Dissecting the DailyKos Bullshit YangGang Conspiracy Theory

As a reminder, here’s the conspiracy theory that DailyKos staff gave for disappearing my vote and thousands more:

“Andrew Yang supporters … have [spammed] polls … [using] fake email addresses to vote. They’re not progressives… [Yang voters] are not interested in joining the site’s mission to elect more and better Democrats while fighting for progressive policy at the national and local levels. They’re not even pretending to try… So it’s no surprise that… it’s the Yang votes that disappear.”

Charge #1: “Andrew Yang supporters … have [spammed] polls … [using] fake email addresses to vote.”

DailyKos has not offered any evidence to substantiate this claim.

DailyKos doesn’t claim to have performed any kind of impartial audit to toss out just “fake” email addresses (whatever that means) — if they had, my vote would have remained in the tally. Instead, they uniformly discarded every last vote for Yang — even though the Daily Kos created the poll in the first place and chose to include Yang as an option to vote for…



This suggests the Daily Kos only included Yang because they assumed he would do very poorly in the poll which would allow them to say, “Look how bad he did! Loser! Drop out!” But it didn’t work out that way, so they scrambled and did their best to rig the results to suit their narrative after the fact (and destroy the evidence that they’ve previously acknowledged that discarding votes is a bad idea and un-Democratic, by deleting their previous apology to Yang’s supporters.)

Truthfully, the analysis of this first absurd charge should just end here, but the irony of the actual #Math involved here is just too much…

In previous anti-YangGang statements, the DailyKos has pointed out the disproportionate number of votes for Yang have come from Twitter users, and that’s somehow dubious — because, ya know… Twitter Bots!!!



There are several problems with this accusation, but perhaps, none bigger than this one: it turns out, an independent analysis performed by “TwitterAudit” shows that, compared to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang has the best ratio of Real vs. Fake Twitter Followers with 96% Real Followers and just 4% Fake Followers.



In comparison, Elizabeth Warren ( @ ewarren ) — who was declared the winner of the straw poll that Yang actually won — has an Audit Score of 84% (12 points worse than Yang) with 16% Fake Followers, Bernie Sanders — declared runner up to Warren — does far worse than both Yang and Warren, with an Audit Score of 67%… but best of all (or at least, most ironically of all), the Audit Score of The Daily Kos (@ dailykos) comes in at 75% Real and 25% Fake, which is 21 points worse than Andrew Yang’s score.

Charge #2: “Andrew Yang supporters [are] not progressives… [and] are not interested in joining the site’s mission to elect more and better Democrats while fighting for progressive policy at the national and local levels. They’re not even pretending to try.”

The arrogance of this accusation is truly baffling.

The Daily Kos staff is portending to know the specific political persuasions and motivations of, literally, thousands of people who voted for Andrew Yang in their straw poll.

And quite frankly, this was the part that really pissed me off… because included in their arrogant assessment of thousands of people who took the time to log on to the Daily Kos’ site, abide by the rules set out by the Daily Kos, and faithfully cast their vote for their favored candidate… was me.

By stating that “Yang supporters are not progressives, blah, blah, blah…” they were talking about me, and I’d be happy to put my record as a progressive leader up against anyone — including any online social justice warrior.

Now, it’s worth reiterating that the Daily Kos did not require that, in order to vote in their sham straw poll, you had to be a member of the Daily Kos community for X-period-of-time or that you had to have demonstrated a certain level of engagement on the Daily Kos’ platform, or submit a resume validating that you are a “real progressive” in the eyes of the all-knowing and all-powerful Daily Kos staff…

But, since my commitment to the Democratic / Progressive cause was called into question by the Daily Kos Staff who are too sheepish to use their real names when casting insults and insinuations at the ever-evolving Democratic / Progressive Grassroots, let me educate the Daily Kos on who I am… who’s vote they invalidated…

✔️ Least significant of all: I’ve been a DK member for 8 years (will be deleting my account today)

✔️ At the age of 20, I became the youngest-ever-elected chairman of my local Democratic Party.

✔️ In the year (a non-presidential, off-year… always less favorable to DEMs) that I served as Chairman of my local Dem Party, our county went from being represented by one Democrat and one Republican in the State Assembly and a Republican in the State Senate, to a Democrat in every one of those seats…*No other county party did as well as we did.

✔️ In the year that I served as Chairman of my local Dem Party, I was a prominent figure in the fight against Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature’s attacks on unions in our state; I was honored to work tirelessly alongside the progressive grassroots and the labor movement in the fight.

✔️ In the year that I served as Chairman of my local Dem Party, we saw explosive growth in our membership, fundraising, and participation in Party functions of all kinds.

✔️ I have worked on dozens of national, state, and local political campaigns and advocacy campaigns, all for Dems or progressive candidates / causes.

✔️ I am most proud of my work as an Obama Organizing Fellow in 2008, and then as field staff for Obama, and eventually as a community organizer for Organizing for America after Obama’s election.

✔️ In 2009, at the age of 19, I ran a progressive campaign for local office against two longtime incumbents much older than I was… I lost by three votes. Then, in 2014, I ran for a county-level office as a progressive candidate against a well-funded conservative… and I won.

✔️ Today, I am proud to be supporting the candidacy of another progressive candidate for President: Andrew Yang.

✔️ Oh, and the email address I used to create my Daily Kos account (eight years ago) and which I used to vote for Andrew Yang in the straw poll, is basically My Name @ (standard email address . com) — so the claim that all of us in the YangGang used fake emails is a load of crap.