I spoke to some of his many Asian-American supporters, and this resonated with them. Michael Chen, a 19-year-old Drexel student at one of the New Hampshire town hall events, said he appreciated that Mr. Yang, whose immigrant father grew up in a house with a dirt floor on a peanut farm, is not running on his identity: “You can be Asian-American, you can be black American, you can be Latino-American, but the common denominator is American. That’s who he is.”

Mr. Chen was there with his dad, Jack. The elder Mr. Chen calls himself a “Yang junkie” but insists being Asian has “little to do with it.” What animates him is the practicality of Mr. Yang’s solutions.

Mr. Yang believes in talking to people he disagrees with. In April, he appeared on “The Ben Shapiro Show,” a no-go zone for those who buy into the new politics of contamination — that to sit next to a conservative like Mr. Shapiro is to tacitly endorse his ideas. “Thinking that I’m going to catch ideas from someone seems ludicrous to me,” he said.

Soon after the comedian Shane Gillis was hired by “Saturday Night Live,” it was revealed that he had used racial slurs on podcasts, including describing Mr. Yang with an anti-Semitic and racist epithet. Mr. Yang tweeted that he didn’t think Mr. Gillis should be fired, writing, “We would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive.” The show didn’t follow Mr. Yang’s advice.

I asked Mr. Yang, who ran one of the top test prep programs in the country before it was bought by Kaplan, about his views on affirmative action. Is Harvard doing to Asians in the 21st century what it did to Jews in the 20th?

“Harvard’s gonna Harvard,” he said.

He told me that he himself was rejected from the school — he wound up at Brown — though he was amply qualified. But “if you have any kind of perspective,” he said, you realize that “my life and my humanity depends on more than whether some institution decides to stamp my hand.”

“Arguing for higher representation of an already overrepresented group — at least according to population standards — would not be my first bone to pick,” he said. Instead, he asked why Harvard, a university with a $40 billion endowment, is “opening locations in Shanghai but not Ohio or Michigan.” The real question, he said, is, “Are you trying to advance our society or are you trying to advance global moneyed interests?”