Lessons Learned

Money is speech and largely corrosive to politics

If you are not a billionaire or an oligarch there is this pesky little problem of paying for the business underlying your campaign.

Politics is especially interesting because donations are the only thing that can fund a candidate’s efforts outside of their personal assets. Unlike for profit entities, raising money for a political campaign is restricted by federal regulation, limiting  its funds pipeline and operating budget, both factoring into the campaign’s popularity and coverage.

The need to fundraise takes away from the real work of politics. Instead of building a community around the vision the forcing function instead becomes money raised. Without money there is no campaign, it can’t exist. In July 2019 I subscribed to email updates from every single presidential campaign. For the past eight months I received on average15 emails a day, roughly one for each campaign, and nearly all of them calling for donations.

 In the end of the primary cycle I was asked for money 3,400 times, once a day by each campaign for eight months.

I worry that money is a fundamental threat to our democracy, that participation–and success–in elections can be purchased. Which is why I support publicly funded elections to bring dignity back to politics.

Success is managing for exponential growth

A political campaign is not only a contest of ideas but also an exercise in building an enterprise. In less than a year, the Yang campaign went from a handful of staff to 230 people on payroll at the end of 2019.

When I joined the campaign’s volunteer channel on Slack in May 2019 there were around 1,000 of us , and in the end of February 2020 the channel boasted around 20,000 members. That is 20x growth in 7 months. As with any enterprise, and certainly one with such exponential growth, leveling up brings necessary changes. It can no longer be business as usual when your organization is 100 people deep up from 10 in less than six months. You can’t manage 100 people the same way you managed 10.

At every step along the journey,campaigns need to adjust how it operates and changes with growth.

Being an outsider removes you from the expectations game 

Most of the narrative for the 2020 democratic presidential primary was effectively about how one candidate was outperforming expectations and another was underperforming. But your performance can only be measured if you’ve been in the arena before. Like Donald Trump in 2016, Andrew Yang stood out as he bypassed the expectations game and was allowed to write much of the narrative around his campaign. Nobody was constantly holding them up to a measuring stick based on past performance or prior comps. By bypassing the expectations game you can focus on what really matters and avoid riding the “pollercoaster”.

Shared humanity is an incredibly powerful motivator

With politics the volunteer wrinkle is particularly interesting. Just by nature of being a citizen and human being in America we are all brought into the stakes of the game. For many volunteers the drive to improve our collective circumstance takes them to make it their full time jobs.  I met more than a handful of volunteers that had stopped their vocational work to campaign full time for free. I met a new mom who did Voter ID calling for the campaign who regularly logged a 40+ hour work week just as a volunteer. That rarely happens in other industries.  

The best thing about my time in the Yang Gang has been the people. Every staff and volunteer member I met was both earnest and kind and genuinely wonderful.

I expect to be involved and update this post at the 2024 election.

• Andrew Yang NY Times Exit Interview
• Medicare for All would be a boon for the American Labor Market
• My tweetstorm after he suspended
• Humanity Forward a new organization supporting the Yang2020 vision post election