“He has [said] that if he’s not the president, the nominee will sound a lot like him, and I think we’re starting to see that,” said Trami Pham, who lives in Springfield, Virginia, and helps run the Northern Virginia Yang Gang volunteer group. “That’s fine. That’s all we want.”

Yang, a 44-year-old businessman and father of two from New York, launched a presidential campaign in November 2017 fixated on preparing the country’s workforce for coming technological shifts—a so-called fourth industrial revolution that he believes will lead to the culling of millions of American jobs. Yang has argued that the election of Donald Trump was largely due to job displacement spurred by automation. “The more we act like Donald Trump is the cause of all of our problems, the more Americans lose trust that we can actually see what’s going on in our communities and solve those problems,” he said at Thursday night’s debate. But Yang is perhaps just as famous for his ideas as for his campaign’s irreverence, like his “Make America think harder” slogan—a snarky rejoinder to Trump’s own motto and a cheeky acronym that fits well on a hat.

So far, Yang hasn’t hit the top tier of candidates. In Iowa, he’s polling somewhere between 1 and 4 percent, and his national average, according to RealClearPolitics, is about 2.6 percent. But his campaign is durable. His fundraising is impressive for a first-time political candidate, and he’s outlasted other prominent politicos in the race, including sitting senators and members of Congress. More than anything else, though, his campaign’s focus sets him apart from his Democratic opponents.

Yang’s signature campaign proposal, a UBI payment called the “freedom dividend,” is a relatively radical concept, not unlike the policy priorities Sanders first campaigned on in 2016. Yang wants the government to give people money—$1,000 a month, to be exact—to help support those who have lost their jobs due to automation; remedy income inequality; and compensate for unpaid labor performed by millions of Americans, including child rearing and caregiving.

Read: The city that’s giving people money

During his 2016 race, Sanders amassed a grassroots following with ideas like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college, two policies that initially had little mainstream support. That was the first year a majority of Americans backed Medicare for All, and their support has remained steady ever since, according to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Also since 2016, support for free public college has grown from 47 to 63 percent.

Sanders, of course, didn’t win the Democratic nomination. But his campaign did inspire hundreds of down-ballot progressive candidates across the country to embrace his platform: In the 2018 midterm elections, more than half of all Democratic candidates for the House backed Medicare for All, including his former campaign organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, with Sanders on his second campaign, his trademark proposals have dominated the 2020 primary race: Seven of the remaining 15 Democratic candidates have embraced some version of Medicare for All, and multiple debates have featured a sustained discussion about the proposal. Similarly, almost every candidate has promised to eliminate tuition for two-year community colleges, with several, in addition to Sanders, vowing to make all public four-year colleges free.