Andrew Yang

Andrew Yang





Who is Andrew Yang?

Current job: Entrepreneur and 2020 presidential candidate.

Age: 44

Family: Yang and his wife Evelyn have two young sons.

Hometown: Schenectady, New York.

Political party: Democratic.

Previous jobs: Corporate lawyer, healthcare startup entrepreneur, CEO of Manhattan Test Prep, Founder and CEO of Venture for America.

Who is Andrew Yang's direct competition for the nomination?

Based on a recurring series of national surveys we conduct, we can figure out who the other candidates competing in Andrew Yang's lane are, and who the broader opponents are within the party.

The average Yang-satisfied respondent said they were satisfied with 5 other candidates , which is okay: it means that people who like him tend to be considering just a few other choices. To stay competitive, he'll want to be in line with the top candidates in the race, for whom that number is less than four.

This is encouraging for him: 8 percent of his supporters liked him and him alone, which is high at this point in the cycle. That means that he's been really good at locking down fans — only frontrunners Biden and Sanders have done better — which will serve him well later in the race.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren do better among Yang voters than they do among Democrats in general.

While Former Vice President Joe Biden is popular among Yang supporters, the businessman's backers like Biden about 10 percentage points less than your typical Democrat.

Andrew Yang Nov 5

Business Insider

Insider has been conducting a recurring poll through SurveyMonkey Audience on a national sample to find out how different candidate's constituencies overlap. We ask people whether they are familiar with a candidate, whether they would be satisfied or unsatisfied with that candidate as the nominee, and sometimes we also ask whether they think that person would win or lose in a general election against President Donald Trump.

Read more about how we're polling this here.

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What are Andrew Yang's policy positions?

Some of Yang's other unique policy proposals include paying NCAA college athletes, providing free marriage counseling for all, and creating an exchange program for high school students to spend time in different parts of the country and meet people they otherwise wouldn't.

What are Andrew Yang's biggest successes?

In the mid-200s, Yang was the CEO of elite test prep company Manhattan GMAT, which he and his partners sold to Kaplan in 2009.

Yang went on to create Venture For America, a program that sends college graduates to work at startups in cities hit especially hard by the financial crisis.

According to Yang, VFA's 500 fellows and alums have created more than 2,500 jobs in cities all around the country.

Yang received a Champion of Change Award from the Obama White House in 2012, and was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2015. He's also made the Fast Company list of the "100 most creative people in business."

How much money has Andrew Yang raised?

Yang disclosed raising just $659,578 between October of 2017 and December of 2018. But Yang's fundraising took off after he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and the Breakfast Club, a popular podcast and radio show, respectively. Yang reported raising $1.7 million from 80,000 donors who donated an average of just $17.92 in March and February alone, bringing his quarterly haul to $1.8 million.

In 2019's second quarter between April 1 and June 30, the Yang campaign reported raising $2.8 million. And in the third quarter between July 1 and September 30, Yang improved on his previous haul by a whopping $7.2 million, bringing in a total of $10 million and beating out multiple US Senators.

How is Andrew Yang viewed by voters compared to the competition?

Insider has conducted a number of other polls to check in on how these candidates are perceived in comparison to one another. When we asked respondents to one poll to rank how far to the left or to the right they considered the candidates, Yang was generally considered to be one of the more centrist candidates in the field.

Owing to his outsider perspective, Yang was identified one of the least experienced candidates in the field by far when we asked respondents to rank the candidates based on how prepared they are for the rigors of the presidency given what they knew about their history of public service and experience with government. And when asked how likable or personable respondents perceived the candidates to be, Yang was in the middle of the pack.

According to recent Insider polling, Yang also has the highest net support by far out of all the 2020 Democratic candidates among undecided general election voters who are considering voting for either party's nominee.

Out of the 268 undecided voters who knew of Yang, 46% would be satisfied with him as the nominee and 24% would not be satisfied, giving him positive net support of 21 percentage points, due to rounding error, among general election voters

Furthermore, Yang is locking down way more loyal supporters than any of the other candidates in the mid-tier of polling. Yang's supporters like an average of 5.5 candidates total, the lowest number out of the mid-tier candidates out of six Insider polls conducted between early September and early November.

Could Andrew Yang beat Trump?

Yang is considered by Democrats who know of him to be a weaker candidate against President Trump, projected to lose more often and win less often than a standard competitor.

How do Democratic voters feel about Andrew Yang's qualifications?

Insider has conducted polling about how voters feel about candidate attributes or qualifications. We asked respondents about a list of possible qualifications and if they made them more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate for president.

For example, among respondents who said they'd vote in the Democratic primary, 19% said a candidate being a college professor made them likelier to support them, while 4% said it made them less likely to, for a +15% net favorability. We can then see how different candidates' resumes stack up compared to those preferences.

Attributes perceived as most valuable include he is multi-lingual (+25%), age 50 or younger (+23%), a child of immigrants (+21%), an Ivy League graduate (+7%) and a lawyer (+3%).

Attributes considered to be a liability based on the preferences of self-reported Democratic voters include his past as a business owner (-11%), that he spent little time in government (-22%), was a corporate lawyer (-33%) and grew up wealthy (-42%).

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