A top political backer for Joe Biden just suffered a crushing defeat.
This loss could be a career-ending blow.
And it’s all because of one massive split in the Democratic Party.
One of Joe Biden’s top supporters in the 2020 election is on the verge of seeing his own career come crashing down.
Andrew Yang, who himself briefly ran for President in the Democratic primary before dropping out and throwing his full support behind Joe Biden on his way to securing the party’s nomination for President, made his next political move by running for Mayor of New York.
But Yang’s campaign, once hailed as an inevitable victory, has now suffered a devastating defeat.
With the first round of the New York Mayoral Democratic primary now over, Yang is polling in a distant fourth place, and has all but lost the party’s nomination for the mayorship of the nation’s largest city.
Winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for New York City Mayor is akin to winning the election itself, due to the city’s overwhelming Democratic lean.
Yang’s campaign kicked the election off being clear favorites to sweep the field, but his standing in the polls slowly eroded over the previous three months, with party activists attacking him for not being left-wing enough, and even for his support of Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders last year.
As a result, Yang entered election day polling between second and third place in the race.
However, it now appears as if he will ultimately finish even worse than polling suggested, with the one-time frontrunner on track to finish in a distant fourth place, between left-wing progressive activists Eric Adams, Maya Wiley, and Kathryn Garcia.
According to early estimates from both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, there is no way Yang can come back and reclaim the lead as New York’s ranked choice voting moves on to the next ballot.
Yang’s poor showing spells the latest political defeat for the one-time Presidential hopeful.
On election night when the first round of ballots were counted, Yang conceded the race, telling his supporters “I am not going to be the next mayor of New York City, based upon the numbers that have come in tonight.”
The primary defeat marks the end of a political career that once appeared very bright, with many of Yang’s supporters predicting that their candidate would make a second run for the White House in 2024 or 2028 after he served several years as mayor.
But Yang’s defeat, while marking the end of his own career, also spells political disaster for Joe Biden.
Not only did the extreme Left-wing of the Democratic Party all but guarantee control of New York City, a major Democratic stronghold, but one of Biden’s own top political allies ended up losing his race to become mayor of the city in an electoral landslide.
This is just the latest in a long string of political defeats and disappointments for Biden, which have only begun to pile up ever since Democrats found most of their agenda stalled in the Senate in the face of opposition from even members of their own party – most notably Senators Krysten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.