Andrew Yang (born January 13, 1975) is an American 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, entrepreneur, lawyer, and philanthropist. He is the founder of Venture for America (VFA), a nonprofit that focuses on creating jobs in struggling American cities. Yang worked in various startups and early stage growth companies as a founder or executive from 2000 to 2009. After he founded VFA in 2011, the Obama administration selected him in 2012 as a "Champion of Change" and in 2015 as a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship". Yang is the author of the 2014 book Smart People Should Build Things and the 2018 book The War on Normal People.

Yang launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election on November 6, 2017. Initially considered a long-shot candidate, he gained significant momentum in early 2019 following appearances on several popular shows and podcasts. The campaign is known for its popularity online, with The New York Times calling Yang "The Internet's Favorite Candidate".

Yang's signature policy is what he calls the "Freedom Dividend", a universal basic income (UBI) in the form of $1,000 monthly for every American adult over age 18. Yang believes that UBI is a necessary response to the rapid development of automation, which is increasingly leading to workforce challenges, and that job displacement by automation is what led to Donald Trump's election in 2016. The other two central elements of his platform are "Medicare for All" and "Human-Centered Capitalism". More than 160 policy proposals are listed on his campaign website.^[1]

Yang was born on January 13, 1975, in Schenectady, New York.^[2] His parents were immigrants from Taiwan.^[3] They met while they were both in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley.^[4] His father graduated with a Ph.D. in physics and worked in the research labs of IBM and General Electric, generating over 69 patents in his career.^[4] His mother graduated with a master's degree in statistics^[5] and became a systems administrator at a local university.^[6][7] Yang has an older brother, Lawrence,^[6][8] who is a psychology professor.^[7][9]

Yang described being bullied and called racial slurs by classmates while attending public school. "Perhaps as a result, I've always taken pride in relating to the underdog or little guy or gal," he wrote.^[10] Yang later attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire.^[11] He graduated from Exeter in 1992 and went on to attend Brown University,^[12] where he concentrated in economics and political science and graduated in 1996.^[13] Yang then attended Columbia Law School, earning a Juris Doctor in 1999.^[2]

After graduating from law school, Yang began his career as a corporate attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City. He left the firm in 2000 to join his office mate in launching Stargiving.com, a website for celebrity-affiliated philanthropic fundraising.^[14][15] From 2002 to 2005, Yang served as the vice president of a healthcare startup.^[2]

After working in the healthcare industry for four years, Yang left MMF Systems to join his friend Zeke Vanderhoek at a small test preparation company, Manhattan Prep. In an appearance on the podcast Freakonomics, Yang said he "personally taught the analyst classes at McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley" during the 2008 financial crisis.^[16] In 2006 Vanderhoek asked Yang to take over as CEO. While he was CEO of Manhattan Prep, the company primarily provided GMAT test preparation. The company expanded from five to 69 locations and was acquired by Kaplan, Inc. in December 2009. Yang resigned as the company's president in early 2012.^[17][18][19]

In September 2019 in a testimony before the New York City Commission on Gender Equity, former employee Kimberly Watkins testified that Yang had fired her because he felt that she would not work as hard now that she was married. Yang has denied the allegations, saying that "Kimberly Watkins' facts about her break from Manhattan Prep are inaccurate. During my more than a decade as CEO, I have worked with many women, married and otherwise, and value their work and dedication as important to the success of any institution".^[20]

Following the acquisition of Manhattan Prep in late 2009, Yang began to work on creating a new nonprofit fellowship program, Venture for America (VFA), which he founded in 2011 with the mission "to create economic opportunity in American cities by mobilizing the next generation of entrepreneurs and equipping them with the skills and resources they need to create jobs".^{[12][21][22][23]}

VFA was launched with $200,000 and trained 40 graduates in 2012 and 69 in 2013, sending them to Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Providence. VFA added Columbus, Miami, San Antonio and St. Louis in 2014, with a class of 106.^[19][24]

VFA's strategy was to recruit the nation's top college graduates into a two-year fellowship program in which they would work for and apprentice at promising startups in developing cities across the United States. Yang's book Smart People Should Build Things (2014) argues that the top universities in the country cherry-pick the smartest kids out of small towns and funnel them into the same corporate jobs in the same big cities.^[25] VFA's goal is to help distribute that talent around the country and incentivize entrepreneurship for economic growth.

After 2011 VFA grew, reaching a $6 million annual operating budget in 2017,^[26] and operating in about 20 U.S. cities, adding Kansas City, Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Charlotte, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and St. Louis.^[27] VFA began running a "startup accelerator" in Detroit and launched a seed fund and an investment fund for fellows.

Generation Startup, a documentary film about six startups in Detroit launched through the VFA program, was released in 2016. It was co-directed by Cynthia Wade and Cheryl Miller Houser.^[28]

In March 2017, Yang stepped down from his position as CEO of VFA.^[21]

Media outlets have provided several estimates of Yang's net worth: $1 million according to Forbes,^[29] between $834,000 and $2.4 million according to The Wall Street Journal,^[30] and between $3 million and $4 million according to Newsweek.^[31]

On November 6, 2017, Yang filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run for President of the United States in 2020.^[32][33] Initially considered a long shot, Yang's campaign gained significant momentum in February 2019 following an appearance on the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.^[34][35][36] He has since appeared on numerous other podcasts and shows, including The Breakfast Club,^[37] The Ben Shapiro Show,^[38] and Real Time with Bill Maher.^[39] By March 2019, Yang had met the polling and fundraising thresholds to qualify for the first round of Democratic primary debates.^{[40][34][35][36]} In August 2019, he met the higher thresholds to qualify for the second round of Democratic debates.^[41]

Yang's campaign focuses largely on policy, in what Reuters described as a "technocratic approach".^[42][43] Yang regularly calls Donald Trump a symptom of a wider problem in the economy, rather than the problem itself.^[44] According to The New York Times, Yang is known for doing interviews with conservative news outlets, and "although [Yang] tweets often, he almost never tweets about Mr. Trump".^[45] This approach is exemplified by one of Yang's campaign slogans: "Not Left, Not Right, Forward".^[42][43][45] According to a July 2019 YouGov poll, Yang was one of two 2020 Democratic candidates, along with Senator Bernie Sanders, with double-digit support among voters who voted for Trump in 2016.^[46][47] Yang points to this as evidence he can beat Donald Trump in the 2020 general election.^[48]

Yang's campaign is known for its heavy reliance on Internet-based campaigning.^[49][50][51] Due to his popularity online, The New York Times dubbed Yang "The Internet's Favorite Candidate".^[52] His campaign supporters, known informally as the Yang Gang, have brought attention to his campaign on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms, through the use of memes and viral campaigning.^[53][54]

Yang is at least the third American of East Asian descent to run for President of the United States, after Hiram Fong and Patsy Mink.^[55][56] He is the first Asian American to run for president as a Democrat, and has said that he hopes his "campaign can inspire Asian Americans to be engaged in" politics.^[57]

Central to Yang's campaign is the proposal of a monthly $1,000 "Freedom Dividend" to all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 (a form of universal basic income, or UBI) in response to worker displacement driven by technological automation.^[58][59] Yang proposes a value-added tax to finance the dividend and to combat tax avoidance by large American corporations.^[60][61] He argues that the problem of automation-driven job displacement is the main reason Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, stating that based on data, "There's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in a community and the movement towards Donald Trump."^[62] Yang has said that he became an advocate of a UBI after reading American futurist Martin Ford's book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which deals with the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the job market and economy.^[63] He believes UBI is a more viable policy than job retraining programs, citing studies that job retraining of displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest had success rates of 0–15%.^[64] His campaign slogan is "Humanity First", which calls attention to his belief that automation of many key industries is one of the biggest threats facing the American workforce.^[65] The other two central elements of Yang's platform are "Medicare for All" and "Human-Centered Capitalism".^[66]

On Yang's campaign website,^[1] more than 160 policies are listed.^[67] Yang supports the implementation of "democracy dollars", where citizens receive $100 each year, "use it or lose it", to give to candidates. The policy aims to drown out corporate money resulting from political lobbying and Citizens United v. FEC.^[68][69] He proposes to end partisan gerrymandering,^[70] supports ranked-choice voting,^[71] and wants to lower the national voting age to 16.^[72] Yang supports the legalization of cannabis and the decriminalization of opioids (including heroin) for personal use, but does not support legalizing or decriminalizing cocaine. He has cited Portugal's drug policy as evidence of the effectiveness of his own policy.^[73] Yang supports a carbon tax and bringing the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreement.^[74] He supports nuclear power and wants to invest in thorium-based nuclear power.^[67] He supports legislation banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and has pledged to appoint pro-choice judges.^[75] An article in The New York Times described various new policies Yang proposes, such as a department focused on regulating the addictive nature of media, a White House psychologist, making Election Day a national holiday, and, to stem corruption, increasing the salaries of federal regulators but limiting their private work after they leave public service.^[76]

Yang has said that Israel "is a very, very important ally."^[77] In regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Yang wants a "two-state solution that allows both the Israeli and Palestinian people to have sovereign land and self-determination". He has called Iran a "destabilizing force in the region".^[78] Yang has criticized China's treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority and China's "more aggressive stance throughout the region, whether towards Hong Kong, Taiwan, or in the South China Sea".^[79] He opposed U.S. military support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen^[80] and has backed a more aggressive policy toward Russia: "Russia is our biggest geopolitical threat, because they've been hacking our democracy successfully."^[81] Yang wrote to the Council on Foreign Relations: "Russian aggression is a destabilizing force, and we must work with our allies to project a strong and unified face against Russian expansionism. [...] we need to expand sanctions against Russia, and Putin and members of his government specifically through the Global Magnitsky Act, in order to pressure the country to play by international rules."^[78]

Yang has received endorsements or explicit expressions of support from officials such as Steve Marchand,^[82] as well as individuals including Elon Musk,^[83][84] Casey Neistat,^[85] MC Jin,^[86] Chris Jericho,^[87] Sam Altman,^[88] David S. Rose,^[88] Tony Hsieh,^[89] James Felton Keith,^[90] Eliot Horowitz,^[88] China Mac,^[91] Ethan Klein,^[92] Kirsten Lepore,^[93] Stephen Sean Ford,^[94] Greg Ellis,^[95] Marcellus Wiley,^[96] Simu Liu,^[97] Joe Wong,^[98] Daniel Negreanu,^[99] Faraz Jaka,^[100] Leslie Smith,^[101] Andy Stern,^[102] Philip Wang,^[103] Tommy Chong,^[104] Dominique Wilkins,^[105] Eugene Gu,^[106] Bobby Kim,^[107] Mark Schultz,^[108] Adam22,^[109] Christina Hoff Sommers,^[110] and Peter Boghossian.^[111]

Yang has received campaign donations from Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, actors Nicolas Cage and Noah Centineo, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo,^[112] and Internet personality Ryan Higa.^[113]

On March 11, 2019, Yang announced that he surpassed the fundraising threshold of 65,000 donors, qualifying him to participate in the first round of Democratic primary debates.^[40] On June 28, he announced that he reached 130,000 donors, which met the fundraising criterion for the third round of debates.^[114]

In the first quarter of 2019, Yang raised $1.7 million, of which more than $250,000 came from "the last four days of the quarter".^[115] According to Yang's campaign, "the average donation was $17.92" and "99% of the donations were less than $200".^[115] In the second quarter, Yang raised $2.8 million.^[116] The campaign stated that 99.6% "of its donors were small-dollar donors [who] gave less than $200".^[116] On August 13, 2019, Yang's third-quarter fundraising reached $2.8 million, matching his total second-quarter fundraising.^[117] On August 15, he reached 200,000 unique donors.^[118] On August 17, Yang announced that among his campaign donors, "the most common jobs are software engineers, teachers, drivers, retail workers and warehouse workers" and the "biggest employer is the US Army".^[119] On September 1, he announced that the average donation was $25, and that the campaign had received no corporate political action committee (PAC) money.^[120] In the 72 hours after the third debate, Yang's campaign raised $1 million, suggesting that it "is on track to raise significantly more in the third quarter" than in the second quarter, according to Politico.^[121]

As of June 28, 2019, Yang had received donations from more than 130,000 individual donors in at least 20 U.S. states, thereby meeting at least one of the requirements to be included in the first and second debates for Democratic presidential primary candidates, as well as the donor requirement for the third and fourth debates.^[122] The Democratic National Committee randomly determined that Yang would participate in the second night of the first debate, which took place in Miami on June 27.^[123][124] During that debate, Yang was asked only two questions and allowed to speak for two minutes and 56 seconds, the least time of any candidate.^[125] He claimed that his microphone malfunctioned, initially suggesting to the debate moderators that technical difficulties might have occurred. An NBC spokesperson said, "At no point during the debate was any candidate's microphone turned off or muted",^[126][127] but Yang and his supporters have provided video evidence they claim shows Yang speaking up but not being heard.^[128]

During the second debate in Detroit on July 31, Yang answered questions on topics including civil rights, healthcare, immigration, party strategy, climate, and the economy.^[129][130] He spoke for a total of 8.7 minutes, which was again the least of any candidate on either night.^[131] He was the only second-night candidate who did not spend any time in "back-and-forths" with other candidates.^[131] Yang drew attention for his decision to not wear a necktie in either debate.^[132][133] In his closing statement, Yang called out the media and the debate format, saying:^{[134][135][136]}

In a September interview with Politico, Yang further clarified his stance on candidates attacking each other at the debates. According to Yang, there "is this sense of manufactured outrage and rehearsed attack lines", and as "a proxy for the American public", he finds "the process to be very false and somewhat misdirected".^[137]

"It's not left, it's not right, it's forward" has been compared to a similar slogan used by the Green Party of Canada.^[138] On August 8, Yang received 2% support in the fourth qualifying poll, thus meeting both qualification criteria for the third debate.^[139]

The third debate was held in Houston on September 12.^[140] In his opening statement, Yang promised to "give a Freedom Dividend of $1000 a month for an entire year to 10 American families".^[141] During the debate, he addressed topics including healthcare, immigration, foreign relations, the War on Terror, corporate lobbying, and education and charter schools.^[142][143] Yang spoke for a total of 7 minutes 54 seconds, which was again the least time of any candidate.^[144]

Some campaign-finance experts have questioned using campaign funds for payments such as Yang promised in his opening statement, on the grounds that federal law bars personal use of campaign funds.^[145] But Yang has said that he consulted lawyers about the proposal and that "he would not gain the same scrutiny if he gave money to a media company or consultants" instead of directly to Americans.^[146] On September 12, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced on Twitter his support for Yang's proposal and offered to finance it.^[147] On September 13, tech entrepreneur Justin Sun pledged to give $1.2 million to 100 Americans in 2020, saying that he wanted "Yang to help him select the recipients".^[148] In the 72 hours after the debate, Yang's campaign raised $1 million and collected "more than 450,000 email addresses from people who entered the online raffle", of which over 90% were new email addresses.^[121]

On multiple occasions, Yang's campaign and supporters have criticized media outlets, such as MSNBC and CNN, for their coverage of Yang. Incidents include cases of news outlets excluding Yang from lists of 2020 Democratic candidates.^{[149][150][151]} On August 29, 2019, Yang supporters prompted the hashtag #YangMediaBlackout to trend on Twitter after a CNN infographic displaying the results of a poll included Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke but not Yang, even though the poll showed Yang polling three times higher than O'Rourke. Yang supporters also criticized media outlets for providing disproportionately low coverage of Yang, pointing out that according to The New York Times, Yang has received some of the least coverage in cable news among the candidates, even though he was polling better than most of the field.^{[152][153][154]}

In early September, Yang's lack of media coverage was reported by several media outlets, including CNN.^[155] Axios noted that while Yang polled in the top six of the Democratic primary and was "getting plenty of online attention", he was "being treated by the media like a bottom-tier candidate".^[156] Krystal Ball of The Hill observed that there was "a persistent pattern of ignoring Yang's candidacy" among media outlets such as CNN. Ball further noted that Scott Santens, one of Yang's supporters, "has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter".^[157]

In 2012, Yang was called a "Champion of Change" by the Obama administration.^[22] In 2015, he was again acknowledged by the Obama administration as a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship", alongside Daymond John, Brian Chesky, Steve Case, Tory Burch, and several others.^[158][159]

As of 2018, Yang lives in New York City with his wife Evelyn and two sons.^[76] He has spoken about his older son being autistic, saying, "I'm very proud of my son and anyone who has someone on the spectrum in their family feels the exact same way."^[160]

Yang attends the Reformed Church of New Paltz with his family and has identified Mark E. Mast as their pastor.^[161][162] He identifies as spiritual but not religious.^[163]

In an interview with The Hill, Yang said that Theodore Roosevelt is his favorite president and that he is the godfather of Roosevelt's great-granddaughter.^[164]

The following table lists long-form interviews and podcasts featuring Yang.