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Last year physician Carson Lam posted online asking if anyone else in the Bay Area wanted to meet up to talk about Andrew Yang’s Presidential campaign. Three people showed up. Carson, Greg, Victoria and Logan went star gazing on Bernal Heights Hill in San Francisco and the Yang Gang was born.

When looking up at the stars, could he have imagined how big the Yang Gang movement would become I ask as Carson and I meet for coffee not far from the star gazing encounter. “No, its far exceeded my expectations by quite a bit!”

If you follow American politics and you haven’t heard of Andrew Yang, you’ve probably been living under a rock on social media. His supporters, the self titled Yang Gang, are everywhere online. He the attracts the third most online traffic of all 20 Democratic candidates behind only Sanders and Warren, he’s got the highest percentage of small donors to his campaign, raising over $1million in the last week alone and he’s polling around 7th place in the race for the Democratic nomination. This is for a candidate with practically zero name recognition having never held public office.

The tech entrepreneur is running on a flagship proposal of the Freedom Dividend giving every American over the age of 18 $1000 a month, a rebranded form of Universal Basic Income (polling told him Americans love the word freedom). He has over 100 other policy proposals on his website and his ability to answer almost every interview question with evidence and data has led to a campaign slogan of MATH (Make America Think Harder).

But who are in the Yang Gang? With a large online following, some commentators have dismissed Yang’s supporters as at best well meaning computer nerds who spend hours making memes on the platform Reddit or at worse white nationalists on the website 4chan (to be clear, Yang has publicly and categorically denounced the support of the latter). I’m curious to meet them and I’m reassured when I meet the friendly Carson.

“I first got involved behind my little computer in the safety of my home but as I have been getting more involved I’ve been meeting more and more of those people face-to-face and we are real people, not robots, and we’re a lot more diverse than you think. A lot are previous Trump supporters and people who were not previously involved in politics. You’d be surprised.” He invites me to meet some of the Gang at a debate watch party they’ve arranged for Yang’s appearance in the second Democratic Debate.

His campaign is certainly bringing together a unusual alliance of progressives, libertarians, former Trump voters, conservatives and futurists. There’s about 40 of them packed into a small bar in the SOMA neighbourhood of San Francisco.

“We’re a motley crew” says Monica, one of the organisers of the SF Yang Gang, “I was a Bernie supporter but now my focus is on Yang. I came to him for the Freedom Dividend”. Tristan, another one of the leaders who’s getting people to sign up the mailing list after the debate said “I’m totally new to being politically active, this is my first time being involved”. Carson too was a Bernie supporter in 2016 but this is the first time he’s been politically involved to this extent.

They are fast developing a reputation for the being the nicest people on the campaign trail, a “friendly gang” as Carson calls them. Whenever someone posts about #YangGang on social media, its usually followed by a series of supportive messages pointing them in the direction of some of Yang’s policies or long form interviews such as his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, which many cite as the moment his campaign gained traction. How did this Humanity First ethos develop?

“We’ve had a very tumultuous couple of years in the US since the election and its been very polarising creating two opposing groups” says Carson. “Yang’s campaign has painted a different narrative which is much more productive. It forgives that both groups are human beings and paints a narrative that economics is the more productive thing to focus our attention on. It skips over the blaming and finger pointing and goes straight to the underlying cause, in this case job losses and automation.”

Indeed, Yang has resisted attacks on other campaigns and avoids the name calling and divisiveness that’s brought American politics to a standstill. Matt, another Yang supporter I meet at the watch party, says “Yang’s campaign has made me re-evaluate and help me understand other people’s opinions and where they’re coming from. We might disagree but we have the space to respectfully debate. When Yang went on Ben Shapiro’s show and had a well mannered debate with a cordial tone I thought, ‘why can’t our Washington politics be like that?’”

Matt, a third generation American-Asian, is also proud to see an East Asian man running for President. “I never thought I’d see the day but what I like most is that he’s not using his race as a central part of the campaign. He acknowledges he comes from an immigrant background but he’s avoiding identity politics and focusing on the important economic issues that impact everyone. He’s also being himself. People can relate to his nerdy Dad jokes. I really related to a campaign email he sent out earlier in the year about being an introvert. It really spoke to my experience”

He’s referring to a campaign email Yang sent in May titled Trust the Process. It was one of the moments when I too first got interested in Yang’s campaign and I sent it round to some colleagues and friends. I’d never heard a politician be so open and honest about the challenges of being an introvert in public life. I too could relate to that. Perhaps it was why Yang initially came across as passive in the first debate, getting very little speaking time as, unlike the other candidates, he kept by the rules and didn’t interrupt people.

He was a man transformed in the second debate however. He had sharp answers to each question that reframed the conversation entirely with bold ideas on health care, immigration, Iran and climate change whilst having laser-like message discipline to bring each answer back to his flagship Freedom Dividend. He was the only candidate to talk about the exploitation of women in the workforce, the challenges people with disabilities face and despite the debate hosted in Detroit, was the only candidate to relate issues to back to the crucial swing state of Michigan.

The only reason he had less talking time than anyone else was because he didn’t attack anyone, and no one attacked him. He ended the night by brilliantly contrasting this behaviour as he broke the 4th wall of television by saying “instead of talking about our automation and our future, we’re up here with make up on our faces with our rehearsed attack lines playing roles in this reality TV show. Its one reason why we elected a reality TV star as our President”.

His unique message allows him a wide open lane to run his race from the outside while the others scrap on the inside lane. Fellow candidates are going to have to find a way to deal with Yang because he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He this week qualified for the next set of debates in September and October, he’s got a message that will spark interest from a cross section of America and with such enthusiastic grassroots support, he’s well set to go all the way to the primaries in February.

Just how far can he go? A lot will depend on translating his online following to offline organising on the ground. Sanders and Warren will have paid organisers across all the key states where as the likes of Monica, Tristan and Carson admit themselves they have no experience of organising, are very busy professionally and currently have no help on the ground other than a weekly zoom call and slack channel with Yang’s central team.

They’ve been impressive at organising socials and they had 40 people at the watch party but there were a number who slipped away without signing up to commit to the all important phone banking or texting that the campaign needs. The campaign have said they intend to spend some of the $1m that’s come into the campaign coffers in the past week on field organisers and the sooner they can get organisers on the ground in key states, the quicker they can support some of these exciting new politically engaged leaders.

A couple of months ago, I spoke to Scott Santens, prominent basic income advocate and online hero of the Yang Gang. He suggested that in the absence of any real basic income movement in the US, the Yang Gangs could fill that void. Carson is certainly in it for the long haul.

“I fully intend to use the campaign infrastructure to pursue the goal of UBI. It goes beyond the MATH. The idea is greater than the person. Whether he wins or doesn’t win we’ll continue to convert this infrastructure into a force for UBI.” Maybe, just maybe, those stars are beginning to align for Yang and long term, we may be witnessing the emergence of a movement that could change American politics.

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