--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm John Bickley, and I'm here with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, September 16th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Joining us now is businessman, former Democratic presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and now novelist, Andrew Yang. Andrew, thank you for joining us.
--:-- Andrew Yang: Thank you for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: So you've co-authored a new novel titled The Last Election that follows the campaign of a third party candidate who's extremely unorthodox, both sort of morally and politically, and whose success could trigger the total breakdown of the electoral system in the US. You and your co-author Stephen Marsh have described this book as obviously fiction, but you've stressed that it is frighteningly possible.
--:-- Andrew Yang: Well, thank you. I ran for president in 2020. I learned a lot. I now started the forward party. I've learned a lot. And I wanted to lay down in narrative form, a completely plausible scenario that could lead us to a contingent election, not to give that much away. But there is a provision in the Constitution that if you aren't sure who wins the electoral college or there's not a majority, it actually gets thrown to Congress in a particular way.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I know folks who are either running for president or have considered running for president. And some of the conversations I had with them were, hey, the system as it's currently designed might lead us to not great results if we were to run independently. And not to give too much away, as you said, things escalate rather quickly, hints the title, The Last Election.
--:-- Andrew Yang: Now, the question overarching this is, why did you choose this format? You've written several nonfiction books, but why did you choose to approach this topic in fiction form?
--:-- John Bickley: I thought it would be more evocative, vivid, compelling, provocative, entertaining. If I were to write an op-ed, think about who that would reach. And frankly, I think it would just kind of bounce off, be like, oh, here's another op-ed about democracy. But if you tell a complete story, then folks can see it and hopefully see some reality in it and then say, okay, this is something that maybe I should be thinking about much more deeply.
--:-- Andrew Yang: When I was running for president, my team would tell me all the time, bio, bio, bio, which is use your biography. And the reason why candidates are told that is because people get attached to stories more than anything else. Right. The idea that politics is downstream of culture, that creative works can have a broader reach and then more powerfully shape the culture in the end.
--:-- Georgia Howe: You've taken a non-traditional approach to politics. So I imagine that your hope here is correct. Well this book is being shopped right now in Hollywood for screenwrites. If you can imagine it hitting everyone's Netflix queue, might that open some eyes?
--:-- Andrew Yang: And I've tried three nonfiction books, a presidential campaign, countless social media posts, a weekly newsletter. So a novel seemed like a natural next step because different people receive messages in different ways.
--:-- Andrew Yang: As to the premise of the book that this next election, the 2024 election, will be our last, do you actually believe that's a possibility in the next couple of elections?
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, I do. And I'm not alone. I think the last I saw, 64% of Americans are concerned that our electoral system may not hold up. And they're right. I mean, right now, two-thirds of Americans want there to be a new alternative politically. About 49% say we're independent. And the two-party system continues to lose ground, particularly with young people.
--:-- Andrew Yang: So if you forecast over the next 4, 8, 12 years, where does this go? In your book, we see a lot of commentary on the two-party system, along with a powerful corporate media that, when threatened, retaliates in all kinds of destructive ways. Can you unpack that idea for us?
--:-- Andrew Yang: Yeah, the corporate media is itself now something of a partisan affair, where 69% of Democrats believe in corporate media, only 15% of Republicans do. And you can see very consistently that the media will reinforce and buttress certain candidates and omit and attack others. The dynamics do play out very differently in each party. But it's almost like a set of antibodies attacking an interloper or something that's from outside the system.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The prospect of a civil war hangs over your novel, but do you see another way forward, a peaceful way for there to be a stronger sense of unity regained in the country?
--:-- Andrew Yang: Now, right now we are sliced up into blue and red zones and most of our votes don't matter. When you think about the presidential race, who's going to decide it? 250,000 voters in four or five states that are probably not the states you live in. So the rest of us are being told to vote harder, to donate money. We're going to spend billions of dollars beating each other up. And in each cycle, more and more of us are going to get frustrated.
--:-- Andrew Yang: So how the heck do you reduce polarization and resolve real problems in this system? Our current system is not designed to do it. Our current system is designed to incite and inflame us and eventually disintegrate into something very, very destructive. I mean, someone asked me what I think is going to happen in American life. And I say the most likely scenario is we're going to slump into authoritarianism.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, is there another path? The better path would be for us to raise our hands and say, okay, it's ridiculous to have only two major parties in a country of 330 million individuals, and that our founding fathers would be shocked and stunned that we've allowed this to happen in our political system and that we should be moving towards three, four, five, six major parties and then have shifting coalitions like Madison predicted would be necessary as opposed to two factions that stay locked in place and just become nastier and more and more antagonistic
--:-- Andrew Yang: Looking back through American history, we have seen parties morph, reform, some of them collapse, and they're replaced by something that's maybe adjacent. We saw that with the rise of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Do you not see that as a potentiality, a major reform movement in one of the two parties, maybe both, or an offshoot party?
--:-- Andrew Yang: Oh, I love the example you cite. Abraham Lincoln winning the presidential election in 1860 in a four-candidate race with 39% of the vote in the Republican Party, which was at that point five or six years old. So it's not like the Whigs came and reformed themselves. It's not the Republicans came together and then ended up winning in a fractious four-candidate race with less than 50% of the vote.
--:-- Andrew Yang: Now, some of the things that are playing out before our eyes are going to resemble that more and more, but it's going to take a new popular political movement to displace what is currently being offered. And that's what I'm doing with the Forward Party. But I love the example because I think it is very appropriate.
--:-- Georgia Howe: About your forward party, you know, obviously your novel does have a political and ideological agenda. Third parties have failed to gain much traction in recent decades. Do you think your party is a viable party going forward and why?
--:-- Andrew Yang: So here's the rub on third parties, is that the two parties have set it up so it's very, very difficult, but there are major openings in the system. Of the 500,000 locally elected officials around the country, up to 70% are uncontested or uncompetitive in any given cycle, and up to 5% to 10% are unfilled. So the forward party, maybe one to two years old now, has 35 state legislators, mayors, district attorneys, county executives who are aligned with us. We're going to be well past 100 by next year. We think 500 shortly thereafter.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Because if you can imagine mayors and school board members, often they don't want to apologize for one party or the other. And if they can be given a new home that actually will support them, they say, sign me up.
--:-- Andrew Yang: So that is one major opportunity that the forward party is growing into every day. The other major issue is the presidential, which is not something forward party is doing this cycle, but an organization that I'm sure your listeners know pretty well, no labels is looking at it. And there is a lot of dissatisfaction with a potential Biden Trump rematch.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Yeah, about that. Manchin this week signaled that he might really be interested in running for no labels as a presidential candidate. Do you think that they would actually have a chance this election cycle and somebody like Manchin in particular? Could he be competitive?
--:-- Andrew Yang: So if you're Joe Manchin, your choices are run for Senate reelection in West Virginia, where Trump won by 38 points last cycle against a popular Republican governor, and Trump is on the ballot. So that's door number one that Democrats are pushing you to go through. And then that next door is run as the Abraham Lincoln type unifying presidential figure If you a 75 year senator which do you choose I going to suggest that he very seriously considering door number two and we may see an 1860s style three, four, or five candidate race as early as 2024.
--:-- Georgia Howe: To that question of a third-party candidate, as we mentioned, one of the lead characters of your book is such a candidate, and he's very much unorthodox, including morally, in terms of how he presents himself to the public. He deliberately highlights his sort of deviance, which is coupled with this very technocratic approach to his campaign. They're looking at what moves the needle, including shock value. Is the message here that this is progress, or is this actually the disintegration of campaigns that you're highlighting? Which is it?
--:-- Andrew Yang: I think that you're going to see more and more unconventional candidates run, and they're going to get stronger and stronger over time. You could point out that Donald Trump was a very unorthodox candidate. Most people didn't think he was going to win either the Republican nomination and the general, and he did both. I believe that he's well positioned to certainly win the Republican nomination again and win in the general again. And these are things that a lot of conventional people would have seen as impossible not that long ago.
--:-- Andrew Yang: So we're in a position now where more and more seemingly improbable or impossible things are going to happen in American politics. Some of them you're going to like, some of them you're really not going to like. And the question is, what comes next? How can we modernize our democracy so it actually responds to us, our families, our communities, and our needs?
--:-- Andrew Yang: Presidential elections right now are one of the very very few pressure release valves we have in american life because 90 of your congressional districts are totally uncompetitive in the general so if you're upset at what's happening or not happening voting for president is one of the only paths you have and because of that you're going to see more and more outsider candidates running it's one of the things we wanted to present in the last election because i think it's here to stay
--:-- Georgia Howe: One last question. There have been a lot of media and political figures sounding the alarm over potential unrest, including violence in either direction, whichever the outcome in the 2024 election. We have seen riots at times in our history and definitely in the last few years, including J6 and the series of George Floyd riots. Do you see any of that ahead of us in 2024?
--:-- Andrew Yang: It's one reason why we wrote this book, because I'm deeply concerned about the disintegration of American politics and what that's going to mean in terms of civil unrest and potential violence. I'm a numbers guy and political stress is right now at multi-generational highs. American parents would rather you date someone of a different race or religion than of the other party. I mean, think about that for a second. So we should be concerned. My co-author on the last election actually wrote a nonfiction book called The Next Civil War. He's concerned, I'm concerned, we should all be concerned.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, a lot of us are concerned, but I guess to quote Lincoln, America's better angels tend to win out. So there's hope yet.
--:-- Andrew Yang: Andrew, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- John Bickley: That was businessman and author Andrew Yang. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
