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If you visit the online betting market PredictIt, you’ll see a long list of 2020 Democratic candidates, ranked in order of their odds of winning the party’s nomination for president, according to the site’s users.
Joe Biden, the former vice president, and Senator Bernie Sanders top the list. Then come other well-known Democrats: Senator Kamala Harris, former Representative Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Yang, Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Wait, hang on a minute. Andrew Yang?
This is not an algorithm glitch, it turns out. Mr. Yang, 44, an entrepreneur and a political neophyte running on the idea that the United States should provide a universal basic income, is popping up in unexpected places in the Democratic contest.
He has catapulted out of obscurity thanks in part to a devoted internet following known as the “Yang Gang.” His fans have plastered Mr. Yang into memes and produced songs and music videos about his candidacy. They have also created a hashtaggable slogan — #securethebag — out of his signature campaign proposal to give $12,000 a year in no-strings-attached cash to every American adult, as a cushion against the mass unemployment he believes is coming thanks to artificial intelligence and automation.
By conventional standards, Mr. Yang remains a fringe candidate. In national polls, his support among Democrats has registered between 0 and 1 percent. But his viral popularity on social media feels reminiscent of the “meme army” that helped lift President Trump to victory in 2016. WikiLeaks, itself a part of the internet’s political underbelly, recently took note of Mr. Yang’s online momentum, and asked, “Did Trump just lose the 2020 meme war?”
“It’s very … interesting becoming the internet candidate,” Mr. Yang said last week in an interview while he was on his way to a rally in San Francisco. “I’m getting support from quarters I wouldn’t have expected.”
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A lot has changed for Mr. Yang since I profiled him a year ago. At the time, he was best known as a businessman who had sold his test-prep company to Kaplan before starting Venture for America, a nonprofit entrepreneurship organization for college graduates. He was entering the race with little name recognition, a nonexistent war chest and a quirky platform centered on his claim of an impending robot apocalypse.
To ease the pain, he proposed what he called the “Freedom Dividend,” a $1,000-a-month basic income that would be paid to every American adult, regardless of income or employment status.
In lieu of cable news appearances and huge rallies, Mr. Yang took his fledgling campaign on the podcast circuit. He appeared with Ezra Klein of Vox and Sam Harris, the author and host of the popular “Making Sense” podcast. Last month, he was interviewed for two hours by Joe Rogan, a stand-up comedian and mixed martial arts commentator whose podcast reaches an audience of many millions of people.
After he appeared on Mr. Rogan’s show, his campaign experienced an influx of support, and it quickly reached the 65,000 individual donations required by the Democratic National Committee for inclusion in the first televised debates. Since the interview aired, he has raised more than $1 million.
“I kept waiting for things to subside,” he told me. “And then it never did.”
Other candidates have become internet phenomena before. In 2016, Mr. Sanders’s campaign first took off on sites like Reddit and Facebook among young progressives who set out to make him internet-famous. (One such group, Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, still has more than 400,000 members.) And Mr. Trump, who benefited from a surge among young, internet-savvy supporters early in his campaign, has been attentive to the internet’s rightmost fringes.
Mr. Yang’s campaign feels different, though, in that it reflects the fractured nature of the modern internet. It has attracted economic wonks, tech-skeptic progressives, right-wing bigots, members of the so-called intellectual dark web and an assortment of half-serious trolls. (At times, watching the Yang Gang at work can feel like the political equivalent of the “Boaty McBoatface” episode — a group of bored internet mischief makers seeing how far they can push a joke.)
“There’s a sect of people who congregate online who view politics as almost a pointless exercise,” said Neeraj K. Agrawal, a communications director at a cryptocurrency-focused nonprofit, when asked to explain Mr. Yang’s appeal. “I think, in that context, elections and campaigns might as well be hilarious.”
Some of Mr. Yang’s online support has been the kind he would rather not have. His candidacy has become an obsession on the politics forum on 4Chan, a message board known for the virulently racist and sexist views of its users, who call his basic income proposal “YangBux.”
Several prominent white nationalists, including Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, have also signaled their support for Mr. Yang, who they believe shares their concern for the fate of the white race. In a tweet, Mr. Spencer called Mr. Yang “the most grounded presidential candidate of my lifetime.”
“It’s uncomfortable,” Mr. Yang, a son of immigrants, said of his campaign’s being embraced by the internet’s far-right fringe. “They’re antithetical to everything I stand for.”
You can’t control the internet, of course. But Mr. Yang may be able to repel some of his most objectionable right-wing supporters by emphasizing his progressive policy positions. He has broadened his platform to include issues like marijuana legalization and Puerto Rican statehood (he supports both) as well as more obscure subjects like marketing robocalls and circumcision (he opposes both).
transcript
The Dark Art of Political Memes
When we manipulate politicians’ images to our own ends, we may feel powerful — but are we?
The internet can make you feel like you have all of this control over the political Wait, sorry. How does this — wait. Did I just lose? “Internetting with Amanda Hess.” (ALL IMAGES SOURCED FROM THE INTERNET) “Pokemon Go to the polls.” Hillary Clinton was famously one of the least charismatic politicians. “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.” But on the internet, her image took on a life of its own. It’s almost as if Hillary’s fans breathed charisma into her on social media. Hillary often seemed at her most charismatic in GIF form, when her most charming moments could be put on endless loop and passed around as totems of her character. Meanwhile, Hillary’s detractors were working in the opposite direction, isolating moments that made her look deranged, ugly and sick. This is political candidate as avatar. We’re no longer just analyzing how candidates express themselves. We want to express ourselves through them. On the internet, our support of candidates is being encoded through these moments where they seem to represent us, not as actual political representatives voting for our interests, but as people acting how we’d like to imagine ourselves acting. “I’m reclaiming my time, yeah.” Memes put a new twist on the old idea of charismatic authority in politics. Charismatic leaders used to imbue themselves with mythos, claiming to possess special qualities and cults of personality around themselves. But on the internet, a lot of that work has been transferred to citizens who take their leaders’ tics and blow them up into superhuman form. And as they do it, they’re creating really strong tribal and emotional ties around those personalities. If you make a meme about a candidate and then they become president, it can feel like you created a piece of the presidential persona, like a part of you is president. Memes give us the power to build leaders’ personalities or destroy them. We used to talk about gaffes. The idea seems quaint now. “Grab and grab and grab.” “Grab and grab.” There’s no longer any fixed idea of a candidate to be disrupted by a gaffe. “Such a nasty woman.” Our conception of politicians is now made up of sets of competing polarized memes. Any moment can be manipulated into a positive or negative, depending on your allegiance. And because memes can morph to accommodate almost any position it’s easier than e ver to take candidates’ images and twist them to our own ends. Facts don’t matter to memes. The meme of this confused blond lady started out as pictures of a Brazilian soap actress contemplating her character’s inner turmoil in jail. But when people started superimposing math equations on her face, she turned into a symbol of confusion or deep conspiratorial calculations. The Babadook was a horrifying movie villain before he was pushed in front of a rainbow flag and restyled as a fabulous gay icon. Because memes don’t need to grapple with reality, they spread a lot faster than typical forms of political speech. And in presidential politics, we’ve never seen anyone benefit from this more “You are fake news.” than Donald Trump. Trump had no clear ideology, the vaguest sketches of ideas, a bottomless thirst for attention, and a flair for drama: the perfect base for endless meming. His campaign rallies became like incubators for ideas with viral potential. Think about the defining meme of Trumpism. “We need to build a wall.” “We need to build a wall.” It never made any practical sense that the United States would build a 2,000-mile wall and that Mexico would pay for it, but “A big, beautiful wall.” Any time reality tried to get in the way, Trump would double down on the meme. “10 feet higher.” “The wall just got 10 feet higher.” For his biggest fans, Trump himself is the ultimate meme. They’ve become so invested in promoting his persona that his promises have become almost irrelevant, like outdated versions of a meme that have been replaced by the next amusing thing. That’s the seductive danger of democracy as meme. It can make us feel like we have more personal control over a politician, but it’s the politician who is seizing the real power, becoming immune to criticism and less accountable to us. Next time on “Internetting” — Why beauty apps make you feel ugly.
The Dark Art of Political Memes
By Amanda Hess and Shane O’Neill
He is also playing along eagerly with his tamer online fans, retweeting their memes and egging them on with joke policy proposals like a “canine dividend,” which would give every American household 1,000 dogs a month.
Mr. Yang’s rush of online support has earned him the attention of major media outlets, and has led to a series of TV appearances. (“The ratio of days I have makeup on is getting higher,” he recently tweeted.) But mainstream Democrats don’t seem intimidated yet.
“We are quick to forget that online support is loudest among die-hards and is not representative of voters,” said Andrew Bleeker, the president of the Democratic communications firm Bully Pulpit Interactive and a former adviser to President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on digital strategy.
Still, some people who have noticed Mr. Yang’s rise on social media have cited his enthusiastic fan base — and the fact that nobody saw Mr. Trump coming, either — as proof that it’s too early to write anyone off.
“There’s a vacuum on the left for people like Yang who view the internet as a primary and not secondary medium for audience building,” said Elizabeth Spiers, a Democratic political consultant and a former editor of Gawker.
But there is a difference between building an online audience and running a successful campaign for president.
“The challenge he faces is how to take the enthusiasm and energy he’s getting on social media and elsewhere and turn it into action,” said Kelly Dietrich, the founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, which helps train candidates to run for political office.
Mr. Yang is not resting on his internet laurels. He has set new a goal of raising 200,000 individual donations by June, and he is planning a series of rallies in Chicago, New York and other cities later in the spring.
He said he was also exploring the possibility of having a lifelike 3-D hologram made of himself that could be carried around battleground states like Iowa on the back of a flatbed truck, allowing Mr. Yang to give a recorded version of his stump speech without being physically present.
“It’s a way for me to be in two places at once,” he said.
