This archive report was first published on 3 May 2021.
As the New York City mayoral election heats up, one candidate has managed to capture the attention of the media and the public alike: Andrew Yang.
Yang, a former presidential candidate, has been making waves with his Twitter controversies, including a series of mildly misguided enthusiasm for bodegas and subways.
According to a recent survey, 79% of Democratic primary voters who get their news from Twitter view Yang's campaign positively.
However, Yang's campaign is not without controversy. His top staffers work for a consulting firm headed by Bradley Tusk, a former aide to Mayor Bloomberg and the disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.
Tusk has steered Yang toward a broad-strokes, pro-business centrism and kept him out of the other candidates' competition for the left wing of the primary electorate.
Yang's campaign has also been criticized for its lack of experience in city politics. He has never even voted in a mayoral election, and his promise to palliate dystopian, robot-driven social collapse by handing out $1,000 a month to a displaced citizenry doesn't make sense in city budgeting.
Despite these criticisms, Yang remains a popular candidate among some New Yorkers. As he told The New York Times, 'A lot of New Yorkers are excited about someone who will come in and just try to figure out, like what the best approach to a particular problem is, like free of a series of obligations to existing special interests.'
