Meet Bradley Tusk and what he sees in Andrew Yang, and in the future of politics
Maybe it says something about the limits of Bradley Tusk’s argument that the old political gatekeepers (newspaper columnists very much included) are basically dead wood just one good whack or gust from collapsing that he spent an hour on the phone Thursday making that case to this columnist. Or maybe not.
We spoke a couple of hours after he’d released a statement committing to boundaries between his lobbying and other businesses, with both of Andrew Yang’s campaign managers on the payroll, and a potential Yang administration. That was a couple of hours before the New York Times dropped the A1 story that had compelled him to release that statement, with big display text about how “Conflicts Hound Yang’s Biggest Campaign Asset” amid “Concerns of a ‘Shadow Mayor’ at City Hall.”
Tusk’s guy has been leading in most polls since parachuting into the race in January, despite me and lots of other pundits and political insiders screaming from the rooftops about a stunt candidate who’s never even bothered to vote here, and doesn’t seem to know much about how New York City actually functions but is running a brilliant campaign.
And Tusk, who ran Mike Bloomberg’s final mayoral campaign, the “emergency” third-term one that spent a staggering $109 million encouraging New Yorkers not to bother voting to eke out a narrow win, knows a lot about New York’s hollowed-out orthodoxies and has made himself very rich betting on his ability to smash idols. For instance, he got paid in equity for helping the villains at Uber run over de Blasio and the loathsome big medallion owners who rented the mayor’s support here.
He’s a risk-taking venture capitalist with lots of skin in lots of tech games (including health records, cryptocurrency, insurance and gambling, not to mention city politics, which he likes to say he’s too rich to need to be involved in anymore but cares too much not to be). And I’m just a guy committed to a staff job so my kids can have health insurance who’s taking potshots from the cheap seats.
And he’s exceptionally smart and ambitious and impatient, someone who’s always looking for ways technology has changed the game (one of his interests involves “digitizing religion”) that other players haven’t picked up on yet and who’s perhaps surprisingly sensitive about being portrayed as a villain by the old gatekeepers he’s dismissive of.
The first time we met in person, he told me, talking so fast that I could hardly keep up, about how he’d had the idea before the 2008 crash of leasing the Illinois lottery to private operators with the tech to let people play on their phones and who could sell tickets in more upscale locations, like Starbucks. That, he claimed, would have helped solve inequality, since it wouldn’t just be a shadow tax on the poor and the elderly but something basically everyone paid. And when we spoke over the phone this week, he told me about his blockchain-enabled phone-voting system, and how that’s “the one thing that changes everything” since “every political output is a result of a political input” and pols are “desperately insecure people who can’t live without the validation of holding office” (fact check: yep) but who “we always want to defy human nature.”
Instead, he says, it’s “the inputs we need to change, and the only input that matters is turnout, which averages 10% to 15% nationally in local contests. If we get that to 50% — well, if you believe pols only do what’s in their interests and if you can change what’s in their interest, it’s transformative.”
Tusk’s foundation has been developing the tech, which he’s tested with military and disabled voters in numerous small elections and now plans to prove in larger ones before finally “making it open source and giving it to any government around the world.”
He got the idea, he said, during “the Uber campaigns we’d run, because we’d mobilize a couple million people through the app and your average City Council member after winning with 8,000 votes and then getting 15,000 emails would promptly change their thinking. I remember thinking at the time: If we could vote like this, it would change everything.”
Yang’s appeal is in a sense an extension of this idea: an “empty vessel,” as Tusk described his candidate to Ben Smith of the Times, whose personal appeal and out-of-the-box ideas (not to mention the name rec he racked up during his presidential run) can take what had seemed like a fixed pool of Democratic primary voters and open it up and change — forgive me — the math in the process.
In that sense, at least, Yang’s appeal is a lot like that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but to voters citywide rather than in one rapidly changing congressional district: A candidate who connects directly with voters and draws in new ones makes a lot politically possible that hadn’t been. And people with power now, Tusk says, don’t like that, since they see any change to the present, fixed pie as a threat to their slice of it.
That’s just a taste of his consistently intriguing and occasionally infuriating thinking:
The Times is coming after us so hard because on some level they recognize if we win, it’s a repudiation of the notion that their coverage or their endorsement matters. I believe that the institutional levers of power don’t matter anymore — faith in institutions has been plunging for 60 years and I don’t think people want to be told who to vote for.
If you look at the other candidates’ campaigns, they’re all being run in pursuit of endorsements as if endorsements still translated into votes. But everyone has access to the candidates digitally now, and they’ll make their own decisions.
(One thing that jumped in my head as he said this: Even AOC’s endorsement hardly seems dispositive, as her early backing for controller candidate Brad Lander has done nothing yet to boost his standing in the polls.)
I think columnists are part of the same chattering class as political operatives and electeds and union reps, and everyone talks to each other in person and on Twitter and reinforces the same incorrect notions over and over again and that’s why you see all the same smart people on these campaigns making the same dumb decisions. What seems to matter and what actually matters these days are two very different things, and it results not just in campaigns missing the mark but in elected officials making cost-benefit analyses and decisions with the wrong information.
But it takes a lot of arrogance to decide that everyone’s wrong and you’re right, and most well-adjusted people don’t behave like that.
Tusk, the author of “The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics,” is working on two more books, a satirical novel about a campaign to legalize flying cars in New York, Los Angeles and Austin and an argument about how the rise of crypto-platforms, which he’s invested in, mirrors changes in politics.
Back to him:
This is a super interesting parallel to the mayor’s race we have now. What makes crypto kind of beautiful in a way is that people say “I don’t trust the government or the banks or Wall Street. I’d rather throw my mind in with people I’ve never met but are like-minded,” and that belief alone could create something, which is amazing, something totally intangible and totally real.
That all came about because the trust is in a vacuum and it had to go somewhere — and Andrew is the same thing.
The biggest sign of low trust is low turnout and if you’re a candidate who can capture that lack of trust and show you’re listening to them and show that not everyone will do the bidding of some union or policy group or something else, that’s incredibly powerful and meaningful. If we win, and we may not, It should be incredibly freeing to City Council and Assembly members who make all their decisions based on who’s for and who’s against what, who think that I can’t piss off Kathy Wylde (the head of the group that advocates for big businesses) or Peter Ward (the former head of the hotel workers union who’s on the board of Tusk’s “blank check” company pooling funds for an undetermined acquisition) or George Gresham (the head of the giant health-care workers union that’s backing Maya Wiley).
One of the most powerful potential outcomes of us winning is to show that the emperor has no clothes.
Winning is still an awfully big if, but Tusk is clearly in the habit of taking big swings and of doing well for himself in the course of moving fast and breaking things, as the tech guys used to say.
Tusk, who says he’s doing so out of his love for the city and may also be considering how he’s perceived here, is opening a bookstore on Orchard St., between Stanton and Rivington, that he says will have a podcast studio anyone can use for free and an event space. It’s going to be called P&T Knitwear, after the shop his grandfather had a few blocks south.
“I made a lot of money but I really try to invest in things I believe in,” Tusk says, including a push for universal school breakfasts, the mobile voting thing, and, with longtime Bloomberg hand Howard Wolfson, a $50,000 annual Gotham Book Prize for a new book about New York City (Professor Christina Greer, my co-host on FAQ.NYC, is one of the judges).
“I didn’t grow up with a lot of money,” Tusk says, and “I didn’t make a lot of it in politics where no one does unless you’re really corrupt.”
But Tusk has a lot now and, he says, “rather than buying more and more (stuff), I’m trying to see what I can do with my money to have an impact — not because I’m a wonderful person but because life gets more interesting that way.”