Let’s establish that I harbor no illusions about Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang. He’s a leftist, albeit a technocratic one that seemingly prefers to raise taxes and throw your money at poor people rather than one who desires to grow the state into a womb-to-tomb nanny.

I don’t agree with the man on healthcare or energy policy, abortion or the death penalty. But here’s the truth: he’s an honest, normal person.

Maybe I should qualify that a bit. There was nothing particularly “normal” about him squirting whipped cream into the mouths of kneeling men, much to the horror of his stunned campaign manager. What I mean by that term is that he’s not of the Washington brand. He’s not a politician, he doesn’t fit in with the establishment, and he thinks in a way that is far more mainstream American than any of his competitors can hope to fake.

Bernie Sanders thinks he’s being relatable when he poses with Ariana Grande. Elizabeth Warren thinks she’s being hip when she pauses to open a beer on Instagram Live. Joe Biden thinks he’s – well, who really knows what Joe Biden thinks. Cory Booker thinks he’s connecting by talking incessantly about weed. None of them are right. To normal people they come off rehearsed, fake, and cringy.

Yang’s authenticity isn’t gimmicky. He legitimately seems to think and talk like most of us – people not bred in the halls of wealth and power. And that’s precisely why, as all the other Democrat candidates gloated over the impeachment of Donald Trump at their recent debate, crowing and insulting every chance they got, Yang spoke about the topic as though he has some basic idea of what is happening outside the beltway:

Andrew Yang drops the truth bomb on Democrats they weren’t expecting at the #DemDebate:



“We need to stop obsessing over impeachment and focus on WHY Trump won.”pic.twitter.com/LSGiYMTjLD — BlazeTV (@BlazeTV) December 20, 2019

Don’t be misled by the lack of interrupting applause. The audience at that debate are campaign surrogates, activists, and supporters. What Yang was saying wasn’t going to appeal to them, and was never intended to. It was aimed at people like you and me – people that don’t have time or money to go attend a Democratic presidential debate on a random Thursday night.

After indicting a press that is far more hated than the president they regularly drag, Yang actually said something meaningful:

“The more we act like Donald Trump is the cause of all of our problems, we lose trust that we can actually see what is going on in our communities and solve those problems.”

Yang went on to talk about the thousands of jobs, manufacturing and otherwise, that the United States has lost in the recent years leading up to Trump’s election, and pointed out, “We have to take every opportunity to present a new, positive vision for the country, a new way forward, to help beat him in 2020.”

How foreign was this concept to the other full-time politicians on the stage, you ask? Front-runner Joe Biden cluelessly followed up Yang’s prescient comments by admitting he would be fine cutting hundreds of thousands of blue-collar, oil and gas jobs in order to get to a green economy. How do you suppose that clip is going to play in the rural communities and union towns of the Rust Belt?

Watching this ham-fisted nomination fight, it’s almost as though Democrats seem committed to re-electing President Trump. And to this point, Andrew Yang is the only one normal enough to actually see and understand that.