Andrew Yang: After quitting the presidential race, will he run for mayor of New York?

For some, there are few jobs as appealing as chief executive of America’s biggest city

(REUTERS)

After two dismal performances in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, entrepreneur Andrew Yang has dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. It makes for a quiet end to a campaign in which he spent tens of millions of dollars and successfully vaulted himself into the national spotlight despite his paucity of political experience.

Along the way, he injected some big ideas into the mainstream of Democratic debate — chief among them a universal basic income — and roused a movement of supporters big enough and enthusiastic enough to earn themselves a nickname: The Yang Gang.

But in the end, it wasn’t enough to make him president. So what next?

No sooner had Yang announced he was winding things up than the New York Post reported “Democratic consultants and other operatives throughout the Big Apple were buzzing” about his potential as a candidate for mayor of the nation’s largest city.

Yang hasn’t yet said he’s running — but it’s never too soon to weigh up what he’d be getting into.

The mayoralty of New York is one of the biggest jobs in the US. Taken alone, the city’s population would make it the twelfth largest state in the union, with the third-largest GDP (after California and Texas). For an ambitious former tech executive whose political instincts are a blend of the idealistic and the technocratic, it’s possibly the ideal job.

Assuming Yang ran for the job as a Democrat, he would have to compete in a primary against the unpopular two-term incumbent, Bill de Blasio, who also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this year (he fared far worse than Yang, dropping out long before the primaries began).

When he was first elected in 2013, de Blasio was heralded as something of a standard-bearer for liberals, but he is now deeply unpopular for various reasons in a very liberal city — meaning he could be very vulnerable to a challenge from a high-profile “disruptive” candidate, particularly one able to attract the kind of media attention Yang has received.

Yang would be following in the footsteps of several towering figures in local (and indeed national) history. Among them are Ed Koch, who oversaw the city during the crime wave of the 1980s, and Rudy Giuliani, now Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, who is well known for using the ‘broken windows’ policy on crime, and famously took to the streets in the aftermath of 9/11.

But most conspicuous of all is another of this year’s Democratic presidential contenders. Michael Bloomberg succeeded Giuliani as mayor, initially as a Republican and then as an Independent; he reigned for 12 years, extending the office’s term limit in order to do so.

If Bloomberg’s campaign succeeds, it’ll might make the mayor’s office all the more tempting for those who, like Yang, probably still harbour dreams of being president. Then again, it’s not quite that simple.

Giuliani too tried to leverage his record as mayor to win the presidency; his campaign turned out to be an unmitigated (and very expensive) failure.

And as his presidential campaign ramps up, Bloomberg has found himself in hot water over his mayoral record: his former enthusiastic defence of stop-and-frisk police tactics has revolted much of the Democratic base, and, with a long way to go till the nomination is settled, he will struggle to shake the issue off.

So if Yang is pondering whether to run for mayor, he will have to ask himself why. If it’s because he thinks it might make him president someday, perhaps he should think twice.