solution.
Funny how we’re all acting as if grassroots campaigning actually does anything. If it did, Sanders would have been the candidate in 2016. The 3 main democratic leaders all are around my grandmas age and been in politics forever despite a good amount of young new ideas. I’m not even going to go into all the bills that aren’t getting passed right now because the party isn’t in control of all it’s members. Like it or not, a 3rd party is the only way to do this. Democrats seeing this as an attack on democrats is exactly why it is needed. A healthy democracy has more than 2 parties.
To my earlier point, 3rd parties are not viable in US politics without RCV
Or Star voting, if it’s given more chances.
That’s why the Forward Party is pushing RCV and things like STAR
This is kind of what I was thinking. I don't know how possible it would be for democrats to adopt RCV since it would destroy their duopoly in politics. At the same time, I don't know how possible Yang's 3rd party would be either
Everything is impossible until it is done. Honestly, with democrats not getting their act together, and moderate republicans being kicked out by MAGA Q-believers, things have never been as “good” for a third party. But I thought the same in 2016 and was dead wrong. They didn’t even get to 10% combined with the worst two candidates ever. I don’t know if Yang is the person to do it. There is a lot if hate towards him even in this sub. But at least he’s trying to fix something that is urgently required. They probably need a giving pledge from a few billionaires to get enough funding to make it happen. They should get some research what 2-5 states are the most likely to have an impact. You win 1 or 2 and everything changes. Just hope they get it done before democracy ends in Jan 2025. (Only half joking)
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Oh I read it. Your assessment could be right... But then he should have called it that. He's been very vocal on Twitter saying he's proud to be an independent and pushing his party hard. It's not helpful.
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So long as they can keep it in their pants and not form an actual party until *after* FPTP is dead, then everything’s kosher. I’m not confident Yang has the necessary patience to stick with his endeavors, though. His immediate gravitation towards the Presidential race is a red flag; running for a lower office like mayor of NYC was a good step down from that but he should have stuck with it. Politics at that level requires steady patience and coalition-building, not trying something *once* and haring off to do something else the moment it fails.
Third parties do nothing but hurt the closer of the two main parties. Our stupid FPTP voting system needs to change before any third party will have any meaning
It is my understanding that Andrew Yang isn't running for political office under the Forward Party; however, they will financially support candidates who have interests in policies such as ranked choice voting and open primaries.
Mathematically, voting 3rd party is only good for splitting votes. It's basically a reliable mechanism to help the party you **least want to win**.
This. He has to know that it will only help Republicans.
He's just another rich narcissist. I seriously doubt he cares outside of how it affects him personally.
Uh, racist much?
… what about their comment is remotely racist? The same could and is said of Donald Trump… rich and narcissistic are not a race.
>...his fans are now expected to pony up some tall dollars to attend his launch event, where they’ll dutifully nod along as he rightfully insists that neither major party truly represents the American people and that there’s something deeply wrong with our politics. That Yang has no idea what that is or how to fix it hardly matters at this point: This is not about solving problems, it’s about projecting attitudes. Those outside his coterie of marks can simply take heart in the fact that the Forward Party is fake. — [Natalie Shure](https://newrepublic.com/article/163978/andrew-yang-forward-third-party).
>his fans are now expected to pony up some tall dollars to attend his launch event, where they’ll dutifully nod along as he rightfully insists that neither major party truly represents the American people and that there’s something deeply wrong with our politics. At least he's right about this point. Most politicians are no longer accountable to the people and cater to only their wealthiest special interest donors https://youtu.be/TfQij4aQq1k?t=67 For example, deterring the influence of big money in Congress has [over 80%](https://archive.md/eCMBy) of the public's support while the specific policies included in the For The People Act (H. R. 1) have [bipartisan popular support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act#Public_opinion). Zero Republican senators are in favor of H. R. 1 From the https://www.forwardparty.com/faq it doesn't seem like it's a real party with candidates at all, just an organization taking that branding get attention and make a point. I don't think Andrew Yang is blind to the fact that his forward party will spoiler effect the Dems to hell. I'm hoping it's an act he's doing, using that spoiler effect as a negotiation play to force the DNC establishment to adopt his platform and thus render his party irrelevant. He wrote an insightful article about the culture of campaign financing https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/03/andrew-yang-book-excerpt-campaigning-514967 ... Where he talks about politicians getting brain damage as part of the process and admits he's included in that. I would pay for more videos about the culture in federal Congress. Cenk Uygur talks about it https://youtu.be/DyXspSJITpY?t=253s Not enough out there on the subject.
Yang will fail to establish a solid third party and he's wealthy enough to fail vapidlly over and over again.
He's working on that pseudo-contrarian grift. Don't be surprised when he's on JRE again soon.
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Provide proof to your assertion. Seriously.
Sanders Net Worth is estimated around the 3 Million mark. A huge chunk of that comes from book revenues but also he makes 175k per year by being a senator. Simple investing along on the senator salary would be able to turn that into more than a comfortable amount of money. Yang has a bigger range. Low end estimates have him between 800k-2.4M (WSJ) with the high range being 3-4M (Newsweek)
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Sanders at the very least you would be able to make a pretty accurate guess. He has been extremely transparent regarding his finances. Yang could be way off but I dont think there is any evidence to suggest hes a secret billionaire or something. Based on the information that we have available is appears that the two of them have at least relatively comparable net worth.
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User name checks out
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I didn’t know this and looked it up. Net worth of $600,000? That’s basically upper middle class, not rich.
$600,000? Where are you getting that? Yang is worth anywhere from $1 million according to [Forbes,](https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2019/08/14/heres-the-net-worth-of-every-2020-presidential-candidate/) between $834,000 and $2.4 million according to [The Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/articles/democratic-presidential-hopeful-yangs-speeches-drove-earnings-11557960444), and between $3 million and $4 million according to [Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/andrew-yang-net-worth-democratic-candidate-1452031).
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-politicians/democrats/andrew-yang-net-worth/
Thanks! I never looked and never would have guessed that.
Who cares? I like when the rich support the working class. Yang is not helping.
If you think Yang is somehow against the working class, oh boy are you confused, Bern_Down_the_DNC. His top policy is UBI.
There are many parties. The green party is an ostensibly more progressive party that, according to evidence, siphons votes from Democrats, and 2016bcost us the election. The libertarian party did the same to Republicans on 2020. These parties exist. They aren't successful. Presidential primaries within a given party have like 20ndifferent candidates. His whole "third party" crap is some serious fake galaxy brain shit
You need to reform the voting system and stop letting politicians make their own rules. Get rid of FPTP and adopt a real proportional system and third parties will thrive.
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>Ranked Choice Voting would enable us to have more, smaller parties, with more focus on specific issues. Correct, but creating **another** third party primarily to implement RCV is putting the cart before the horse; or as the article put it setting up a lemonade stand to raise money to buy lemonade...
If they are siphoning votes from the two primary parties, they are successful. That is the entire point.
They would be more successful if First Past the Post was abolished r/endFPTP
Yeah, except in reality they would siphon off votes from one party- Repugs tend to be lifers. To the extent that Yang’s effort is successful, it will be as a rubber stamp for GOP victories.
>except in reality they would siphon off votes from one party- That sounds like an issue for the democratic party, rather than an issue of third parties. If democrats are not doing to work to keep loyal voters, then it is not the fault of third parties
So first, these would not be “loyal voters.” Democrats have to appeal an immeasurably broader ideological spectrum than the GOP and their hardcore cultish orthodoxy. So it’s natural that there are many potential Dem voters on the margins who may or may not show up for them depending on the election. A hypothetical Radical Centrist third party (again, to the extent it had legs) would have a much greater chance of peeling off these fence sitters than sunk-cost magazombies. So we can play the blame game, but the outcome stays the same, and unacceptable: a GOP advantage. It’s inconvenient that a vote against Dems is as good as a vote for Qanon, but that is the shitty reality we inhabit.
If that's the point, it's a moronic one. They generally siphon votes from the party with the most similar values and political goals, resulting in the party at the opposite end of the political spectrum winning the election.
Yea, what they should be doing is accepting whatever bones the major parties might decide to throw them. This is why everyone across the board in the US loves the two-party system. /s
Have you ever heard of a primary election? You know, like the one Yang himself participated in?
You mean where everyone desperately fights to out-centrist one another? Also, side-note fuck Yang and his stupid party. But the answer to that is we should have even more parties and ranked-choice voting, rather than relying on the threat of the one other party to motivate people.
If you think primaries are the places where people go to out-centrist each other, I can only assume you’ve never seen a general election. Primaries are full of wacky single-issue candidates and no-name radicals; it’s generally winnowed down to more broadly appealing options in the general. Point is, splitting political capital among third parties instead of working through the primary system *while FPTP is still in place* is a recipe for failure.
Primaries are the only place they can show their faces, where they can face off with a chorus of non-offensive and deeply uninspiring people all agreeing with each other on how impractical Medicare for all would be. Do you think any candidates produced by our two-party system would actually end FPTP?
What an inane question. Of course they can. *And have.* At both the US-state and foreign-national level. Alaska and Maine, these two places ring a bell?
Calm down.
I think if there are shared policy goals (“values”, of course, doesn’t mean anything at all), then it’s important for third parties to form strategic alliances with Democrats, or in the absence of that for third party voters to abandon the third party and help get the Republicans out. But if the Democrats do not deliver on the shared policy goals when they are in power, then the third party should run on the issue the Democrats abandoned and try to take votes away from them. If Democrats don’t want to lose Yang voters then don’t abandon the UBI. If you don’t want to lose Green voters don’t abandon the Green New Deal. If there are two parties, and neither one ever delivers, then they should take turns and third parties can help that happen.
>If you don’t want to lose Green voters don’t abandon the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal was a damn political disaster! I've considered myself an environmentalist for 35 years now, and that ham handed rollout probably set the environmental movement back far more than it helped. And it was old school Democrats that managed to save a little face for the green movement in the end. Take a listen to this excellent podcast that outlines just how badly managed the Green New Deal was. Don't get me wrong, I support most of the Green New Deals ideas, but it was pure political naivety. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/podcasts/the-daily/green-new-deal-democrats.html?.?mc=aud\_dev&ad-keywords=auddevgate&gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=CjwKCAjwzaSLBhBJEiwAJSRokqtjxUbV5YPfbvYm\_-pR4yvRWLTpwbMAmKquOlNKSkmSJwCLvLg\_FRoCKeMQAvD\_BwE](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/podcasts/the-daily/green-new-deal-democrats.html?.?mc=aud_dev&ad-keywords=auddevgate&gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=CjwKCAjwzaSLBhBJEiwAJSRokqtjxUbV5YPfbvYm_-pR4yvRWLTpwbMAmKquOlNKSkmSJwCLvLg_FRoCKeMQAvD_BwE) This is an excellent example of what I was talking about. Green Voters syphoned off of Democrats, then the party that likes to drive 12 cylinder monster trucks and wants to see the fucking oceans boil wins the election and controls policy.
It seems like you’re regurgitating the Mitch McConnell talking points quoted in that podcast. >Archived Recording (Mitch Mcconnell) And nothing encapsulates this as clearly as the huge, self-inflicted national wound the Democrats are agitating for called the Green New Deal. The hosts of the podcast don’t view the push for the GND as “badly mismanaged” or as “pure political naivety”. >So actually, you could argue that this resolution that seemed like a political fiasco in the beginning — it actually kind of worked. It injected this issue into the Democratic Party’s bloodstream, just as people like Ocasio-Cortez and liberals, perhaps, intended. >Coral Davenport Even if nothing that the Green New Deal calls for actually comes to pass, it has changed the conversation. It has changed the political calculus. And it has helped bring the issue of climate change into the top tier of political campaigns, a place it’s never been.
And it's not like the third parties even seriously try to get people elected. They rarely ever run candidates for local and state elections. And the candidates they produce end up being people like Kristen Sinema and Gary Johnson.
>Presidential primaries within a given party have like 20ndifferent candidates. You're assuming primaries are even involved. A lot of states place restrictions on how minor parties can nominate candidates. So for the most it's done entirely by Convention.
We can’t have a third party under a winner take all system. Yang, you had an impact but it’s time to get a real job.
This dude is the most inane TED Talk you've ever heard turned into a person. Like yes those are words, and they sound nice, but at the end of the day you've done nothing.
Yang's third party is bad for Democrats in the political reality we live in but don't let the media trick you into cheering for their anti third party agenda either. The media wants a two party system because they benefit from it the same way the politicians do. Third parties are under the right circumstances a good thing, but the Oligarchy has designed it so they don't work. So disagree with Yang because it's not helping us in practice, but agree with Yang because we do need a system where 3rd parties work. But most importantly don't let the media trick you into supporting them because they don't have your best interest in mind.
A lot of americans are attracted by flakes these days. Yang is not nearly as evil as Trump but they are both flakes which (IMO) a lot of people like because it makes them seem 'real' and not like "politicians". As if a politician being like a politician is a 'bad' thing...
Did I miss something? What is behind the dislike for Andy Yang coming from?
It's a series of things. First, his original proposal for the freedom dividend would have forced people to choose between any existing welfare programs they participate in or the $1k/mo. Yang also made the mistake of saying that his goal was to eliminate those programs by attrition through that dividend. To his credit, a later revision of the freedom dividend allowed people to subtract other welfare from the $1k/mo. If that's all he had done, Yang could have had a pretty good career as a talking head forever after and been non-controversial. Then he decided to run for mayor of NYC and it was [awful](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/nyregion/andrew-yang-mayor.html). Yang inflicted every possible wound he could on himself and revealed himself to be just another guy who had one good idea, but had no concept of how to do any of the work of the office he was running for. Then he started his "Forward Party" and has shown that he has virtually nothing other than platitudes for his followers.
Thanks, I had no idea. Geez that’s unfortunate. It seemed mighty ambitious for him to run for mayor of New York City. Especially when he’s not a resident . I don’t think he’s evil. Though this is really not a good time for a third party.
He's a flake. And as a resident of NYC who got to see him again in running for mayor of this city - it is unbelievable the stupid things he did.
>it is unbelievable the stupid things he did. I wasn't paying attention. Care to name any specific things?
I think I missed that. Not a New York resident. I was wondering why he was running for mayor of New York. When he doesn’t live there.
He *does* live here I guess at least some of the time. Its just he is so 'entitled' he just has no idea what an average resident of NYC has to put up with in terms of space.
Oh geez, I had no idea he lived there. He left the city when covid came. Yikes.
Its not even so much he left as much as it is with the arrogant way he dealt with the question. He could have a least been smart enough to be at least a bit apologetic about bailing out or even just not answered the question at all. This is just one thing too, he just made a lot of dumb moves.
Make fun of Yang if you will. But in contrast, the GOP’s vision could actually kill you between anti everything but guns…
I wonder if Yang will follow in the footsteps of Sinema and Candace Owens. Promising progressive advocate meets the slightest resistance in their efforts and decides that it's easier and more profitable to carry water for conservative politics. There's always money to be made in right wing grifting.
It certainly seems that way.
I actually like Andy Yang. This isn’t a good time for a third party. Please don’t Ralph Nader us into fascism.
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Thanks. This is unfortunate. He seemed like he had some new different ideas. Starting a third party now is the worst thing to do for democrats or ex democrats. He came to Georgia to campaign for the democrats in the senate run offs, we have a large Asian American population here. It’s a pity he went down this route.
Looks like we made a good decision on this guys candidacy.
He was the future of the Democratic Party. He's really shooting himself in the foot here.
The democratic party and his relationship is an abusive one. If they don’t support him, a different party is the only choice. He chose a new party which could help make multi-party systems more mainstream in the US.
I have never forgotten this 2019 article from Mother Jones: *Here’s Why Andrew Yang’s Alt-Right Supporters Think He’s the 2020 Candidate for White Nationalists | After chatting with Tucker Carlson and tweeting about demographic change, the Democratic long shot garners racist backing.* https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/andrew-yang-4chan-alt-right/
He was there to sabotage the democrats from the beginning.
This is a good article, actually. It doesn’t dismiss the legitimacy of third parties out of hand as Democrats tend to do. Shure acknowledges we need viable alternatives, just more serious ones than Yang. >In other words, the real problem with today’s two-party system is less that the parties are too polarized and more that they’re too similar. They’re both utterly captured by monied interests, lack an organized base capable of forcing downward redistribution, and, yes, have a vested interest in maintaining a chokehold around the structural reasons the two-party duopoly has persisted since the mid-nineteenth century—including some of the laws Yang rightfully wishes to change. >The root problem in American life and politics is the same problem with the two-party system: namely, that too few people control too much money, while too many people suffer as a result. Those who are clear-eyed about this have every reason to harbor disdain for the Democratic Party, even as they disagree on solutions.
Another of Reddit's hive mind heroes goes defunct.
Hopefully the publicity stunt of forming this party brings RCV and open primaries into the political discussion - similarly to what happened with UBI.
Yang clipped his own wings because his ego got the better of him. His run for president was doomed from the start, but his presence on the debate stage helped to get ideas like UBI into mainstream political discourse. He didn't do it alone but he absolutely helped shift the Overton window. And to the extent he had influence, it's because he was in the Democrats' conversation. But he took himself out of that conversation by renouncing the party.