There are more than 20 Democratic candidates for president, and none are as technocratic as Andrew Yang. The New York–based entrepreneur and venture capitalist is running on an eclectic platform that synthesizes ideas from the party’s socialist and centrist wings. Though he’s never held elective office, he’s secured an enthusiastic following known as the “Yang Gang” and now polls in the low single digits—no small feat in this crowded field.

On the campaign trail, Yang outlines his policy agenda in three pillars: a universal basic income of $1,000 per month, Medicare for All, and what he describes as “human-centered capitalism.” Beyond that, he’s put forward a heterodox mix of more than 100 policies on his candidate website. Most of them, like paid family leave and the DREAM Act, are relatively standard Democratic fare. Others, like regulating artificial intelligence and transitioning to self-driving vehicles, reflect his futurist approach to governance.

Like many Democrats, Yang devotes no small amount of attention to structural reforms of the American political system. Many of his proposals are worthwhile. He supports automatic voter registration, statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and ending felony disenfranchisement and partisan gerrymandering. But some of his more unorthodox ideas would be more complicated to enact than they first appear—which says more about the nation’s contorted political system than about Yang’s solutions for them.



Perhaps his most unusual proposal pertains to the Electoral College. Most Democratic candidates now support abolishing it, and for good reason: Only three of the five Democrats who won the national popular vote over the past three decades won the presidency. But Yang is skeptical of abolition. “Constant calls to change the electoral college after a popular vote win/electoral college loss can seem like sour grapes, and the attempt to abolish it would require a constitutional amendment that could be stopped by 13 states,” he argues on his website.

Yang instead calls for the states to allocate delegates on a proportional basis, like Maine already does. But there would be nothing to stop state legislatures from switching back for short-term advantage whenever it suited them. A hypothetical Democratic candidate could secure a narrow nationwide majority in November 2020, only to see Republican lawmakers in Texas or Florida reimpose a winner-take-all system before the electors gather to cast their votes in December. (Democrats in California and New York could do the same to a hypothetical Republican victor, too.)