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Jonathan Herzog: His Plan To Get 30k Votes to Beat Jerry Nadler for NY Congressional Seat, YangGang Strategy and Freedom Dividend
18 May 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, nerds. My guest today is Jonathan Herzog, and he was one of Andrew Yang's first 10 members of his presidential campaign.
Chapter 2: How did Jonathan Herzog get involved in Andrew Yang's campaign?
In fact, Yang tapped Herzog to move to Iowa to launch the Yang strategy in that state. Now, obviously, Yang ended up dropping out. But in this interview with Jonathan Herzog, we talk about how Yang built his early strategy. How did the Yang Gang get so strong on Twitter to the point where they can make their own hashtags trend? And other insights to the early stages of that campaign.
More importantly, we jump into Herzog's journey back to New York where he threw his own hat in the race. Last year, August 2019, he said, I am running for the congressional seat, the 10th congressional seat here in New York, which makes up a lot of the West Side and other parts of the area. But he's not going to have an easy run at it. He's running against 15-term congressional powerhouse.
Jerry Nadler took the seat there in 92, which I believe was two years before Jonathan was born. If Jonathan gets the seat, he'd be the youngest ever at just 25 years old. He's hoping to run and get elected on things like a freedom dividend, $1,000 a month to every American, a data bill of rights to keep consumers and have us keep control of our data.
and maybe tamper down some of the centralization of wealth associated with these multi-billionaires that run these corporations that use our data. Also, we jump into what blockchain could look like in the future, but none of this is going to be easy. As Precinct has 720,000 total potential voters, a very few... amount will actually vote.
He needs 30,000 votes to win on the primary on June 23rd, but it's not going to be easy. He's fighting nasty lawsuits, a lot of courts, media disinformation campaigns, and more. So the question is, can Jonathan Herzog get 30,000 votes and win, taking down powerhouse Jerry Nadler?
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Chapter 3: What strategies did the Yang Gang use to build their online presence?
Well, let's hear from the man himself, Jonathan Herzog. So Jonathan, I mean, Iowa for a guy that's at Harvard, they seem like two worlds apart. I mean, did you spend meaningful time in Iowa prior to moving there for Yang?
So the answer was a no. The first time I had set foot was with Yang just a couple of weeks prior. But the reality was, to your point about you and your work and your audience of entrepreneurs and builders, is it's really like we actually called it from the inside. We put together this Instagram just to kind of be... early employees called startup politics, because that's exactly what it was.
You know, we were wearing 50 different hats, doing 50 different functions, doing the job of 50 different people, essentially. And so everyone, you know, to your previous question, came from all walks of life with no political background, just because the urgency and the strength of the vision and the need in that moment was so strong.
So paint that picture for me. Again, you, you show up in Iowa.
Chapter 4: What challenges does Jonathan Herzog face in his congressional run?
Are you also besides your own precinct trying to recruit other precinct leaders? What'd you guys end up with penetration wise? Did you have a precinct leader for all 1600 precincts?
So this goes back to, again, the fall of 2018. Now, at this point, Nathan, basically, I think we were one of maybe a handful of people who had declared in a field that ended up growing to 29, the largest field in, I think, Democratic presidential history. So people you think of like Kamala Harris, Kerry Kyrsten et al. had not even declared at that point. So I remember...
It was Yang, myself, and another team member, and we were at the Progress Iowa event in December of 2018. It was Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, who had not formally declared because everyone sort of declares an exploratory committee or they share some public speech indicating their interest. Pete Buttigieg, Jeff Merkley, and maybe one other at that event And
right after we got our first 1% in a national CNN poll. And I remember driving back in the car with Andrew. And again, this was the scrappiest campaign by any measure. But he's just elated after this 1% at the end of December for 2018 because he says, we have found product market fit.
We spent a year and a half building the foundation, getting this really businessman and entrepreneur from anonymity. and Rogan was on the calendar for early of 2019 and Um, yeah, it was really at that moment where, um, we said we, we found product market fit.
And so Muhant has kind of laid out these five distinct phases of the campaign mapping out, uh, the, you know, almost three years of its progression. But at that point there were no such thing as precinct captains. There were no such thing as even other team members in, in, in Iowa. Interesting. The like day in the life essentially looked on average, you know, I would get up,
let's say 5 a.m., drive three hours to a local union hall, church, school, democratic club meeting.
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Chapter 5: What is the Freedom Dividend and how does it relate to Herzog's campaign?
There might be eight to 10 candidates, again, depending, you know, let's say early. At the same meeting? Yeah, yeah. So you basically have these like cattle calls. So Amy Klobuchar would speak, Pete Buttigieg would speak, Eric Swalwell. Again, there were literally 26 different campaigns at that point. And then I would get up and speak, make the Yang pitch,
You know, get people to sign up, hand out swag, answer questions. you know, speak to some of the press and then pack up shop, drive three hours, do the same thing in a different city halfway across the state. And that's what building person to person counted the county event by event looked like in the early days.
So why did Buttigieg, you know, you, I think Yang finished six in Iowa, 8,900 votes, but Buttigieg just did so well in Iowa. What did you, I mean, you must've come to these cattle, your point about these cattle calls, you must've come across his people as you were doing this. What were they doing differently than everyone else that allowed him to finish so strongly in Iowa? Yeah.
Yeah, so there are a lot of factors in terms of the nitty-gritty of the caucus process. So having been a precinct captain myself, what you saw was on the first alignment, so there's two alignments in the process, right? People kind of gather and they self-organize into different clusters in the room, declaring who their favorite candidate is.
And then they have a certain 15% viability threshold to allocate the delegates. the winnings of the state. Now, after people lock in to who their first candidate is, people have the choice and the chance to realign, to say, well, oh, my candidate wasn't viable. You know, let's say you supported Tom Steyer. In our case, he wasn't viable. So then his... God bless him.
So his handful of folks got to decide where they go to realign. So you have the final count after the second round. And what you saw is Pete Buttigieg had the most significant gains. He was more people's second choice than almost anyone.
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Chapter 6: How does Jonathan Herzog plan to gather 30,000 votes?
And so he may not have had the vast majority on the first round, but there were many, many people who said, I'm happy enough with Pete. and so realigned to him in the second round, which was the final count.
But again, these are the sort of nitty-gritty of the politics of the night of a caucus, and really the kind of sausage is made in the weeks and months leading up to that with the press and with the debates and endorsements and so on.
did he do something in the weeks and months leading up to that to make sure he, I mean, was that the strategy to be the best second choice once all these other people filtered out that didn't meet the threshold?
Chapter 7: What legal battles is Herzog currently facing in his campaign?
So again, ultimately, you know, this, this didn't bear out in a, in a win in the primary process. And so we're kind of seeing a whole reevaluation of the Iowa caucus as this decisive factor. It really came into our consciousness because of,
Jimmy Carter sort of coming out of nowhere and being bolstered by it and also with Barack Obama And being able to prove to voters in later states in the process particularly voters of color that you can bring The Iowa voters around you so, you know in this case it ended up being that neither the winner of the Iowa caucus or
nor the New Hampshire primary, nor the Nevada caucus ended up becoming the presumptive nominee. And it just shows you how hard it is to extrapolate from any of these events because we're running against Donald Trump. And so there are a lot of other factors at play. But certainly Pete had an incredible ground game in Iowa that led many, many people to be comfortable with him as president.
as their second choice or what have you.
Math, make America think again. Hello, nerds and Yang Gang and Blue Hat. I mean, one thing you have to have in today's political world is a very strong online organic game. You see some people argue potential candidates, it's bot driven. Others, you can tell it's truly organic.
I want to know what you guys, because this is relevant to someone building a business or to someone running for candidacy. How did you guys build the infrastructure to basically allow anything Yang wanted to trend on Twitter to trend almost everywhere?
Well, so what's incredible, Nathan, is that, again, our candidate literally started fundraising from his Gmail address book. This is a guy who, you know, first generation American, son of immigrants, had started out his career in entrepreneurship. His businesses had flopped until one took off. And then the lion's share of his career was building Venture for America to help
promote entrepreneurship in cities that needed a boost after the financial crisis. We didn't really have a whole network of connections and donors and capital and relationships to work off of. Really, the innovation was born out of the necessity where many of the people who were drawn to Yang and to the campaign,
came to it from, again, these long-form, substantive one, two, three-hour podcasts where we would dive into the data and the fact that American life expectancy had declined for three years consecutively before Trump, before COVID.
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Chapter 8: How does Herzog view the role of automation in the economy?
It's not about one person or anyone in particular. It's about having a wave of freedom Democrats, a wave of people committed to rebuilding, revitalizing, having a culture of entrepreneurship. Our generation is starting new businesses at the lowest rates over the past nearly half century. So here's the step by step of what you got to do. So in Andrew's case, you know, he was running for president.
Well, do yours, because the young people listening are going to be more likely to start at a local level like you are. They're going to want to walk in your footsteps.
Gotcha. Cool. So I went down the list and I Googled, like, what are the things you have to do or have to be to run for Congress? So you have to be 25 by the day you're inaugurated. I'm turning 25 on May 25th, which is a half a year or so before inauguration. Check. You have to have been...
a u.s citizen or resident of the state for at least i think about seven years i'm a born and raised american born and raised my entire life in the district check great um and then there's one other you know depending on where you're running i'm running in new york you have to like be an actual like resident in that particular district by the inauguration again check great
Then the process goes, I literally Google like, how do, how do you file to run for Congress? So there's FEC form one, there's FEC form two, and now there's some forks in the road because there's some more problem solving. So you have to have a campaign checking account. You have to be able to collect money somehow. Um, so then you're like, where do I go open a bank account?
Um, it turns out in New York, There's a bank called Amalgamated Bank, which is a non-for-profit and will open you a checking account very easily. But I did not know this. And so I went from Citibank to Bank of America to so on and so forth, got stonewalled and gaslit and so on and so forth. Why?
They don't want to open an account for you for a political campaign?
Not for a challenger to a Democratic incumbent.
Really?
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