About 500,000 People Apply for Andrew Yang’s Free $1,000 Giveaway

Back in June, we wrote about the Venture for America founder, Andrew Yang, when he promised to give away $1,000 per month for the next 12 months to anyone who retweets his tweet and follows him by July 4th, 2019. During the last Democratic’s debate, Andrew Yang’s reiterated his plan to pay ten American families $1,000 a month for a year as a model for his universal basic income campaign.

The plan seemed to have paid off. According to a report from Politico, Yang’s campaign collected more than 450,000 email addresses from people who entered into the $120,000 online raffle and raised $1 million in the 72 hours since the debate.

Yang’s campaign told Politico:

The campaign said that over 90 percent of the email addresses are new, a huge expansion of the candidate’s email list. He also gained more Twitter followers over the course of the debate than any other candidate.

While some rivals on the debate stage laughed and rolled their eyes at the ploy, Yang’s campaign sees the “Freedom Dividend Pilot Program” as an example of why their internet-first campaign has pushed them to sixth place in the crowded contest.

“We’ve got a 21st-century candidate and we’re running a 21st-century campaign,” Campaign Manager Zach Graumann said in the Politico report. “That’s something not many of our competitors can say.”

Before running for the President of the United States, Yang founded Venture for America (VFA), a nonprofit that focuses on creating jobs in struggling American cities. Yang also worked in various startups and early stage growth companies as a founder or executive from 2000 to 2009. After he founded VFA in 2011, the Obama administration selected him in 2012 as a “Champion of Change” and in 2015 as a “Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.”

Below is a video of Yang announcing his $1,000 a month giveaway.