[joshuaellinger]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned good old H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who made Bill Clinton president in 1992. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot)

Perot peeled off enough libertarian voters from the Republicans to enable a Democratic victory. It odd looking back at him. He was not a proto-Trump exactly but he ran against the NAFTA free trade agreement in a way that looks a lot like how Trump ran against shipping all heavy industry to China.

My first reaction was that Yang is going to splinter the Democratic coalition thus enable Trump to get a second term. But maybe he can pull moderates away from the Republican side (especially in Arizona).

After looking at it for a second time, it looks really out-of-touch with reality and will not have a significant impact. Political polarization isn't a product of a broken political system. People are angry for a damn good reason. It's a reflection of all of the economic gains of the last 40 years going to the billionaires.

Someone has got to take control of the country back from the 0.1% like FDR did. That someone will likely be an unknown politician in the Democratic party who makes them pay for the costs of addressing climate crisis. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.

[pharke]

I may be misunderstanding this bit of history, but wasn't part of FDR's success due to his strong connections among the wealthy and powerful? He was essentially an insider who decided to use a lot of the knowledge he had to reform parts of the system. If we were to have a modern equivalent it would probably be someone from within the 0.1%.

[spyckie2]

> We will support candidates for office who align with our core principles so that we can reform the system and make it more responsive to the American people. This means that we will support Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - as well as candidates identifying themselves as Forward Party members.

Yang definitely hates Trump. He's not about to put him into power any time soon.

Yang is more about wielding influence on political discussion and trying to move the country away from incumbency than anything else. I really don't foresee anyone building a campaign on the forward party, but I can see a democrat or republican leveraging the forward party's ideas in the right environment to get endorsements from it to win in tight elections.