The Sanders campaign more than any other has been griping about Yang for a while, feeling as though he was taking some of their votes. That’s certainly true for some, but so many of the people I met at Yang events around the country told me that they were there for him. That includes Kim Meade, a 52-year-old realtor from the Hudson Valley who’d come up to knock on doors for Yang in the final days and was in Keene on Monday night. She’s a former Republican who voted for Hillary Clinton, but wasn’t committed to any of the Democrats this year before she watched Yang’s interview with the New York Times editorial board a few weeks ago.
“He is so real and in reality. He holds good ideas, but he’s also a realist,” Meade told me. She’ll vote for whomever the candidate against Trump is, she said, but she was clearly unhappy about the thought of it not being Yang. “I want him to at least get through New Hampshire so more people can hear from him,” she said.
I started out skeptical of Yang, too. I first heard of him in 2018, when one of his aides emailed me a New York Times article about him. He was a novelty. A few months later, I received a series of coordinated emails from Yang “supporters,” all of whom used almost exactly the same language, urging me to have him on a podcast. That was annoying. Then, when I didn’t mention Yang in some of my early campaign coverage of events he’d attended, he emailed me himself. That was grasping. Even when he made the first debate back in June, he was still a novelty—Marianne Williamson had her not-quite-earthly accent and self-help mush; Yang had his weird UBI proposal and a bunch of guys who looked as if they were constantly hopped-up on Mountain Dew, and who’d scream his name as loudly as they could.
But there was no way to go to his events, see his unique blend of fatalism and optimism, and not realize that he had something to offer.
Yang is going to hold out on endorsing for a while. He wants to see his kids, get back in shape, and reflect. He feels in his gut that he could have won the race if things had gone a little differently, but he’s accepted that they haven’t. He hopes the other candidates find success by talking about the economy in the way he did, and by not playing politics as usual. “If I tried to act like a … ‘conventional’ presidential candidate, I think we would’ve been stuck in the mud a long time ago,” he told me. “I also would have probably jumped out a window at some point too.”
He knows that some of his supporters will likely sit out the election now. Introducing him at the event last night, former Portsmouth Mayor Steve Marchand urged the crowd to support Yang by saying that with this candidate, they didn’t need to settle as they would with others. But he does not want that to keep them from voting.
“One of the things that we have to be … is a student of how to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Yang said. “And so if you think you can make a choice that will move us in the right direction, even if it’s not what you would have chosen in an ideal world … you have to work with that. There are going to be many disappointed people, but we have to try and choose someone who’s going to actually help move us in the right direction and start solving some of these problems. I do not think that person is Donald Trump. And so if we have a better alternative, we should really try and make sure that person wins.”
His DMs are open.
