![]() This is not to say that it was entirely glossed over, but it did not break the mainstream media cycle as have other history-making campaigns in the past. Yang’s historic run as the first Asian-American Democratic presidential candidate to run a national campaign was largely buried either in unfavorable news coverage or none at all due to accidental and intentional omissions. For its history-making and agenda-setting nature in terms of platform and identity, the Yang 2020 campaign was much more important than what people thought and what the media reported only after he suspended his presidential campaign were Yang’s contributions to America’s national discourse acknowledged and supported. Ignored, forgotten, and handed an unusually abundant combination of irregular obstacles that the majority of other candidates running for president of the United States did not face in the 2020 cycle, impacting his chances of gaining name recognition across the nation and winning, Yang managed to introduce certain ideas to mainstream discourse and successfully build a loyal coalition of ideologically and demographically diverse voters through his platform with over 150 policies addressing some of America’s greatest issues and promoting a premise of Making America Think Harder (MATH). What could have been a unique, inspiring story about the first Asian-American Democratic candidate running on a national scale bringing fresh ideas to a crowded primary was entirely lost and replaced with a distracting narrative of “random man runs for president,” as a Washington Post headline described it. Few media outlets reported on what made Yang inherently different from the rest of the field: he was a trailblazer for Asian-Americans seeking national office. That is, in the few places he was acknowledged in the early days, entrepreneur Andrew Yang was portrayed as a robot-fearing, alarmist, fringe candidate with a gimmicky futuristic agenda promising free, no-strings-attached money to Americans of $1,000 per month, no less. Despite receiving disproportionate obstacles for a candidate of his polling level, Yang resiliently left a legacy that shaped national discourse on policy and empowered other Asian-Americans to run for office.Įmerging in a historically crowded field of Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination, the first Asian-American Democratic candidate to run for president in all 50 states went largely unnoticed for more than a year after announcing his campaign in February of 2018 and filing with the Federal Election Commission in November of 2017. ![]() ![]() When the media never fully determined how to cover the first Asian-American Democrat running for president nationally, it created a plethora of challenges for Andrew Yang’s historic campaign. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |