‘This isn’t ideological, it’s just math’: Andrew Yang on how to move the country forward

Before Andrew Yang helped found a new political party, he spent a lot of time running as a Democrat. In 2020, he ran as a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary and lost. The next year, he ran as a candidate in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. He also lost that race, but he did significantly better – even leading the polls for a few months – and nearly denied victory to Mayor Eric Adams with a shrewd ranked choice endorsement of opponent Kathryn Garcia.

Yang’s new political party, the Forward Party, hopes to build an independent source of political power outside of the Democratic and Republican parties at the local, state and federal levels. Third parties don’t have a great track record in American politics, but Yang believes that wider adoption of policies like ranked choice voting and nonpartisan primaries will give independent and third-party candidates a better shot at winning real power.

City & State caught up with Yang to talk about the New York City mayoral race, the future of the Democratic Party and whether he’ll ever run for office again. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Have you been following the current New York City mayoral race?

Yeah, of course. As someone who lives here, you know, I follow it avidly. And in my case, I’m someone who had some back and forths with our current mayor, so I definitely keep track of it.

Obviously, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is dominating in the polls now, but you were dominating the polls four years ago –

Way to remind me! I mean, it is interesting. The parallels have not escaped me. But I think that the dynamics of the city are different than they were in ’21. I think the front-runner will definitely take some incoming though.

The 2021 race was the first time New York City had ranked choice voting. Do you think people have learned to use it more strategically this cycle?

I’m very proud of the fact that I urged my supporters to rank Kathryn Garcia No. 2, and from the data, it seems like a lot of them listened. So I hope that candidates take lessons from that this time, where if you can be collegial and build some form of consensus, you’re more likely to arrive at a mayor that the majority of voters want.

I would have felt better, obviously, if it had worked and Kathryn had won. After myself, I always felt that Kathryn would make the most competent, noncorrupt mayor. I remember when the votes were being counted and it seemed like she might win. That would have really demonstrated the power of ranked choice voting.

Do you wish that you had encouraged your supporters to rank Garcia earlier? Would that have made a difference?

It’s a good question. Looking at the data, I feel like a lot of people did get the message. We did campaign together, and it is possible that if I had done so earlier, we could have campaigned together more and increased the co-ranking adoption. At the same time, I think voters kind of tune in closer to the voting time, so I’m not sure if the timing would have made a difference.

If you were advising the current candidates, when would you say is the best time to do co-endorsements?

Right now, each candidate is still trying to get the word out about themselves and introduce themselves. I think that’s appropriate. You know, you hope that polls change in various ways. Then down the stretch, that still makes sense to me.

Have you seen the DREAM movement – “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor” – that United Auto Workers and the Working Families Party are getting behind?

Well, they found a catchy name! I can see why they’re taking that approach. If your goal was to win, you would want to try to suppress the vote for, certainly, Andrew Cuomo. I personally don’t see a path for Eric Adams, so it’s interesting that he’s part of this.

There are a number of center-left candidates running for mayor now. Do you think it makes sense for them to consolidate into a single lane?

I think this is why ranked choice voting exists, to keep you from having to do that sort of thing. At the same time, if someone feels like they're not going to really be making effective use of donor resources, that’s a personal decision.

One thing actually – I’ll throw this in just for fun, because it’s very inside baseball, and this is why people want to talk to folks like me – is that you should know that if you take money from the city, you wind up in some version of audit hell for months and months and months afterward. Happily, my campaign hasn’t had any of the issues, let’s say, Eric Adams’ campaign has had. But people think, “Oh, let me give it a try and see what happens.” You should know that there’s actually a lot of work associated with what happens after the campaign. If you don’t think that you’re making effective use of either your donors’ resources or the city’s resources, you know, something to consider.

You started a new political party called the Forward Party to break the duopoly of the Democratic and Republican parties. What’s the pitch?

I want to take a step out and look at it nationally for a moment. Let’s say that you were someone who wanted to adopt Democratic policies nationwide. The Democratic message of, hey, we’re going to legislate some of these changes’ would require the Democrats to hold the U.S. Senate, which, by the numbers and by the map, they are very unlikely to do for any foreseeable number of years.

Right now, they just lost seats in Ohio and West Virginia, which they will never see again. They’re down 53-47 and the map is unkind to them in ’26 and really from now on, unless you have a massive sea change where states like Texas or Montana or wherever become contested or competitive. There was a time when Iowa or Ohio used to be states that might send Democrats to Congress, and right now, the Democrats are actually losing ground in terms of being competitive in any of those places rather than gaining ground. So there really is no path for Democrats to be able to legislate as a majority party.

The way to a more dynamic and also, by the way, more resilient and anti-authoritarian mode of government would be: Imagine if you had independent candidates, like someone like Dan Osborne who ran competitively as an independent against Deb Fischer in Nebraska, in a deep-red state that would have been completely uncompetitive for a Democrat. That is the only path out right now of Democrats being in a permanent minority. And this isn’t ideological, it’s just math.

So when you ask someone like me, hey, like, how are we going to come out of this mess? In my opinion, you have to evolve past the blue versus red to have any chance of dynamism or problem solving or real independent thought. Because right now, there’s such a powerful incentive to follow the leader of your party, where you can tell that there are legislators who are just rubber stamps for whatever the leadership of their party is saying. To me, that leads to bad policy, bad outcomes, bad governance and diminishing faith in democracy.

In a state like New York, isn’t there a lot of political competition in the primaries, even if there isn’t in the general election?

I remember as a candidate walking around and people would say, “Hey Yang, excited to vote for you.” And then I’d ask them, “Are you a registered Democrat?” And they would say no, and I’d say, “Well, then you’re out of luck, because you needed to register for the party back on Feb. 1.” So I’d ask people reading this: What is the rationale to have a February registration deadline for a June primary? And I’m going to suggest it’s not to maximally register the will of the people. I mean, you wind up having a primary that determines the mayor of the city with maybe 10 or 11% of the people voting.

Do you think it would make sense for New York to move toward open primaries?

Yes, categorically. Ideally, you’d have something even more interesting, like a final four, final five open primaries plus ranked choice voting, and then different points of view could emerge, and you’d have more interesting coalitions form.

Is the Forward Party active in New York?

We have an active chapter here in New York. And what’s great is we have the liberty of getting behind candidates of either or no party at any stage in an election like the one for mayor, and we’re not restricted just to that election either.

But do you have party status in New York?

Thanks to some various rules at the state level – I don’t know if you know the ins and outs of this, but there are very, very expensive and rigorous requirements to be a registered party in the state of New York, including running a statewide candidate that gets a certain percentage to stay on the ballot, and those requirements were made even more onerous in the last several years. So Forward has ballot recognition in seven states around the country that are a little bit more open.

Not everyone unhappy with the two-party system wants to join a centrist party, right? Some people are unhappy with the Democrats because they think the party isn’t far enough to the left.

You’re totally right that independence comes in all flavors. The thing that I believe, the insight that I would bring to a table, is that, let’s say you’re ideologically left, this system will not deliver what you want, full stop, like it is not designed to do so. Even if you would look at someone like Christine Todd Whitman (the former New Jersey governor who was a moderate Republican and has now joined the Forward Party) and say, “Hey, I don’t line up with her ideologically,” what you have to do is try and create competition and dynamism and openness in the system so that maybe some of the things you want actually are deliverable. And that’s the only way out.

What do you think of the nascent backlash we’ve seen to Democratic leadership in the past month, like calls for U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down?

It’s a great question. This is exactly what I’m talking about. You have folks, grassroots supporters of the Democratic Party, who say, “Hey, we have to fight, we have to fight harder.” What that meant in this particular instance is, “Hey, let’s actually let the government shut down so that we can have a real bargaining position versus the Republicans.” The concrete effect of that would be to shut down a government of 2 million employees – a majority of whom would have been furloughed, sent home without a paycheck, without knowing what would happen. I joked online that if you’re going to be for a shutdown, you better be ready for a $10 billion GoFundMe so that you can fund all these federal employees being able to keep their roof over their head.

Chuck Schumer made a difficult decision. You can disagree with it, but people acting like it was a clear-cut decision have the luxury of not living through the counterfactual reality of a shutdown government and all that would have resulted.

But you understand the anger toward Schumer and Democratic leadership.

There’s a ton of anger within the Democratic Party because they want their representatives to do more, which I get. The problem is the Democratic Party completely missed the moment, and the time to fight like mad was in January of 2024 when Joe Biden was running for reelection unopposed. That was the time you should have been up there, kicking and screaming, saying, let’s have a real primary, because Joe Biden running was a short path to Donald Trump winning, and here we are.

By the way, there was one individual who decided to actually make that case, and what did the Democratic Party do to (former Rep.) Dean Phillips? They primaried him. He’s now out of Congress in a system where incumbents have a 94% reelection rate, because he had the temerity to stake his career on trying to save the country from a sure Biden loss. And instead of hearing him out – and this was a vice chair of the Democratic Party, a third-term member of Congress from a swingy state, Minnesota – they maligned him as a narcissist and they cast him out. They destroyed his career. They tried to destroy his reputation.

So what you have now is a Democratic Party that is paying for its cowardice and conformity, and that is where the anger is. But the anger is not, in my opinion, properly directed at Chuck Schumer, who’s trying to manage the aftermath. The anger should be directed at all of the people that stood in the way of a competitive primary and the people who engaged in the career destruction of Dean Phillips.

What do you think the opposition to Trump – both Democrats and moderate Republicans – should be doing now?

If you look at one senator who has raised her hand and said, “Look, I’m not a fan of some of these Cabinet appointees, and I’m going to vote my conscience, and you can primary me all you want,” that’s Lisa Murkowski from Alaska. Alaska now has an all-party primary system coupled with ranked choice voting that enabled Lisa to withstand a challenge from a Trumper, including a stop on the Trump revenge tour. He actually went to Alaska and said, “Hey, let’s get Murkowski, this RINO, out of there.” And if they had a conventional primary system, she would probably lose in the Republican primary, and that’s a wrap. But there is no Republican primary in the state of Alaska.

So what all Americans who dislike what’s happening right now should be focused on is trying to emulate Alaska’s electoral structures and make it so that we have all-party primaries coupled with ranked choice voting, which would lead to consensus candidates emerging. And then the great thing is those consensus candidates could actually do what they thought was the right thing without fear of getting booted in their next primary. I mean, our politicians are creatures of incentives, and the only way we can improve their decisions is to improve their incentives.

Are you interested in running for office yourself as an independent or a Democrat?

I get asked this every day, I mean, multiple times a day, and my stock response is: “I’m very young in politics, and apparently I’ve got 30 more years.” But I definitely have a future run in me. The question in my mind is more when, not if.