Andrew Yang, whose call for universal basic income brought him national attention in the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential field, appears to be running for mayor of New York City.
Current Mayor Bill de Blasio is term-limited and unable to run again.
Yang filed his official forms Wednesday, according to the New York Daily News.
City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan and former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire are among the names already in the November 2021 contest.
A report in the New York Post said Yang would make his final decision next month. The tech entrepreneur did not make any public statements about his candidacy, but offered a comment on Twitter that next year would be “epic.”
2021 is going to be epic.
— Andrew Yang??? (@AndrewYang) December 23, 2020
Even before filing, Yang appeared to be popular with New Yorkers.
A poll from Education Reform Now Advocacy released Monday put Yang at the top with 17 percent support, one percentage point ahead of Adams. Other candidates were in single digits.
The poll was conducted among 755 likely Democratic primary voters and has a margin of error of +/- 3.6 percentage points.
Yang also topped a Slingshot Strategies survey of 1,000 Democratic voters who said they are likely to vote in the mayoral primary in June, according to the New York Post.
The survey, which had a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points, put Yang at the top with 20 percent support and Adams second at 14 percent.
Yang “has a lot of name recognition, so it makes it more difficult for people without that, Fordham University political scientist Christina Greer told the Daily News.
Yang’s universal basic income plan proposed sending Americans $1,000 a month.
He recently said the Democratic Party needs to focus less on cultural issues and more on economic ones, according to Fox News.
“I would say, ‘Hey! I’m running for president!’ to a truck driver, retail worker, waitress in a diner. And they would say, ‘What party?’ And I’d say ‘Democrat’ and they would flinch like I said something really negative or I had just turned another color or something like that,” Yang said in November.
“And there’s something deeply wrong when working-class Americans have that response to a major party that theoretically is supposed to be fighting for them,” he went on. “So you have to ask yourself, what has the Democratic Party been standing for in their minds?
“And in their minds, the Democratic Party, unfortunately, has taken on this role of the coastal urban elites who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving their way of life that has been declining for years.”