Home / Politics / Andrew Yang Scores Endorsement from Former NFL Player Antonio Bryant

Andrew Yang Scores Endorsement from Former NFL Player Antonio Bryant

Last Updated October 6, 2020 8:21 AM
W. E. Messamore
Last Updated October 6, 2020 8:21 AM

On Friday, former NFL wide receiver Antonio Bryant backed Andrew Yang for president in the 2020 Democratic primary. In a tweet hashtagged #YangGang, AB touted the New York tech entrepreneur and universal basic income proponent’s innovative ideas and concern for the average American. In under 24 hours, the post got 2.1K retweets and 13.8K likes.

AB antonio bryant backs Andrew Yang on twitter

Saturday morning, Bryant was back at it. The 2002 second-round NFL draft pick for the Dallas Cowboys tweeted out eight reasons to support Andrew Yang for president:

antonio bryant tweets reasons to support andrew yang

Antonio Bryant Is Not That AB

Within just four hours, “AB” had hundreds of retweets and nearly 3,000 likes on his second Yang tweet. His Twitter page is popular enough (with almost 95K followers) that Bryant has been getting  hate tweets over the last month intended for another NFL wide receiver, Antonio Brown. In September, Brown’s trainer Britney Taylor filed a  lawsuit against him alleging sexual assault and rape. Bryant has had to repeatedly clarify: “Wrong AB!”

The level of engagement with Bryant’s endorsement of Andrew Yang says a lot about the presidential hopeful’s popularity on the internet.

The likes and retweets on his Yang posts are on the same order of magnitude as most of the other AB tweets. And Touchdown Brown’s Twitter page has 1.6 million followers.

Maybe football fans appreciated it when Yang spoke out for them last month. He wasn’t  happy with the Democratic debate scheduled for the same time as an NFL season game.

andrew yang tweet democratic debate nfl season game 

Other Andrew Yang Celebrity Endorsements

Antonio Bryant is far from the first celebrity to endorse Andrew Yang for president. The businessman with an innovative political platform and upbeat personality has racked up an impressive roster of endorsements.

Other Andrew Yang celebrity endorsements include billionaire engineer and business magnate Elon Musk. In August, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO simply tweeted , “I support Yang.” He then added: “He would our first openly goth president. I think this is very important.” It’s true.

Yang has also received campaign donations from Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO of Twitter. Dorsey, who also founded Square, has also contributed to Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign. (Perhaps because all three support cryptocurrency?)

Other celebrities  who’ve donated their own money toward nominating Yang in 2020 include powerhouse Hollywood A-lister Nicolas Cage and Weezer frontman, Rivers Cuomo.

But that’s not all of Andrew Yang’s celebrity endorsements. Other famous Yang supporters include YouTube royalty Casey Neistat  (who has 11.5 million  subscribers). Then there’s fellow YouTube A-lister Ethan Klein , with 6.6 million subscribers  to the h3h3 channel he produces with his wife, Hila Klein. And don’t forget Tommy Chong  of comedy duo Cheech and Chong.

Andrew Yang racked up many of these endorsements in Q3 2019. That same quarter, his fundraising jumped an astounding 257% from $2.8 million in Q2 to $10 million Q3. That puts  Andrew Yang in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates by fundraising prowess. It was only a million shy of Sen. Kamala Harris’ Q3 take.

Yang is shaping up to be the dark horse of the Democratic presidential primary.