Andrew Yang: I was glad to be blacklisted by Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign

I recently read an advance copy of Andrew Yang's new book. Here's my review.

For decades, Andrew Yang identified as a Democrat. But the entrepreneur who ran for president in 2020 is also one of the few politicians brave enough to criticise the party for its mistakes.

That has occasionally made him unpopular.

After President Biden’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump in June 2024, Yang launched a “pass the torch” campaign, encouraging the president to quit the race. When he finally did so, Yang endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, for the White House.

In return? Harris’s team blocked him, Yang claims in a new book.

“Kamala Harris’s campaign had put me on a list of people not to use or refer to, due to the fact that I’d ‘crossed the line’ in my disrespect of Joe Biden,” he writes. “So dumb. I was kind of glad, to be honest, because if they’d asked me to do something, I would have felt honor bound to comply, but I don’t know how convincing I would have been.”

To be fair, he had by this point left the Democrats to form the Forward Party in 2021. But he says that Harris’s team’s approach “was a sign of a culture problem” for the party.

“If you’re trying your best to win, who cares what I said four weeks ago?” he writes. “Use anyone who might move votes.”

It is one of many criticisms in the memoir, Hey Yang! Where’s My Thousand Bucks?, in which he documents his personal rise in business and politics, and the Democrats’ fall in 2024 to a second age of Trump.

Yang writes that Harris and her team were negligent about building and safeguarding their coalition of voters, especially among men without college degrees, even though “about two thirds of Americans don’t have a college degree”. Trump targeted this cohort by combining “three previously separate modes of communication: politics, pro wrestling and comedy”, which “simply reach more people across more platforms”.

‘Trump projects messianic vibes’

Yang calls Trump “a world-class insult comic” who channels the language of pro wrestling to advance his narrative.

“Trump projects messianic vibes: I’m great, I’m the best, I am one of one,” he writes. “I watched a lot of pro wrestling as a kid, and the wrestlers were often very self-centered and braggadocious in their communication: ‘I’m the best damn champion there ever was.’

“Pro wrestlers literally talk in the third person in order to emphasize how great they are,” he adds. “And they come complete with nicknames like ‘The Great One’ or ‘The Showstopper’ that they bestow upon themselves.”

For Trump, “this self-hype does serve a purpose. It gives off a feeling of confidence and energy. It’s also more individualistic, which appeals to certain people, particularly men. Note that pro wrestling shows are among the highest-rated shows week after week, much higher than, say, cable news programs. Democrats have never understood this or had any response to it.”

Yang also reminds readers that Elon Musk endorsed him in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but the party washed its hands of people like Yang and Musk and also Robert F Kennedy Jr, who spoke to Harris’s team to discuss his possible endorsement of her before he endorsed Donald Trump and later joined his cabinet. But Harris’s people wouldn’t even entertain the discussion.

Anyone who falls foul of party orthodoxy is persona non grata, Yang argues.

The same is true of left-leaning media, he writes. He notes that he was a CNN contributor “getting paid something pretty significant — about $125,000 a year — to be exclusive to them” but was cast out after he registered as an independent in 2021.

When “the news came out that I was no longer a Democrat”, he writes, “my agent called me during this time and said, ‘Hey, CNN is rescinding its offer to you. Apparently, they don’t want to be seen as supporting a third party.’

“I responded, ‘Wouldn’t that make me more valuable to them, not less, in that I’d be an objective voice that isn’t tied up in one party or the other?’”

Yang adds: “It felt like rejection from a company that I thought really liked me.”

And it’s here where I should make a disclaimer. I worked as a former Democratic operative for years, raising millions for various candidates, before publicly turning against the party in 2024 because I also felt it had lost touch with the average American.

That’s when Yang reached out to me cold over Twitter.

He hinted that there were many opportunities at his new Forward Party, but I didn’t pursue it. Still, I appreciate how willing Yang is to reach across the aisle, mend fences and be a bridge builder in left-leaning politics.

‘Odds of me running in 2028 are high’

The Democratic Party needs more of this if it wants to beat the Republicans in the midterms this year. Even though the GOP is unpopular with Americans, even less popular are the Democrats, who have lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in 30 states that measure voter registration by party.

In his book, Yang teases another shot at the White House, noting “the odds of my running again are high”. And while in 2020 Yang was the outsider who campaigned on what was then considered a niche issue — the concept of Universal Basic Income — he might have a chance in 2028. Long before AI was a household issue, Yang argued that the “robots were coming to take our jobs” and that the government needed to start paying its citizens a living wage of $1,000 a month.

Two years from now, Yang’s message will be even more potent. And though he has cut himself off from the institutional support of Democratic PACs and the party’s media allies, he seems optimistic about his chances.

“I like people. I love the country and those within it,” he writes. “And I have some ideas for how to campaign better next time. For example, imagine if we could vote on our smartphone in a primary that included everyone, including Independents?”

He continues: “Let’s just say that I’m constantly evaluating, and there are different ways to make good things happen. I have an uncommon privilege of being sixty seconds away, sort of like actor Nicolas Cage, who donated to my presidential campaign.”

At that, he nods at his last unsuccessful run for president, and says: “How did I not win?”

This article was originally published in The Times

Evan Barker is a former Democratic campaign operative and the author of the upcoming book Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, available now for pre-order. Follow her Substack and on X @Evanwch