Andrew Yang Addresses the Young Forwardists

By Caroline Qian

On November 19th, former Presidential candidate and Forward Party co-founder Andrew Yang joined the Young Forwardists for a virtual discussion about the state of youth in 2025. Over 70 Young Forwardists from four Young Forwardists Chapters (Cornell, Rutgers, George Washington University, and Duke University) joined Yang, sharing the opportunity to converse on youth-focused issues. And here’s what Yang had to say:

Yang and the Young Forwardists kicked off the discussion with a search for the ideal mentality of a young activist in today’s climate. Here’s what we found: young Americans should be both outraged and hopeful. There should be an indignant resistance against macro-level trends such as rising unemployment among graduates, unattainable housing prices, and the destabilizing effects of AI on job markets. These crises, Yang pointed out, are either directly produced by or consistently ignored because of a dysfunctional two-party system that lacks incentives to solve them. However, in order to avoid sliding into political nihilism and be able to fight effectively for societal change, we have to simultaneously believe we ourselves have a future worth fighting for.

Yang shared another way to see it. While more than 50% of young Americans are now projected to be worse off economically than their parents, assume you are among the minority who will be better off and fight relentlessly for the majority who won’t be.

But in Forward fashion, the Young Forwardists brought the conversation to a concrete strategy. How can young people actually, productively lobby for change? Yang argued that youth energy has often been misdirected toward a two-party system resistant to transformation. Young idealists are frequently used as figureheads by both parties, but sidelined when it comes to real agenda work. Token youth. Therefore, youth political energy should be moved away from partisan politics and fully redirected toward supporting independent candidates.

When the two-party dynamic has settled into a stalemate, an independent challenger is needed to trigger actual policy movement. A particularly powerful anecdote for this situation came from an audience member who shared his struggles navigating Texas’s disability benefits system. In Texas’s current political landscape, Republican leadership is comfortably insulated against any realistic Democratic challenge. So, there is no incentive to fix most voter issues, such as disability benefits. Yang calculated that this equilibrium could only be viably disrupted by an independent candidate. 

Besides endorsing credible independent candidates, our discussion also looked at other reforms to weaken polarization and make institutions responsive again. These changes include implementing open primaries, adopting ranked-choice voting, creating nonpartisan redistricting processes, and building smaller, low-stakes community gatherings where people can encounter new political ideas without the usual tension. 

We young people face a choice. We can continue participating in a polarized two-party ecosystem that feeds on our idealism without producing results, or we can force a new political reality, where the simple presence of successful independents pressures Democrats and Republicans alike to communicate, compromise, and act.

Our talk with Yang ended with the establishment of an ambitious, but realistic, set of goals. The number one objective is outreach: more writers, more chapters, more visibility, more people at events like this one. Cultural influence often precedes electoral influence. Yang emphasized that true structural change does not begin with an independent candidate winning 51% of the vote. It begins with an independent candidate winning 5%. That’s enough to signal public demand and open political imagination. So, you heard him—let’s score that 5%.