Andrew Yang drops out of the 2020 Democratic Primary race.

Andrew Yang at a campaign event. Politico/Getty.

Andrew Yang is dropping out of the 2020 Democratic Primary race after a poor showing in Iowa and a likely bad finish in New Hampshire. Politico. Yang ran a viral campaign that promises universal basic income which would provide every American with $1000 a month. However, the campaign did very poorly once actual voting happened with a 1% finish in Iowa and a poor showing in early returns from New Hampshire. Yang said he didn't want to drag things out even though he was proud of what his campaign accomplished. 

My Comment:

I suspected that Yang was on the verge of dropping out last week when he fired much of his staff. I said back then that was a sure sign that his campaign was on the way out. A 1% finish is not going to translate into success even if he had done better in New Hampshire, which the early exit polling did not bear out. Continuing now would just be wasting his donor's money. 

I do think that Yang deserves some credit. His campaign was pretty effective at non-traditional campaigning and he got his message out pretty well. He had a lot of viral support on websites like Twitter and 4chan and his UBI proposal was at the very least unique. I think Yang should be praised for at least popularizing a new idea that is different than the status quo. 

But why did his campaign not succeed? I think part of it was the demographics of his supporters. Yang had most of his support from extremely online types. But the two early states did not have a lot of online tech-bros that Yang got most of his support from. The people that like Yang just don't live in Iowa or New Hampshire. 

Some of it might of been astroturf as well. Yang was pretty good at getting people to post on places like 4chan and making it seem like he was super popular but a lot of that support evaporated as the money started to run out. I think a lot of his support was ironic at best. 

I also think that Yang's debate performance was fair at best. He had some pretty bad debates, most notably the first one where he flubbed an easy question about his UBI proposal. He got better as he went along but I never thought he was aggressive enough. 

Of course the DNC and the debate moderators did not help Yang at all. He consistently had the least time to speak in any of the debates and just wasn't given the kind of support and media coverage the other candidates were. Though they weren't out and out biased as they are against the Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard campaigns, they never treated Yang like a serious candidate. 

Either way though, I think it's time for the Democratic field to narrow. We still have a lot of people running that don't have much of a chance. I know Gabbard is running for moral reasons but anyone who isn't Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttgieg should probably drop out. And that includes people like Amy Klobucher and Michael Bloomberg who are still polling ok but have no realistic chance. Like Yang I think anyone outside of the top four are just wasting their donor's money, or in Bloomberg's case, his own money.