Andrew Yang’s shoestring campaign staff has multiplied along with his fundraising, giving the unconventional businessman the trappings of a conventional, well-resourced presidential campaign in the months before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

In the second quarter — from April to June — the campaign had under 20 staff members on its payroll, according to Yang’s Federal Election Commission filings. But a quarter later, it nearly quadrupled to include 73 staff members, POLITICO’s analysis shows, as well as several experienced and well-respected strategists in Democratic politics.


The expansion, fueled by a nearly $10 million third-quarter fundraising haul, ensures that the 44-year-old entrepreneur can stick around through the beginning of early-state voting next year — and gives Yang a platform to build on if he should have a big moment in a later debate or show unexpectedly well in the Iowa caucuses. The hires also add critical experience to Yang’s campaign as it starts to spend on advertising, like a recent six-figure digital ad buy in the early states.

“It's been like a startup but this startup has gone mainstream, about to go public, if you want to keep using the analogy.” said Zach Graumann, Yang’s campaign manager. “And frankly and I tell the team, 'we're just getting started.”

Yang’s newly built-out campaign combines a motley crew of political outsiders — Graumann did not have a political background before helming Yang’s campaign, and some senior staffers are veterans only of West Virginia Democrat Richard Ojeda’s failed 2018 congressional run and short-lived presidential campaign — with more traditional Democratic hands.

Most notably, Yang’s campaign recently brought on Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh as its media consulting firm. The firm — run by Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh — worked for Sanders’ insurgent 2016 primary campaign and produced the famous “America” ad before splitting early on with Sanders’ 2020 bid due to “differences in a creative vision.”


Longabaugh says they were drawn to Yang because he’s “is offering the most progressive ideas” of the primary but that they see a long runway for the Yang campaign.

“We wouldn't have signed on with somebody we didn't think was a serious candidate,” Longabaugh said, “Yang has a good deal of momentum and there's a great deal of grassroots enthusiasm for his candidacy and that's what's driven it this far.”

Other hires include senior adviser Steve Marchand, a former mayor of Portsmouth, N.H. and two-time gubernatorial candidate, who is a paid adviser to the Yang campaign since April and national organizing director Zach Fang, who jumped ship from Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign in late August.

The campaign has also paid Spiros Consulting — a widely used Democratic research firm helmed by Edward Chapman — for research throughout the quarter.


The campaign’s field office game has ballooned recently. Currently all 15 of their field offices are in the first four states; 10 have opened since the start of October, according to the campaign.

The campaign’s plan for expanding past the early states leans heavily on the Yang Gang; staff will train volunteers on the best ways to organize at “MATH” classes (a spin on the campaign’s slogan “Make America Think Harder”).

"We won't need to put three or four organizers in November in these states. We can rely only on these volunteer leaders who've been with us for a year,” Fang said. “We can save money, invest heavily in the early states with paid staff because we have this distributed program that is covering the later states.”

The campaign’s deeper war chest also allows the campaign to invest in critical non-staff infrastructure: voter data.

Yang’s campaign has been remarkably successful at collecting voter contact information, including the contact information of over 450,000 people who entered an online raffle to be in a trial of Yang’s Universal Basic Income program.

But that only gets campaigns part of the way there. The national and state parties keep a detailed voter file that campaigns have to pay for access to, which includes data about potentially millions of voters. Yang’s campaign forked over $245,000 to the Democratic National Committee and the four early-state parties for access to their respective voter files along with an additional $97,000 to private companies Grassroots Analytics and Aristotle for voter data — crucial to any campaign that wants to grow their supporter base and track potential voters.

The campaign expects to keep growing — but don’t expect them to rival those top-tier candidates in numbers.

Graumann said, “It's about how effective can we be. We have the resources to put them where we can and we need to. But we're not going to hire people just to hire people. I think that's a bad way to build any organization.”