From Apolitical to a Week in Iowa: My Journey With Andrew Yang

In the summer of 2018, I was in NYC and got coffee with Andrew Yang’s campaign manager, Zach Graumann. I was initially interested in speaking with Zach since he’s a Duke alum and we shared a Duke management professor, and because he had founded an education nonprofit. While I was aware of the fact that he was Yang’s campaign manager, it was definitely not at the forefront of my mind. If anything, my interest in Yang was more about how I was interested in him being an Asian American entrepreneur that had done work in the education space, and not so much about how he was running for an election more than 2 years from that point in time.

In our conversation though, I did ask about Yang. Although I didn’t express it at the time, I thought his odds for president were pretty low and was still pretty skeptical about his flagship Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposal. Even if I came around to liking it, I didn’t think our country would be by the time 2020 came around. In his response to my thank you email to Zach after we met, he concluded with “We’ll need your vote in 2020!” I felt a little bad for not being fully bought in yet, but little did I know that this meeting with him would plant the seeds for something much greater.

In the grand scope of things, I was relatively apolitical at the time. Politics is a tough topic, and isn’t the easiest thing to talk about, especially given how divided our nation has become. In 2016, the first election cycle I was able to vote in, I witnessed Trump get elected my freshman year at Duke. Overall, I didn’t really understand politics. While I had been making the excuse that I was busy with schoolwork throughout high school and didn’t have time to follow politics, I also felt that when I did try to follow it, I somewhat felt like I was watching a game of lies and empty promises. In retrospect, I now also realize that I had gotten a bit caught up in the trap of simply viewing Democrats as the “good” party and Republicans as the “bad” one due to a combination of our increasingly polarized two-party system, views I developed through the people around me, and the media I was personally consuming.

Given all of this though, I can say that the foundation of intention for me to be involved in politics was there. During the times I did try to follow politics, I did so with the intention to participate in our democracy and be a responsible citizen. I also felt compelled to not only think about problems affecting our nation and economy, but also meet people from all types of backgrounds and understand their challenges, especially given how I’ve been fortunate to have had a relatively well-off upbringing.

In the 9 months following my meeting with Zach, I continued to stay relatively distant from politics. However, in spring of 2019, I realized Andrew Yang was making some headway simply because people around me started talking about him — some even fascinated by how I had been able to previously meet with his campaign manager. Even then, I didn’t give it much thought until I inadvertently ended up listening to several of his long-form interviews on podcasts like Joe Rogan after graduating Duke in May.

When I listened to Yang speak, I no longer felt the feeling of not being able to understand politics. I felt he was talking about real issues and answering questions directly, and that by listening to him talk, I was learning more about our nation’s issues regardless of whether I supported him or not. I also felt he was a genuine and nice human, so I thought that there was no way that learning more about him could really hurt. At the same time though, I definitely did not want to put myself into an echo chamber. I started to cautiously learn more about him through reading his book “The War on Normal People”, listening to more of his podcast interviews, and listening to podcast interviews of other candidates. I felt good in that no matter what happened, I was simply becoming more educated on issues in politics than I had ever been up to that point in my life.

All of this led me to watch the 1st round of democratic debates in June. Normally I would only somewhat pay attention to the debates in late fall of the election year after the nominees of the 2 respective parties had already been decided, so this was a nontrivial step for me.

After watching the 1st debate, I felt happy about the Asian American representation he brought to the debate stage, but less happy about the small amount of speaking time he got. My main takeaway though was that I felt he was presenting a compelling vision for the future of our country, and was motivated enough to attend a local Raleigh-Durham meetup to learn more about how I could get involved. Even then though, I remained cautious, repeatedly telling myself not to fall into the echo chamber. I told myself that if anything, I’d be learning more about some of the work Zach and the campaign had been putting together, and that going to this meetup aligned with my goals to meet more non-Duke people in the Raleigh-Durham area. In that first meeting, I was probably just as much fascinated by meeting other Yang supporters as I was simply seeing a political campaign that up close for the first time.

During the months that followed, I would say my involvement was on and off. I watched the debates every month as the field of 20 started to narrow to 7, attended a debate watch party with the Raleigh-Durham group, and donated to the campaign. It wasn’t really until the winter holidays that I realized that it was quite remarkable that Yang was outlasting some other candidates with previous notable careers in politics. I started watching more and more of his interviews. Sometimes I fell into a rabbit-hole watching these, but instead of feeling guilt, I felt like I was becoming a better person from learning about the problems going on in our country, and from the kind, energetic, and genuine way he conducted himself. I officially went from “Yang Curious” to a “Yang-aholic” over winter break. All of my previous hesitations about not liking politics and falling into an echo chamber fell to a resounding motivation that the future of our country was too important for me to hold back in my support. As Elon Musk once said, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

Over that winter break, I started to think about how I could make a unique impact on the campaign. I did think about utilizing the network effects and my connections at Duke to spread the word and text/phone-banking, but what excited me the most was the crazy idea of actually going to Iowa to knock on doors — initially inspired by seeing Youtuber Kai Watson take leave of absence from college to support Yang. I felt that going to Iowa was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity both in terms of the candidate and the time of my life to do it given I didn’t have school or a 9 to 5 job yet. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be as excited about a political candidate in the future, and it was cool how so many things came together: how I had met his campaign manager, the practical and data-driven vision for the future Yang brought, the entrepreneurial elements Zach was bringing to running a political campaign, my alignment with values such as “Humanity First”, and how my entrepreneurial idols like Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Sam Altman had all endorsed him. And yes, he is Asian American like me, but that’s probably about 2.48% of the reason I like him, not 100% as a couple of my friends sometimes joke.

After taking a leap of faith and through the help of many, I was able to go to Iowa for the last week before the caucuses with a group of other Raleigh-Durham #YangGang members, something I could have never imagined I would do in my lifetime even after my initial meeting with Zach in summer 2018.

Iowa Trip

Going into Iowa, there were plenty of reasons as to why I was taking a leap of faith and really putting myself out there by committing to going on the trip. Our group was assigned to one of the most conservative counties in the country, and I’d be taking over a whole week of my life to learn to canvas (essentially doorknocking) for the first time while working with people I’d never worked with before. Nevertheless, I was more focused on what I could gain from the trip: an opportunity to bond with other #YangGang members, speak to other Iowans and understand their lives and challenges, and gain experience in what I essentially liken to door-to-door sales (only that you are essentially selling a vision for the future of the country to a target market that is every US citizen).

The part of my trip that sticks out the most is getting to know the other members of the #YangGang. Their passion was amazing to see, and we had new people from all walks of life joining our canvassing efforts from different parts of the country. We all shared a common bond of having a passion for Andrew Yang’s vision for the country and all had stories about how we were first captivated by his message. This bond was also why we were so easily able to wake up each day and go canvassing with someone we had never met before. This style of not knowing what location we’d be working in or who we’d be working with until the morning of was in large contrast with my analytical and detailed way of planning in advance, but I feel like the common bond I shared with the other volunteers made me hardly notice that contrast.

While I probably knocked on a few hundred doors, most doors went unanswered. However, like in sales, it’s all a numbers game. Whether it’s fair to have 5% of people that actually caucus in a state that’s 90% white have such a large say by going first is another discussion, but these numbers mean that the experience of knocking on 10 doors to no avail and getting a conversation in on the 11th door is worth it. Getting that person to look into Yang and potentially caucus with their friends could mean sealing the deal for viability in a precinct. Some caucuses in very rural precincts had a turnout of 0 in the past, meaning a single person could win it. Sometimes, the analytical part of my mind thought too much about the doors I knocked on that didn’t get answered, but something I came up with that helped was that if each Iowan is truly “worth” 1,000 Californians in the election as Yang says, talking to 1 Iowan is equivalent to talking to 1,000 Californians, and if there’s a 25% chance the doorhangers we left on unanswered doors were read, that meant the equivalent of 250 Californians were reading that doorhanger and potentially being led into the pipeline of becoming an eventual #YangGang member.

The actual conversations I had with people varied. The positive ones made my day, and the negative ones made me understand why people described the area as the most conservative in the country.

On the positive side, some were in awe that we had come from North Carolina to spread the word about Yang. I focused on understanding what matters most to them in an election, playing off the analogy of diagnosing pain points when conducting a customer discovery call in sales, and got a couple of good conversations through that by resonating with what they cared about. A few sympathetic Democrats asked what it was like to knock doors in such a Republican area, which I appreciated. One time I walked into a gas station store in a small town to talk to the cashier that wasn’t even on the list we were supposed to canvas. He had been working there for 3 years, and I tried to tell him about how I believed automation would take away jobs like cashier next unless we rewrote the rules of our economy with solutions like UBI in the most well-intentioned way I could, and he was intrigued and said he’d look into it more if I sent him more info.

On the negative side, I got a few “If you’re a Democrat, get off my property immediately!” responses, and our group was even yelled at with derogatory racial remarks when exiting a bar at night once. What kept me grounded in the midst of all of this was the campaign’s “Humanity First” values of first understanding where those people are coming from instead of immediately judging, and having a strong understanding about what I was fighting for and knowing I was becoming a better person through what I was doing. Yang is also unique in that he pulls support from so many groups that include disaffected Trump supporters and independents, which makes him easy to talk about to anyone. For the last few days, I actually canvassed with someone who voted for Trump in 2016, so I would let him try to relate to the people that said they were Trump supporters.

On the night of the caucuses, I was asked to fill in as a precinct captain for Yang at a caucus just a few hours before it was set to happen. This involved giving a speech about Yang and representing him. The caucus ended up being for 3 precincts in one of the most conservative parts of the most conservative county in the US. Even though we ultimately didn’t get much support (as we had expected) in those particular precincts, I was proud to represent Yang and present him to people that maybe have never heard of him. I later found out that the event was published in the local paper and included a picture and video of me speaking.

The Iowa caucuses didn’t exactly end up resulting in anything anyone expected with all of the controversy around the delayed and inaccurate results. While I am disappointed in Yang’s 6th place finish, I will say that if there’s anything I’ve lost any faith in, it would be the DNC and the caucus system in our political system among other things, not Yang. Yang has outlasted former governors, senators, and members of Congress, and has the least to lose in this race. He is bringing ideas to the table like UBI and automation, and although there are many that are now calling out other candidates for engaging in verbal plagiarism of Yang’s ideas after seeing their appeal to such a wide audience of voters, all of it just leads me to think that the nominee, whomever it ends up being, will be one that ends up sounding an awful lot like him.

Epilogue

I initially wrote this piece before Yang dropped out. At first I thought I would need to rewrite this piece, but then I realized that there was nothing I needed to change. As many members in the #YangGang can probably attest to, we were always fighting for something much greater than ourselves. No matter what, we always knew that Yang had made us better human beings, and made us more in touch with prominent problems and forward-thinking solutions for the future of our country. To me, Yang’s success was never going to be defined simply by whether he won the nomination, but by how many people’s lives he made better, how many people who never followed politics that he got thinking about problems our country’s future is facing, and how many years he accelerated our society towards solutions like eradication of poverty with UBI.