At the start, Yang was lauded as a political outsider with the clarity of vision to change New York. But by the end, he started to embody the failures of the consultant and political class his supporters at one time bet against. Yang\u2019s outlook was positive and his plans were far-reaching, until people actually started asking him questions about them. And when the\u00a0assertion that crime was reaching historic highs in New York City started to change the bounds of the race, Yang\u2019s big ideas were nowhere to be found.\u00a0Despite palpable flaws in the soaring crime narrative \u2014 shootings and homicides <\/span>have increased significantly<\/span><\/a>, but <\/span>not consistently<\/span><\/a>, in 2020 and 2021, while the causes and solutions for crime surges remain <\/span>far more complex<\/span><\/a> than most news coverage allows \u2014 Yang ran with it, appearing loyal to some donors yet unwieldy to trusted staff.<\/span><\/p>\n Yang\u2019s campaign was the natural center of attention, earning almost daily coverage in city tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily News. National outlets soon followed suit. \u201cCan Anyone Stop Andrew Yang\u2019s Campaign for Mayor?\u201d read one May headline<\/a> in The Atlantic. He raised $4 million, and political action committees backing him drew in millions<\/a> more from Wall Street. Yang had thousands of volunteers, many of whom had supported his presidential bid and wanted to see more success from his next campaign. But in the late evening hours of June 22, as voters prepared to wait another several weeks for official results of the city\u2019s first venture into ranked-choice voting, Yang found himself in fourth place. Not long after polls closed, he became the first of the 13 Democratic primary candidates to concede<\/a>. \u201cI am not going to be the next mayor of New York City,\u201d Yang told attendees at his election night party.<\/p>\n If you\u2019d spoken to Yang just a few days earlier, he would have sounded certain of the opposite. 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. And then it all came crashing down.<\/p>\n \u201cAndrew was used to the way he was on the streets of New York,\u201d getting mobbed on the street and asked for selfies, said Chris Coffey, the co-campaign manager Yang hired through Tusk Strategies. \u201cHe [and I] used to say, if 10 percent of these people vote, I\u2019m gonna win.\u201d<\/p>\n But that energy didn\u2019t translate into votes. Despite his claim that he had more individual donors<\/a> than any other candidate in the race \u2014 and what his campaign said was the highest number of donors in the history of primary and general mayoral races in the city\u00a0\u2014 Yang ended up with just over 135,000 votes in total. He was eliminated in the third-to-last round of ranked-choice voting. What started as something larger than life, one staffer said, \u201cended up being so small.\u201d\u00a0(Three Yang 2021 staffers spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, fearing professional reprisal.)<\/span><\/p>\n When the election was about economic recovery and supporting small business, Yang was good, said one staffer. But, as they put it, Yang started out as the guy who mainstreamed the concept of universal basic income<\/a> and ended by bashing homeless people in the final debate of the race. \u201cWhat he started with \u2014 cash relief, anti-poverty \u2014 there was hope in there,\u201d said the second staffer. \u201cAnd we lost track of that.\u201d<\/p>\n Yang did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n Andrew Yang, founder of Venture for America and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, waves during a campaign rally in New York on May 14, 2019.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: Mark Abramson\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n The campaign\u2019s initial<\/u> strategy was to flood local news with coverage, and it seemed to work, according to staff\u00a0\u2014 until it started to backfire.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, and\u00a0proposing\u00a0TikTok hype houses to help bring back the city\u2019s nightlife<\/a>. But eventually, his lack of experience stopped being funny.<\/p>\n \u201cYou had to find ways to make him look ready for the job,\u201d one former Yang staffer told The Intercept. \u201cThere were just flaws everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Yang struggled most where he also thrived: in public, unfiltered, often online.<\/p>\n In April, he prompted swift backlash after tweeting<\/a> that the city wasn\u2019t enforcing rules against \u201cunlicensed street vendors.\u201d In May, voters confronted<\/a> him about a tweet he wrote<\/a> in support of Israel<\/a> as bombs fell on Gaza. The incident lost him volunteers, many of whom later met with Yang<\/a> to express their frustration.<\/p>\n\n The moments showed \u201cultimately, a lack of a depth of knowledge around those topics, or not understanding the nuance,\u201d said one staffer. \u201cAnd then it fit the most potent critiques of [Yang] being a newcomer to politics, or not having voted before. \u2026 It showed a lack of civic engagement, or interest.\u201d<\/p>\n Then in June, just a year after a summer in which New York City police officers routinely brutalized<\/a> protesters demonstrating against police brutality, Yang won the endorsement of the NYPD Captain Endowments Association, the police union to which frontrunner candidate Eric Adams once belonged. Some of Yang\u2019s staff advised him that if he was going to pursue the endorsement to at least keep quiet about it. But he wasn\u2019t the blank slate they might have thought him to be, and Yang touted the endorsement.<\/p>\n \u201cAndrew became obsessed with it,\u201d the staffer said. \u201cAndrew is much more conservative than any of us knew on policing stuff.\u201d And, as the tone of the race shifted to focus on crime, \u201che became increasingly conservative,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n Part of the campaign\u2019s focus at the outset had been to try to keep Yang out of long-fought local policy fights and to maintain his image as someone who wouldn\u2019t take sides. But as the rates of homicide and gun violence spiked<\/a> in areas across the country this summer, rather than maintaining control of the race turf on Yang\u2019s terms \u2014 keeping it positive and nonpartisan \u2014 Yang and some of his top staff leaned into the idea that New York City voters wanted a law-and-order candidate. In doing so, the campaign made a strategic error, said one staffer, and let the race become defined around crime.<\/p>\n \u201cAgainst a candidate [like Adams] who has the lived experience of being a Black man plus being a cop, Andrew Yang wasn\u2019t going to lead the nuanced conversation about it,\u201d the staffer said. \u201cBecause crime is a number one issue that people are concerned about doesn\u2019t mean that\u2019s the only thing people want to hear about. I think Maya Wiley proved that to be true.\u201d<\/p>\n Yang was almost the \u201cpresumptive mayor,\u201d said another staffer, when tabloids and some local media started hyping up a right-wing narrative that crime was overtaking the city. So when the captains union endorsement came, staff \u201cwere kind of looking for ways to shake things up, because we knew we were slipping and we tried a bunch of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n The shift in focus came in part from Yang himself, but it also came from some of the Tusk\u00a0employees running his campaign, according to two staffers. \u201cThere was a big sense from certain parts of the campaign that it needed to be all crime, and talking about it in a way that felt very antiquated and unsophisticated,\u201d said one. \u201cWhat a Democratic electorate wants New York to look like after crime is addressed, and how they want that to happen, is very different than how a Republican electorate would want that. So the idea that addressing crime means you\u2019re law and order is a false narrative. And wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n At the last<\/u>\u00a0Democratic\u00a0mayoral debate on June 16, Yang was angry. He thought the media, which at times seemed to scrutinize his campaign more than those of his opponents, had become increasingly unfair. (Some staff say he rarely read the full coverage.) At that point, Yang had been spending a lot of his time with donors, and his comments on issues like crime, homelessness, and mental illness had started sounding more like theirs.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re new to politics,\u201d said one staffer, \u201cand you haven\u2019t spent decades honing your own political views, and your own sort of views on these issues, I think you\u2019re probably more susceptible to it.\u201c<\/p>\n During the debate, in response to criticism of his plan to increase institutionalization of people with mental illness who don\u2019t have housing, Yang said<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cMentally ill homeless men are changing the character of our neighborhoods,\u201d and that families were leaving because of it. Later in the debate, Yang doubled down, saying that city residents \u201chave the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out at us.\u201d<\/p>\n Yang\u2019s comments, which, according to several former staffers, were an attempt to look tougher on crime, prompted swift public backlash from people who criticized his remarks as ableist, harmful, and misinformed<\/a>. \u201cAside from when it happened and for a few hours afterwards, it was not an issue that I heard a lot about,\u201d Coffey said, adding that he was surprised it came up during an interview. \u201cDoesn\u2019t mean that there weren\u2019t people that were pissed. Doesn\u2019t mean that it wasn\u2019t a big issue. But I wouldn’t have identified it as a top 10 issue of the mayor\u2019s race.\u201d According to his staffers, Yang came away thinking he had done a good job.<\/p>\n During the final<\/u> weeks of the race, as the campaign struggled to direct its focus, Yang was still raking in money. While it may have posed a narrative challenge, Tusk Strategies presented a financial boon for the campaign: Salaries of at least seven top staff members, some of whom were making upwards of $10,000 a month, were all paid directly by Tusk Strategies.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Andrew](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2021\/08\/GettyImages-1143955038-edit.jpg\")
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