What to know about the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival
- The Aspen Ideas Festival is hosted by the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization founded in 1949 that is dedicated to “change through dialogue, leadership, and action to help solve the most important challenges facing the United States and the world.”
- Thursday's speakers included Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, author Curtis Sittenfeld, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
- NBCUniversal News Group is the media partner of the Aspen Ideas Festival.
That's a wrap on Yang. Tomorrow: Rethinking the U.S.-China relationship
And that’s a wrap.
Yang was clear that he’s not running for president next year, but he left the door a little open on his political future. For now, he’s all in on the Forward Party.
We’ll be back tomorrow morning to cover a panel about how the U.S. could rethink its relationship with China, hosted by NBC News President Rebecca Blumenstein.
Yang makes his pitch for changing the Electoral College
In response to an audience question, Yang gave his pitch for how to change the Electoral College while acknowledging it would be very hard to get rural states on board with eliminating it.
Yang said that instead of allocating electors through the Electoral College, states should allocate them proportionally, much like Maine and Nebraska do.
Forward could get hundreds of local officials elected in next 12 months, Yang says
In terms of success for Forward, Yang said he’s focused on the number of Forward or Forward-affiliated officials elected in the next 12 months. He noted that people can support the Forward Party and remain Democrats or Republicans.
Yang said that he thinks Forward could “get into the hundreds” of local officials and that he hopes to grow the party’s budget.
U.S. needs a Cabinet-level secretary focused on AI, Yang says
Yang said there should be federal regulations for AI models, licenses for models with more than a million users, a Cabinet-level secretary concentrated on AI and a global AI body.
He also warned that AI development is accelerating rapidly and that regulators need to catch up fast.
“These models are just getting stronger and stronger every single moment,” he said.
Yang says Forward Party is focused more on making connections than policy
Yang said the Forward Party does not necessarily push particular policies and instead looks to empower local leaders to make their own decisions based on what’s best for their communities.
“We want to let the people that know best lead in that direction, and the folks in the community generally know best what to do,” Yang said.
He added that he hoped the Forward Party could be a place where people who were anti-abortion rights but also concerned about the environment could find people they disagreed with on some things while agreeing on others.
“When people ask me what policies Forward stands for, Forward stands for reconnecting the people of this country to your elected representatives,” Yang said. “They can deliver what you want.”
Yang calls two-party system 'susceptible to authoritarianism'
Yang said the two-party system “is uniquely susceptible to authoritarianism.”
He also pointed to warnings from some of the Founding Fathers about a two-party system.
Yang said ranked-choice voting and more parties would help address creeping authoritarianism.
“The way out of this is not doubling down on partisanship and polarization,” he said. “It’s trying to get us to see ourselves as Americans.”
Yang indicates he won't run in 2024, says Biden shouldn't, either
Yang indicated he's unlikely to run for president in 2024 while suggesting Biden should drop out.
“I’m a math guy. And the math says that if I run, I probably increase the chances of Trump winning, and that’s the opposite of what I’m here to do,” he said.
Yang noted that some surveys show a lack of enthusiasm for both Trump and Biden, and he said he thinks Biden should step down and have someone else run on the Democratic ticket.
“This is someone who voted for Joe Biden campaign,” Yang said about himself. “But I do not think that this is the right approach.”
He later said that he would “never say never” about running for office again but that it’s not his current focus.
U.S. politicians are too focused on primaries, Yang says
Yang said the U.S. political system has created a system in which many politicians focus solely on their primaries, meaning they have to appeal to only a sliver of the broader population.
“It’s because their audience is not you. Their audience is that 10 to 12% of the most ideological voters in their party that they need to keep happy,” he said. “That’s the only way they can lose their job.”
He added that part of the challenge of starting a third party is that it requires a distributed effort. “If you start a national party, it turns out you’re starting 51 organizations, because you have a party in each state and then you have the national,” he said.
Yang says the Forward Party is more focused on local races
Asked whether he would run for president again, Yang joked, “Apparently I have another 40 years,” a reference to the ages of both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
Yang said he and the Forward Party are more focused on local races, noting that surveys have found that many Americans want a third party. He also pointed to the mostly full ballroom of people who came to hear him speak. “You’re all what I call at least a little bit third-party curious,” he joked, getting some laughs from the room.
Yang said the parties are often not trying to run against each other in races they don’t think are competitive. “If you go to rural areas, it’s not like the Dems are there saying, ‘Oh, we’re gonna make it happen.’ And the reverse is true, and in a lot of big cities, it’s not like the Republicans are there,” he said. “I’m going to suggest that that’s a recipe for bad policy, a lack of accountability and a lot of frustration,” he added.
There are now 15 local officials who identify with the Forward Party, Yang said. One of them, he said, is Jeni Arndt, the mayor of Fort Collins, Colorado.
Yang says he ran for president to help U.S. prepare for 'economic transformation'
Sellers said that the last time she spoke with Yang, he said he had a negative view of U.S. politics.
“I had a great time running for president. I want to make that clear,” Yang said.
He joked that he never expected to be president, eliciting some laughter from the audience, and he said his goal was to try to help prepare the U.S. “for the most profound economic transformation of our time.”
“I ran for president to try and warn us and prepare us for the fact that this transition was coming up. We didn’t seem to understand it or be reckoning with it, and our political system certainly did not want to have that conversation,” he said.
