Andrew Yang’s Presidential Run Advisers Blame His Mayoral Run Advisers for His Big Flop

For many months during the weirdest mayoral campaign season in NYC history, it seemed like Andrew Yang was actually going to win the Democratic primary. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that he’d recently run for president of the United States, and while he didn’t end up getting the job, he became famous for his “MATH” campaign slogan and a pledge to pay every American adult $1,000 a month. That the majority of his competitors enjoyed relatively little name recognition likely helped him significantly when voters were asked who they wanted to see succeed Bill de Blasio, given the choice between someone they’d actually heard of and “who?”

Unfortunately for the Yang Gang, things clearly did not pan out as they’d hoped when he announced his candidacy in January 2021; on Tuesday night, as the numbers rolled in, he told supporters: “You all know I am a numbers guy, I’m someone who traffics in what’s happening by the numbers, and I am not going to be the next mayor of New York City, based upon the numbers that have come in tonight.” He added: “I am conceding this race, though we’re not sure, ultimately, who the next mayor is going to be. But whoever that person is, I will be very happy to work with them to help improve the lives of the 8.3 million people who live in our great city.”

How did Yang, once the front-runner, end up in a very sad fourth place? Was it his inability to accurately identify a bodega? The fact that he spent the pandemic outside of the city? That he hadn’t voted in an NYC mayoral election (and some national ones!)? That, as my colleague Chris Smith put it, “the desire for the next mayor to be a cheerleader in chief has waned” as the city has emerged from the scariest days of the pandemic, while a rise in crime benefitted former police officer Eric “Search your kids’ rooms for contraband” Adams? People who advised Yang on his presidential run—which, as a reminder, was not successful—seem to believe the fault lies with the people who were advising him on the latest campaign.

According to political reporter Hunter Walker, “multiple sources who worked on Yang’s…upstart presidential bid last year” said “they tried to advise Yang on his mayoral campaign and were rejected in favor of Tusk Strategies, a New York City lobbying firm. The sources placed blame on the Tusk team for Yang’s disappointing finish.” A senior adviser to Yang’s presidential campaign told Walker that “For months, several senior staffers from the presidential campaign offered guidance to Tusk Strategies without response in regards to earned media and digital that were largely ignored. This loss is being squarely placed on this firm.”

A second adviser from his presidential bid echoed the notion that members of the 2020 presidential team—who helped Yang make a strong showing after beginning the race as a distant longshot—were pushed aside in favor of Tusk Strategies. “In the lead into this thing, you had a lot of the presidential team who gave these guys advice,” this adviser said. “Right after the election in 2020, all of a sudden, I guess Tusk got in there and, boom, they were going their own way.”

The possibility of Yang in City Hall seemed quite real for much of this campaign as he led polls of the crowded field in the crucial Democratic primary. However, in the weeks before Tuesday’s voting, Yang’s standing plummeted. The former senior adviser to his presidential campaign attributed much of that drop—and the contrast with his performance in last year’s election—to Tusk’s team. “They took something that several people spent years building to bring it crashing down in five months,” the senior adviser said…. The former senior adviser specifically blamed one of Yang’s co-campaign managers, Chris Coffey, who leads Tusk Strategies’ New York and New Jersey practices, for lashing out at the media and trying to direct the activity of the “Yang Gang,” the candidate’s infamous social media fan base.

The same source also faulted Coffey for “virtue signaling to the Yang Gang” and “calling reporters liars,” and for moving away from the strategy employed on the presidential campaign to “let Yang be Yang,” a pivot this person said resulted in “a massive loss in engagement on Yang’s pages on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.” The former adviser also blamed the Tusk team for not embracing some of Yang’s highest-profile allies, like Dave Chappelle. “Dave Chappelle offered to do free shows,” this person told Walker. “Tusk said no. They found him too controversial.”

On the other hand, it seems as though the national campaign people didn’t think Yang could win the mayor’s race in the first place. The former adviser told Walker that some on the previous campaign told Yang “[this is] the wrong race for you,” and tried to convince him to “get in front of” Joe Biden and “go for a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet” gig. “I don’t know what happened or who got his ear,” this person told Walker, saying that Yang had been listening to his old advisers until Tusk came on the scene.

In a statement, Coffey told Vanity Fair: “We are proud of Andrew and the campaign he ran. He had the most donors of any campaign in NYC Mayors history and the most volunteers in the cycle. We didn’t get there this time but excited to see what Andrew will do next.”

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