by Cait Bladt

While most of the political media has been speculating on whether Joe Biden will enter the race and considering the rising and falling popularity of Bernie Sanders, several underdog candidates have been building strong coalitions. Andrew Yang is a 44-year-old political novice who started a tech company and a non-profit before entering the race. Pete Buttigieg is the 37-year-old gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Both are seen as interesting political outsiders. But which do you prefer?

While Yang’s rollout has been slow, he has steadily been building support. According to FiveThirtyEight, he has seen a sharp increase in his popularity among young internet users and members of the tech industry.

Yang’s strongest constituencies might be Millennials and Hispanic and Asian voters. Yang has a strong following on Reddit and his fans have been producing hundreds of memes there and on Twitter, both platforms whose user base skews younger. And should he win, Yang would be the first Asian-American president.



...One constituency that might be in his corner, though, is the tech establishment. But this will probably help more with scaring up money than with scaring up votes. The campaign claims Yang has already reached 65,000 unique donors, which is one of the thresholds for qualifying for the first two debates. And Graumann says the campaign has raised about $950,000 in February and the first half of March, which would be solid for a House or Senate candidate, but it probably won’t cut it for president, especially if Yang doesn’t plan to self-fund his campaign, which Graumann says is the case.

Buttigieg has made a name for himself as a highly intelligent, calming presence on the campaign trail. While he has not held higher office, FiveThirtyEight reports he still has many qualities that make him an appealing candidate.

On paper, Buttigieg is impressive. The son of an immigrant father from Malta, Buttigieg graduated from Harvard, earned a Rhodes Scholarship, and worked as a consultant at McKinsey before moving back home to Indiana at age 29 to become the mayor of South Bend, making him the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100,000 people. While still serving his first term, Buttigieg took a seven-month leave of office to serve with the Naval Reserve in Afghanistan in 2015. Less than a year later, Buttigieg came out as gay. Buttigieg’s sexuality didn’t stop South Bend voters from re-electing him to a second term with more than 80 percent of the vote.



All that success didn’t go unnoticed. In a 2016 New Yorker interview, Barack Obama name-dropped Buttigieg as a potential leading light for the party. And the New York Times (“The First Gay President?”) and Washington Post (“Could Pete Buttigieg Become the First Millennial President?”) have both published profiles of Buttigieg in the last three years.

Both candidates have thrown their support behind hot ticket issues. Yang's signature platform is Universal Basic Income:

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a form of social security that guarantees a certain amount of money to every citizen within a given governed population, without having to pass a test or fulfill a work requirement. Every Universal Basic Income plan can be different in terms of amount or design.

Andrew Yang is running for President as Democrat in 2020 on the platform of Universal Basic Income. The UBI he is proposing for the United States is a set of guaranteed payments of $1,000 per month, or $12,000 per year, to all U.S. citizens over the age of 18. Yes, that means you and everyone you know would get another $1,000/month every month from the U.S. government, no questions asked.

Yang, with his background in the tech industry, emphasizes that many American jobs will be lost in the next few years due to changing and improving technologies. He proposes the UBI is a way to safeguard against a massive economic hit from these lost jobs.

We report fundraising totals at the end of March. The better we do in both number of donors and dollars the more the press will be forced to acknowledge us. Let’s make sure that everyone knows that we can win. Donate and tell friends to donate today. 👍🇺🇸🥊https://t.co/Gp4E3EFZO0 — Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) March 20, 2019

In a recent appearance on Morning Joe, Buttigieg drew widespread praise from liberals on Twitter for throwing his support behind causes like ending the Electoral College and cracking down on gun violence.

We accept the fact that in our so-called "democracy" the person who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily get to become president, or that there are policies the vast majority of Americans want, like universal background checks, that Congress can’t make it happen. pic.twitter.com/Hza1gPgl8a — Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) March 20, 2019

The New York Times spent time talking to Yang about his growing support among young, internet savvy denizens of Reddit and Twitter.

Mr. Yang, 44, an entrepreneur and a political neophyte running on the idea that the United States should provide a universal basic income, is popping up in unexpected places in the Democratic contest.



He has catapulted out of obscurity thanks in part to a devoted internet following known as the “Yang Gang.” His fans have plastered Mr. Yang into memes and produced songs and music videos about his candidacy. They have also created a hashtaggable slogan — #securethebag — out of his signature campaign proposal to give $12,000 a year in no-strings-attached cash to every American adult, as a cushion against the mass unemployment he believes is coming thanks to artificial intelligence and automation.

Both candidates have garnered profiles in major media outlets. Buddigieg talked to Esquire about his policies, his feelings on Bernie Sanders and what he feels the Democratic party needs to do to win in 2020.

The problem with making it all about [Trump] is that's what we did in 2016, and when we make it all about him, then there's a lot of voters in places like the industrial midwest, where I live, who say, "Okay, but who's talking about me?"



...For the same reason I don’t think that we should do the usual Democratic thing, which is experiencing your competition through competing policy proposals. I think that policy matters, I’m a policy guy. But I think that you need our altitude to be both higher and lower. Higher in the sense that I think we need to talk about values and principles, that’s why I’m out there talking about what freedom and democracy and security mean before we get into the depth of any policy idea. And at the same time also be talking in terms that are nearer to the ground, really explaining what we believe in in terms of everyday lived experience and how different under us it will be than under them. And that’s how good political narrative works.

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