"I came from the Internet": Inside Andrew Yang’s wild ride

I lost track of the number of Yang supporters who told me they first encountered him through podcasts. They said they appreciated that Yang didn’t boil down his ideas into message-tested talking points or TV-ready sound bites. They admired him for saying that he wasn’t in the race because he looked in the mirror and saw a future president; he ran to get his ideas into the bloodstream of the body politic.

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There was also a rawness about him — a candidate as actual human being, no spokesperson whispering in his ear, no pollster telling him what to say. “He’s not a politician at all,” Gene Bishop, a Yang volunteer and Trump voter in New Hampshire, told me. “When people ask him questions, he just answers the question. He’s a breath of fresh air.”

Not unlike Trump as a candidate, Yang cast himself as an outsider who could shake up the system and break through the partisan deadlock. “Yang is pulling the same strings, but in a more reflective and serious way,” says Harvard professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig. “People are still desperate to have someone come in and shake this system up.” Yang says people often come up to him and say, ‘You’re what I hoped for when I voted for Donald Trump.’”

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