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Patrick Newton drives a mint-condition, line-green 1948 GMC truck that has, quite jarringly, had its tailgate affixed with a large red and white sign announcing the North Carolina Forward Party, of which Newton is vice chair.
Not to be confused with Carolina Forward, the progressive organization, this Forward Party is the local iteration of the third party launched by tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang in 2021.
Yang, you might recall, was a flash-in-the-pan contender in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination; his supporters called themselves “the Yang Gang.” After placing fourth in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor a year later, he founded Forward, a party less devoted to ideology than promoting ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting commissions, and other political reforms.
By the end of 2023, Forward had secured ballot access in about a half-dozen states, including Virginia and South Carolina. Yang, 49, hopes to do the same in North Carolina in 2026, once Forward collects at least 13,000 signatures. The group is also backing two candidates in local races this year, including James Bledsoe, who is making his third bid for the Raleigh City Council.
And so last week, Newton drove Yang around the Triangle in his truck to rally the troops in the Triangle. Reporter Jeffrey Billman spent a few minutes with Yang to talk about his goals for N.C. Forward. This conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
Billman: What are you trying to do while you’re here?
Yang: I’m trying to get people to understand the Forward Party. We think that the two-party system is not working very well. It’s not working very well here in North Carolina. It’s not working very well in the United States. You can see very clearly that there are powerful political incentives to not solve problems. And if you do solve a problem, you’ll take a beating, so you don’t solve the problem.
Our goal is to galvanize and activate a critical mass of the 50 percent of Americans who consider themselves independents, or the two-thirds of Americans who are fed up with the current system, and help elevate and enlist hundreds of candidates around the country who want to run for city council or state legislator, or, in some cases, Congress.
Billman: How is Forward different from the other centrist third parties in recent decades—the Reform Party, or more recently, No Labels?
Yang: The first major distinction is the approach we’re taking, which is that we want to help create real choices in more of the 500,000-plus local races around the country, 70 percent of which are uncontested or uncompetitive. If you think about most of the third-party movements of the last 50 years, you can probably think of a single presidential candidate they’re attached to. We think that’s not a durable, long-lasting approach. Our goal is to lead locally.
There isn’t meaningful competition around the country, because each party actually doesn’t want competition. If you go to various rural parts of North Carolina, it’s not like there’s a Democrat running there that has any chance of winning.
Billman: North Carolina has no citizen referenda. Its legislative and congressional districts are heavily gerrymandered. How do you reform a system that is inherently adverse to reform?
Yang: Let’s say you were to run Forward candidates in rural communities around North Carolina, where right now there is no real competition, and let’s say there’s a particular Republican officeholder who has not been doing a good job, and a critical mass of people there say, “I’m going to go with this independent.” If someone says they’re running as a third-party candidate, most people haven’t been coded to think, “You’re on the team I hate,” or, “You’re on the team I must be loyal to.”
If that dynamic can happen in either party’s turf around this state, you could wind up with half a dozen to two dozen officeholders who represent the Forward Party and its values. You could wind up with a state legislator who’s there saying, “I’d like to make things happen with anybody.”
Now, in this state, it would be very difficult for that legislator to make any difference, because it’s 60-40 Republican. But there are massive opportunities. If you’ve got 10 percent of North Carolinians saying, “I’m a Forwardist. I will back anyone Forward endorses, and I want these reforms,” then it’s harder for the Democrat or Republican in a statewide race to say, “I hate those reforms.”
All of a sudden, you become the kingmaker.
Billman: So the idea is that once you have more competition politicians have to pay more attention to their constituents?
Yang: What I say to folks is that we’re living under a fiction, or an illusion, that our leaders have to make 51 percent of us happy in order to win office and stay in power. And it’s not true. You have a 15 percent approval rating of Congress right now, and 94 percent are re-elected. They don’t need to make 51 percent of us happy, they just need to win their primary. And to win their primary, they just need to keep the most ideological and extreme 8 to 10 percent happy.
Right now, we have a deeply unhealthy, unresponsive system that’s making us more and more angry and frustrated. We’re going to either revitalize and modernize our democracy via something like the Forward Party and its reforms, or we’re going to end up with something even darker than we have now.
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.