“You had to find ways to make him look ready for the job,” one former Yang staffer told The Intercept. But eventually, his lack of experience stopped being funny. Yang began not just as the change candidate, but also as the lovable guy who was just out of touch: buying bananas in a shiny bodega, telling the comedian Ziwe Times Square was his favorite subway stop, and proposing TikTok hype houses to help bring back the city’s nightlife. The campaign’s initial strategy was to flood local news with coverage, and it seemed to work, according to staff - until it started to backfire. Yang did not respond to requests for comment. “What he started with - cash relief, anti-poverty - there was hope in there,” said the second staffer. But, as they put it, Yang started out as the guy who mainstreamed the concept of universal basic income and ended by bashing homeless people in the final debate of the race. When the election was about economic recovery and supporting small business, Yang was good, said one staffer. What started as something larger than life, one staffer said, “ended up being so small.” (Three Yang 2021 staffers spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, fearing professional reprisal.) He was eliminated in the third-to-last round of ranked-choice voting. Despite his claim that he had more individual donors than any other candidate in the race - and what his campaign said was the highest number of donors in the history of primary and general mayoral races in the city - Yang ended up with just over 135,000 votes in total. “He used to say, if 10 percent of these people vote, I’m gonna win.”īut that energy didn’t translate into votes. “Andrew was used to the way he was on the streets of New York,” getting mobbed on the street and asked for selfies, said Chris Coffey, the co-campaign manager Yang hired through Tusk Strategies. According to staffers who worked on the campaign, Yang believed up until the last second that he was, in fact, going to be the next mayor of New York City. If you’d spoken to Yang just a few days earlier, he would have sounded certain of the opposite. “I am not going to be the next mayor of New York City,” Yang told attendees at his election night party. Not long after polls closed, he became the first of the 13 Democratic primary candidates to concede. But in the late evening hours of June 22, as voters prepared to wait another several weeks for official results of the city’s first venture into ranked-choice voting, Yang found himself in fourth place. Yang had thousands of volunteers, many of whom had supported his presidential bid and wanted to see more success from his next campaign. He raised $4 million, and political action committees backing him drew in millions more from Wall Street. “Can Anyone Stop Andrew Yang’s Campaign for Mayor?” read one May headline in The Atlantic. Yang’s campaign was the natural center of attention, earning almost daily coverage in city tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily News. Despite palpable flaws in the soaring crime narrative - shootings and homicides have increased significantly, but not consistently, in 20, while the causes and solutions for crime surges remain far more complex than most news coverage allows - Yang ran with it, appearing loyal to some donors yet unwieldy to trusted staff. And when the assertion that crime was reaching historic highs in New York City started to change the bounds of the race, Yang’s big ideas were nowhere to be found. Yang’s outlook was positive and his plans were far-reaching, until people actually started asking him questions about them. But by the end, he started to embody the failures of the consultant and political class his supporters at one time bet against. Though he tried unsuccessfully to recruit a primary challenger to Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016, this was CEO Bradley Tusk’s first time backing a Democrat for mayor.Īt the start, Yang was lauded as a political outsider with the clarity of vision to change New York. But 12 years ago, Bloomberg ran as a Republican. ![]() The firm soon employed much of the campaign’s top staff, including his co-campaign managers, senior advisers, policy director, and press secretary. ![]() ![]() Not long after Yang dropped out of the presidential race last February, Tusk Strategies, the political consulting and lobbying firm that managed Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral reelection bid, recruited him to run for mayor. The ex-presidential candidate entered the mayoral race as the man of big ideas, someone who could move New York into a new phase of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and past the tense political environment that colored the city after protests against police brutality last summer. For the first six months of 2021, if you asked a stranger on the street in New York City who they thought their next mayor would be, there was a good chance they would say Andrew Yang.
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