Hey all – 

After nearly two years of work, the story of our campaign, Longshot: How Political Nobodies Took Andrew Yang National—and the New Playbook That Let Us Build a Movement, is finally here! You can order a print or audio version here, and find it in bookstores across the country.

I dedicated this book to the Yang Gang, because without you, there is no campaign. This entire book is meant to be a behind-the-scenes look at how we went from anonymous to national movement, and specifically, how we were able to compete when we truly weren’t supposed to.

BUT… for those of you who are skeptical, I thought I’d give the Yang Gang a sneak peak at what this book is all about.

So below is the opening chapter of the book… I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Much love,

Zach Graumann
Campaign Manager, Yang 2020
 

LONGSHOT
How Political Nobodies Took Andrew Yang National—and the New Playbook That Let Us Build a Movement

INTRODUCTION
     
           “How about now?” Frawley shouted from across the room. Andrew Frawley—who lost his first name to the campaign (can’t have two Andrews on the Andrew Yang campaign)—was a six-foot-five, two-hundred-plus-pound giant with messy brown hair, a youthful glow, and, at the moment, a precarious perch atop a wheeled desk chair.
           Preventing Frawley from being dumped unceremoniously onto the floor was our head of operations, Muhan Zhang, a slight twenty-seven-year-old with a much lower center of gravity; he struggled to keep the chair from rolling away while Frawley stood fully stretched to hang the wrinkled YANG 2020 banner that would serve as part of the backdrop for that night’s event.
           It was the first of August, 2018, and we were preparing the newly opened Friends of Andrew Yang campaign headquarters in Manhattan for one of our first public campaign events. As much as we griped about the location—way too close to the tourist traffic of Times Square—there was no denying it was convenient. Not only did its proximity to NYC’s main train stations make it an easy commute for every member of our five-person staff, but it was also close enough for Andrew to bike there from his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
           Andrew Yang was a successful entrepreneur and nonprofit executive, but at that point he was also virtually unknown. He had built and led a popular education tech company, Manhattan Prep, sold it for a small fortune, and used his earnings to launch his most recent social enterprise, Venture for America (aimed at helping recent college grads create businesses in economically stressed cities), which had gotten him named a “Presidential Ambassador for Entrepreneurship” by President Obama back in 2015. But despite his impressive résumé, the American public couldn’t have picked Andrew out of a lineup. He had no particular following, on social media or elsewhere. He had no email list, donor base, or network of political connections. He had never held elected office of any kind, and he possessed no governing experience whatsoever. And yet he was, against the advice of essentially everyone, running for president of the United States of America.
           Naturally, the staff he’d been able to assemble weren’t exactly seasoned political professionals. Our campaign team consisted of a recent Virginia Commonwealth University graduate with a marketing degree (Frawley), a tech generalist who’d worked for Andrew at Venture For America (Muhan), and three people I haven’t introduced yet: a former hedge-fund analyst, a former LSAT teacher, and an ex–Wall Street executive/founder of a small nonprofit (Carly Reilly, Matt Shinners, and me, respectively). Matt was the oldest, at thirty-four, and our team’s combined years of political experience totaled exactly zero.
           But what we lacked in experience . . . we also lacked in funding. At the time of this particular event, the campaign had less than $75,000 in the bank. While this sounds like a decent amount of money (hey, it’s more than most of us make in a year), for context, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris—neither of whom had even officially announced their candidacy at this point—were rumored to have stocked up nearly $10 million in their war chests. Each. To start—keyword start—their presidential runs. They were also expected to raise upwards of $50 million—again, each—before the 2020 Iowa caucus, which was then just over a year away. Our $75,000 was barely enough to pay for that month’s rent/payroll/expenses; never mind the year until Iowa, we were operating on a month-to-month basis, just scratching and fighting for our continued existence.
           These obvious facts did not seem to faze our young team. In fact, spirits had never been higher—probably because, until recently, we’d been operating out of Andrew’s mom’s one-bedroom apartment (where Muhan was also living). “Frawley—move it two inches higher,” I shouted from the back of the room. Our new headquarters was a classic garment-district warehouse turned corporate office, a single cavernous space with twenty-foot ceilings and massive windows along one wall of the unit. The room was full of shitty IKEA furniture because none of us had any idea how to furnish an office (and no real money to do it even if we had). The hardwood floors were always covered in a thin layer of nasty, old-NYC-building dust, despite our best attempts with the Swiffer, and the space was either too hot (in the summer) or too cold (in the winter)—no in-between.
           It’s worth emphasizing how ridiculous this office looked. “Decorate the office” was low on our priority list, and responsibility for the task was split between Muhan, Frawley, and myself. The result was, well, exactly what you would expect from three dudes decorating an office—painfully white walls with nothing on them except a scattering of campaign signs and paraphernalia haphazardly hung with Scotch tape, a couple of Andrew Yang street-art posters made by some of our early (and rare) fans, our Wi-Fi password handwritten on a piece of notebook paper, and a few Michael Scott quotes I’d scribbled in Sharpie onto white printer paper and stuck up for inspiration. The banner Frawley was hanging was new, and had probably looked good at one point, but we had stupidly rolled it up and tossed it in a corner somewhere when it arrived, so it was now being hung on the wall looking like it used to wave off the back of someone’s truck. Right next to it was the biggest sign in the room, a three-by-two-foot poster I’d had made at Kinko’s and hung on one of the very first days in our new campaign HQ:
 
“Andrew Yang is a longer-than-long shot for the White House.”
The New York Times, February 10th, 2018
 
         On one hand, I hated that quote. Screw you New York Times! Three weeks before the 2016 election you said Hillary Clinton had a 91 percent chance of winning! Your paper sucks! On the other hand, I loved it. Our candidate was covered by THE New York Times! You’re by definition not such a longshot if the New York Times is talking about you!
           Either way, it was great motivation. The New York Times doesn’t think we can win? Let’s prove them wrong.
           Andrew arrived right as the event started (on his bike, of course, which we stored in a far corner of the office) and greeted everyone as they walked in. By 7 pm, a whopping eighteen people (a few of whom Andrew already knew) had arrived to hear our candidate outline his vision for the country. They drank some of the discount Stella Artois beers we’d bought at the CVS next door, and snacked on the Tostitos Hint of Lime chips we’d arranged (still in the original bags, of course) on plastic foldout tables we’d ordered from Amazon. Naturally, we’d forgotten to buy napkins, so we’d set out a roll of paper towels, which guests tore off as needed. If you were dubious about Andrew’s chances before you arrived, our event-planning expertise definitely wasn’t changing your mind.
           After thirty or forty minutes of mingling, I officially welcomed everyone and gave Andrew’s introduction, and he took his place in front of the wrinkled “Yang 2020” banner, illuminated by IKEA lamps. Absolutely nothing about our makeshift setup looked remotely presidential.
           His appearance didn’t help. Andrew’s hair was . . . an experience. It looked like a child had cut it (and not a particularly talented child). Never combed, it stuck out in multiple directions and was flat in all the wrong places. He wore a pair of too-baggy and too-long Levi’s, an overwashed light-blue button-down with a droopy collar, and a pair of never-polished brown dress shoes scuffed from years of wear. He’d topped this ensemble off with a blue suit jacket (not a blazer—literally the jacket half of a business suit), and pinned to his left lapel was a big white campaign button featuring the “Yang Y” logo, which Business Insider would later call “an abomination.” The overall effect was less “potential world leader” and more “engineering professor/Silicon Valley wonk about to give a TED Talk.”
           And in fact, this wasn’t far off. His stump speech at that point basically was a TED Talk. It began with some terrifying statistics about how automation is going to eliminate millions of American jobs and how woefully unprepared our country is to handle this, and then he presented the core of his solution: universal basic income (UBI, for short—essentially, under Andrew’s plan, giving every American adult $1,000 a month). He explained his flagship UBI proposal in convincing detail, then touched on “Medicare for All,” laying out a unique business argument for the government providing healthcare, along with how we might make it happen. He didn’t use slides that night, but only because I told him we couldn’t get the projector to work (not entirely true, but I felt like presidential candidates shouldn’t be breaking out PowerPoint decks—a version of a fight we would have in various ways throughout the campaign).
           TED Talk or not, his stump speech was compelling. It was very matter-of-fact, specific, and logical, and his speaking style was fairly monotone. That said, he had natural wit and a subtle straight-faced humor, and his genuineness shone through, especially as he moved into his strongest argument—that the way we measure the economy (GDP, stock-market growth) is fundamentally flawed, and that we should be building a more “human-centered economy” that measures and incentivizes the things that really tell us how we’re doing, like life expectancy, happiness, childhood education levels, and so on.
           Something about the way Andrew laid out information made you trust that he was right, and you could feel a slow but tangible shift in the audience as he spoke: Holy shit, maybe he’s not that crazy. People stopped cocking their heads skeptically and actually started nodding; you could see them starting to believe in Andrew Yang, at least a little. He was no longer a longshot presidential hopeful with no chance of winning, he was a patriotic visionary who wanted to make this country better for all of us, with concrete ideas about how to do it.
           Then he started to go sideways.
           Despite hours of me, Muhan, and Frawley coaching (read: begging) him not to, Andrew began talking about something he calls “digital social credits” (DSCs)—his solution for the economy and society in a potential future in which virtually all jobs have been wiped out by automation.
           “People need more than work to live a fulfilling life,” he argued, “so we need to create a new currency where the government gives citizens credit for volunteering, caring for the elderly, and other things that our financial market does not pay for. It’ll be like credit card points or a punch card at your local deli—the government administers points that people can accumulate and trade in for other undervalued services.”
           One donor once told me it’s too “beep-boop, beep-boop” for the average person. That’s generous. It’s an insane talking point for a no-name candidate trying to be taken seriously. For one thing, the idea itself has . . . problems. For another, we were already far-out enough; throwing in the concept of DSCs brought everyone back to Earth and reminded them of just how ridiculous we were. It was like a bubble popped—he lost half the room instantly, and you could see people’s expressions change from thoughtful and interested to wondering: What the fuck is this guy talking about?
           He finally moved on to taking questions, and it’s a mark of how exceptional Andrew is at Q&A that he nearly got the audience back to where they were before his digital social credits detour. He really warms up one-on-one, and he can engage with people on almost any topic—he may be the smartest person I’ve ever met—and the event wrapped with some decent applause. As the crowd trickled out, the majority had the vibe of people who’d just seen a unique play or lecture—they were curious about what Andrew Yang would do next, while having no expectation of ever casting a ballot in his favor. A few people truly seemed to like him, and three or four guests even hung around to chat with Andrew and were convinced to sign our “campaign wall” (a randomly chosen spot we’d thought it would look cool to have people write on, like a visual demonstration of the support for our campaign). Frawley had taken a photo of the event, angled to make the crowd look bigger, and we posted it to the official Andrew Yang Instagram and Twitter accounts, which had approximately seven thousand followers combined. I’m confident that, except for us, no one in that photo—hell, no one who liked that post—thought Andrew Yang had a chance of becoming president, or even being considered a serious contender for the role.
           I overheard one guest laughing with another on his way out: “Interesting event. That guy has no shot.”
 
           Flash forward just over one year.
           It’s September 30, 2019. Andrew and the six full-time staffers and two very large security guards that make up his “road team” are huddled in a small greenroom. (By now I’ve learned that most “greenrooms” aren’t actually green—this one is basically a concrete storage closet with a few chairs and too many snacks.) Along with me and Carly, the group includes our traveling press secretary (not to be confused with our other, non–traveling press secretary), our head of advance (a position I hadn’t known existed fourteen months ago—basically in charge of planning wherever we’ll be next and setting things up . . . in advance), Andrew’s “body man” (like Gary from Veep; basically a personal assistant who’s with him at all times), and a full-time videographer (wielding the kind of massive camera you need a back brace to carry).
           From our concrete room behind the outdoor stage, we can hear a roar from the crowd as MC Jin—one of the more famous Asian rappers in America, and our opening act—hypes them up. We are in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where a production company has erected a stage complete with concert-quality lighting, sound system, and large and loud pyrotechnics (sparks are literally flying), and where a few thousand people had been waiting since 3 pm. It’s now almost 7, and the energy of the crowd seems to shake the walls. MC Jin finishes up, and the audience starts chanting “AN-DREW YANG! AN-DREW YANG! AN-DREW YANG!” Minutes before, I’d been frustrated.
           “What is with this traffic?” I’d complained from the front seat of one of the three giant black SUVs that made up our motorcade—Los Angeles traffic was always bad, but it was bumper to bumper as we got close to the venue.
           Then, through the windshield, I saw a group of eight people crossing the street together carrying YANG GANG signs, wearing MATH hats and NOT LEFT, NOT RIGHT, FORWARD T-shirts, and I got it—the traffic was caused by us. This was our traffic. Andrew Yang traffic.
           Now, in our packed not-so-green room, Andrew is picking at his pre-rally snacks of choice. His hair has clearly been cut by an adult professional, and it is impeccably styled. He wears a custom-tailored navy Havana blazer from Suitsupply, a freshly pressed light-blue button-down shirt, well-fitting chinos, and polished black dress shoes. The large, white Y button of last year has been replaced with the campaign’s signature MATH pin, which we have sold tens of thousands of online. We have just spent the day with Elon Musk and Donald Glover, and our candidate is preparing to take the stage of what amounts to a political rock concert.
           When it’s time, in true rock-star fashion, Andrew hypes himself up with his own personal routine: He jerks his arms and legs, looks up, and yells “Aaghhh!!” It’s sort of “pro-wrestler before entering the ring,” or “basketball player after making an ‘and one.’” Supposedly, he is imitating Nicolas Cage right before he steals a car in Gone in 60 Seconds, but I promise that no one watching would make that connection.
           Then:
           “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce . . . THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES . . . ANNNNNNNDREWWWWW YANG!”
           Andrew bursts onto the stage with his arms stretched wide and head back to face the darkened Los Angeles sky; Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” starts blasting, and the pyrotechnics pop off golden fireworks on both sides of the stage. The standing-room-only crowd is screaming—some are hoisting giant papier-mâché Yang heads adorned with MATH hats, massive signs bearing Andrew’s name or Bitmoji likeness bob up and down, and oversized $1,000 bills printed with Yang’s face spin in the air above the sea of supporters.
           Over seven thousand people have crammed into MacArthur Park on this warm LA night. It is a noticeably diverse crowd—by age, ethnicity, any way you slice it. But they all have one thing in common: they are fired up for Andrew Yang.
           Standing in the wings, I make eye contact with Carly across the stage—we are both wearing the same expression, best described as “Jim from The Office when he finds out Pam is pregnant”: Can you believe this!? What is happening!?
           Andrew Yang had become a national superstar. He had millions of supporters—we’d gone from a combined seven thousand to a combined three million followers on all platforms. We had just raised $10 million from nearly three hundred thousand different people in the third quarter, were on our way to topping $40 million total, and had done it all with donations that averaged thirty-five dollars each. We had nearly one hundred paid staff, and had built an online army—the “Yang Gang”—that numbered in the hundreds of thousands across the country, and seasoned political professionals were asking to work on the campaign. By now, Andrew had been on four Democratic debate stages, headlined The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Rachel Maddow Show, The View, and nearly any other national news or news-adjacent show you can think of. He had been profiled by the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. CNN had recently called him “the hottest candidate this side of Elizabeth Warren,” and he was polling fifth nationwide in the primary. Somehow, in a historically crowded Democratic field, Andrew Yang had managed to stand out and stay in.
           That night, he glided around the firework-lit stage like he had been performing at this level his entire life. He was hamming it up, and kept having to pause while the crowd laughed at his dad jokes—and when they started an impromptu “POW-ER-POINT” chant after he made a crack about being the first president to use a PowerPoint deck at the State of the Union. After his standard talking point about how the one thing all Democrats want is to beat Donald Trump, and he’s beating Trump head-to-head in every poll out there, he went off script:
           “It’s like a game of rock paper scissors,” he crowed to the crowd, “and if Donald Trump is the scissors . . . I’m the fucking rock!”
           The crowd went wild. “YANG BEATS TRUMP! YANG BEATS TRUMP! YANG BEATS TRUMP!”
           In a movie, this would be the point where a record scratches and you freeze the frame.
           How the heck did we get here?
           How did we go from poorly attended Tostitos-on-folding-tables TED Talks to traffic-jam-causing rallies with chanting and fireworks?
 
           You see, Andrew Yang was not supposed to blow up.
           With no money, name recognition, or experience, any political expert or casual observer would tell you he was supposed to perform about as well as the “Free Hugs Guy,” who yes, also runs for president every cycle. When he announced his presidential run, Andrew Yang was variously laughed at or ignored, because he was supposed to be irrelevant with a field of twenty-nine elected officials competing in the Democratic primary. Even as he began to gain support, he was supposed to be a flash in the pan, at best, the male Marianne Williamson: a successful nonpolitician with an interesting story who showed up, got some click-bait press, and fizzled out.
           Yet Andrew Yang didn’t fizzle out. Not only was he not another Free Hugs Guy, he wasn’t overshadowed by the seemingly endless list of established Democratic contenders. Instead, our ragtag and inexperienced campaign team outlasted and outperformed four senators, four governors, seven Congressmen and women, two mayors, and one cabinet secretary. 
           And yes, I am well aware that Andrew Yang did not win the presidency. In fact, he didn’t come close. He earned 5 percent of the popular vote in Iowa and dropped out after the New Hampshire primary. From a polling perspective, he was barely a blip on the radar—a small nuisance to more established contenders.
           But Andrew Yang was more than just a presidential candidate, and the effects of his campaign extend far beyond any one election.
           This book answers two related questions. First: How did Andrew Yang explode onto the scene in the first place? The answer to that is what fills in the gaps between our eighteen-person gathering in New York City in August of 2018 and the seven-thousand-person rally in Los Angeles in September 2019.
           Just as important, though, is a second question: How did a losing longshot candidate manage to stay relevant and influential after his longshot run? How is it that the majority of American voters are now in favor of universal basic income, and Andrew Yang is still one of the best-liked and most influential politicians in the entire nation? Let me repeat that: someone who no one had heard of three years ago, who has yet to win a single election, is one of the most popular politicians in the US—right behind former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. More significantly, when the entire world was in crisis after the outbreak of COVID-19, we turned to the ideas that Andrew Yang’s campaign helped mainstream. Instead of simply following the traditional playbook of government-aid programs or bailout money directed to businesses (see both the 1933 New Deal and the 2008 recession), the decision was made to give direct cash to citizens during one of our country’s darkest hours. The idea was so popular that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle, heck even the pope himself, publicly announced their support of cash relief. At the time of this writing, the United States government has already distributed stimulus checks of $600, $1,200, and $1,400 directly to millions of American adults, and is currently paying families $250 to $300 per month per child through the enhanced child tax credit, the closest thing to implementation of universal basic income we’ve ever seen.
           So how did Andrew Yang go from nobody to national, lose his primary bid, and end up more influential than some of those he lost to?
           Was it pure luck? Good timing? Is he a mad genius? What?
           The answer is none of the above.
           We didn’t overcome the massive odds stacked against the Yang campaign simply through a series of accidents. Sure, as with any success story, there’s a decent amount of luck involved. After all, I was the youngest and most inexperienced major presidential campaign manager in US political history—I won’t pretend that I always knew what I was doing. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, and I’ll share these to hopefully spare others from making the same ones. But our campaign also made calculated strategic moves that set our candidate and message up for short- and long-term relevance. And we did that by recognizing that the game has changed. Politics does not work the way it once did. Traditional political gatekeepers are not as powerful as they once were. Marketing does not work the way it used to. Mainstream media is not as trusted as it once was. Frankly, many of the principles that were once the foundation of any serious political brand are crumbling. We were successful beyond anyone’s wildest imagination by playing a different game entirely, one based on the knowledge that, in today’s world, what matters above all is building a brand that supporters identify with.
           Simply put—Andrew Yang didn’t just run for president. Andrew Yang built a brand and a movement.
           Our team evolved political campaigning for the twenty-first century—borrowing tactics from traditional methods that still work, and letting go of what didn’t, in order to successfully turn a longer-than-longshot into a serious political contender. In the process, we created a playbook that can be used to help any longshot contend for anything. That’s why this book is more than just a behind-the-scenes campaign story (for that, watch the documentary or listen to our podcast, Forward). The lessons we learned on this campaign are for anyone trying to build and sustain a brand, a business, or a mission. They are insights you can apply not only to attract new supporters, customers, or voters, but to keep them amid a flurry of distractions. This book will not only explain how Andrew Yang came out of nowhere to achieve national relevance, but also what we—as politicians, businesses, and people—can learn from his surprising breakout and sustained influence in one of the most competitive arenas in the world.
           In other words, this book is a playbook for how to compete in today’s “attention economy.” And the best place to start, frankly, is there, with the attention economy itself—what it is, how it’s changed our world, and how all this led me to make the ridiculous decision to quit a job I was good at to do something I knew literally nothing about: running a longshot presidential campaign.
           Let’s dive in, shall we?
 
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