At the same time, celebrity status and Twitter buzz do not always translate into votes in New York Cynthia Nixon gained a lot of attention but not enough voters in her failed run for governor in 2018.
Mr. Yang will also be jockeying for endorsements along with more than a dozen candidates, some of whom have been courting elected officials and unions for years in anticipation of Mayor Bill de Blasios exit next year because of term limits.
Two candidates have been mainstays in New York politics: Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Scott Stringer, the city comptroller. Others are positioning themselves as outsiders, including Raymond J. McGuire, a business executive, and Maya Wiley, a lawyer and former MSNBC analyst.
And on Thursday, Representative Max Rose, who lost his re-election bid last month and was said to be interested in joining the mayors race, registered a mayoral campaign committee with the citys Campaign Finance Board.
The pandemic has reshaped the mayors race, and the candidates are all trying to argue that they are the best qualified to help the city recover. The field is also perhaps the most diverse ever, including several Black and Latino candidates.
Mr. Yang, who was born in upstate New York, has spent most of his adult life living in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. He gained attention on the campaign trail with his MATH slogan Make America Think Harder and amassed 1.8 million followers on Twitter and nearly $40 million in campaign contributions.
His campaign to give every American adult $1,000 a month as part of a universal basic income mandate could be even more popular after many people relied on the federal stimulus to help survive the economic losses of the pandemic, said Susan Kang, a political-science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.read more
Is Andrew Yang Running for Mayor? All Signs Point to Yes
