Yangonomics 101

Whether or not he becomes New York’s next mayor, Yang has brought his signature idea—to just give people money—into the political mainstream

- Claire Suddath

When Andrew Yang said he was running for mayor of New York City in January, people were thrilled. This spring he’d do something like deliver a speech outside a Brooklyn catering company, and a passing jogger would see him, stop, and jog in place for half an hour just to listen to him talk. He’d be outside a food hall in Hell’s Kitchen when a young woman would approach him and, her voice shaking with nervousness, ask him to sign the back of her cellphone case. On a subway platform, a teenage girl squealed when she saw him, then apologized for being too young to vote.

“Andrew Yang is pretty sick,” Alex Arce, 20, a student at New York University, told me in April. Arce and a friend had happened upon Yang as he stood outside a boarded-up restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village and called for a full reopening of New York’s bars.

“We need commonsense regulations!” Yang was saying. “I don’t know about you, but I miss sitting next to people in bars!” At the time, less than a third of the city had been fully vaccinated.

I asked Arce why he liked him.

“I don’t know, he’s just a cool guy,” he said.

What about his policies, anything that he stood for?

Arce thought a minute. “The universal income thing?” he finally offered. “That’s pretty great.”

For someone who has never held government office and has campaigned only once before, when he ran for president in 2019, Yang is extraordinarily adept at getting people to like him. Early this year he was bumping elbows with strangers and leaning in close for photos—which may explain how he contracted Covid-19 in February, just weeks into his campaign.