This is an excerpt from The Stakes 2020, BuzzFeed News' newsletter about what really matters in the 2020 campaign. You can sign up here.



I DM’d Tuesday afternoon with Andrew Yang, the former test prep CEO and nonprofit leader who is running an extremely effective outsider’s campaign for president, and doing better by any meaningful metric than a bunch of career politicians. Why is Yang’s campaign working? After our exchange, I think it’s because of his relentless (help!) optimism, his genuine, technocratic hope for a better future at a dark moment in America. “You feel much better about a problem when you are working to solve it,” he told me.

Yang also responded to our investigation of Amazon’s last-mile delivery, suggesting the government devise a new set of rules specifically aimed at the giant company.

And he told me about his favorite Yang meme — but he, his team, his supporters on Discord, and I couldn’t find it! Please send it my way if you do.