Presidential candidate Andrew Yang revealed on Wednesday evening that his campaign “dies” if it does not perform “well above expectations” in New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s first primary after the Iowa caucuses.
Yang urged voters in the Granite State to fight for an economy that “works for us and makes us stronger instead of serving the bottom line of these corporate masters.”
“You all have the power, only you,” Yang said. “If this does not come out of New Hampshire, it dies. And then we have four more years of stores and malls closing, of AI getting smarter, self-driving trucks hitting the highway. We cannot let this happen.”
Yang later told CBS News that his “campaign has to demonstrate a ton of strength in one of the first three states, realistically probably one of the first two states in order to successfully catch fire.”
“To me, if New Hampshire does not get behind the campaign, the odds of it making the whole way to the White House go down a lot,” Yang said, adding that “expectations are kinda low so we just have to perform well above expectations.”
Yang, who has been attracting a fair number of disaffected voters who supported President Donald Trump in 2016 at his overflow campaign rallies in the state, has said he believes he can do well in the Granite State, where he went to high school, because it holds an open primary.
Yang received 5% support in last week’s CBS News/You Gov New Hampshire poll and is in sixth place in the RealClearPolitics average of New Hampshire polls.