WASHINGTON — The architects of the 2016 insurgent campaign for Sen. Bernie Sanders abruptly parted ways with his 2020 campaign Tuesday, dealing him a surprise blow one week after he entered the presidential race with an emphatic show of fundraising strength.

The consultants, Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh, said in a statement that they were “leaving because we believe that Sen. Sanders deserves to have media consultants who share his creative vision for the campaign.”

Their decision was unexpected: The three produced the announcement video that Sanders released last week, which has helped him raise $10 million, and they had been intimately involved in the planning of a second White House bid for the Vermont senator.

The rupture infuriated some of Sanders’ supporters, who feared it would detract from a stunning financial haul that they had hoped would quiet the doubters about a second Sanders candidacy. The shake-up was also the latest indication that Sanders is going to run a different kind of race this time around — or at least, that his advisers want him to do so.

In a brief interview, Longabaugh said he and his partners, who produced some of Sanders’ most memorable 2016 ads, had strategic differences with the senator and his wife, Jane, who is his closest adviser. “We came to realize this was just not going to work,” he said, noting that the disagreements “built over time.”

Longabaugh, who said he told Sanders on Tuesday morning of the decision, would not specify the nature of the disagreements.

But after running a highly improvisational campaign against Hillary Clinton, Sanders has been taking steps toward a more conventional race this time. He hired a new campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, the former ACLU political director, and the trio of consultants had little say in the decision to replace his 2016 manager, Jeff Weaver.

Shakir, who did not know the strategists were planning to quit, had not even yet met with them. Sanders’ new team said little about the surprise exit of the consultants’ firm, known as Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh. “The campaign appreciates all the good work DML has done and wishes them well,” Shakir said in a statement.

Privately, Sanders’ supporters were irritated and suggested the consultants walked away because they were not going to have the same influence as they did four years ago.

Longabaugh dismissed that claim, noting that advertising firms are by their nature central to modern campaigns and that Sanders would inevitably have come to rely on their long experience in Democratic politics.

The senator clashed at times with his consulting team in 2016 — particularly Devine, and particularly at the end of the race when it was clear that Sanders could not win the nomination — but Mulvey and Longabaugh had been expected to play central roles in 2020. For months, they had made the case that Sanders should not be underestimated.

But Tuesday, Longabaugh would not rule out the firm working for another Democratic candidate. “We haven’t talked about that, so I’m not going to comment,” he said.

Sanders, who struggled to win African-Americans voters, has made clear that he wanted a more diverse array of campaign advisers after largely surrounding himself with white men in 2016. The three consultants departing are all white, while Shakir will be the first Muslim in American history to run a presidential campaign.

And Sanders will hold a series of rallies this weekend that nod to his biography — a marked contrast to his 2016 campaign, when he eschewed talking about himself and relentlessly focused on his progressive policy agenda. He is appearing in Brooklyn, where he was born, and in Chicago, where he went to college and joined civil rights protests. The weekend tour will include a stop in Selma, Alabama, for events marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday there.

And while he may have a different group of advisers for this campaign, Sanders clearly retains the same grassroots appeal: On his first day as a presidential candidate, he raised nearly $6 million, and Monday, six days after he joined the 2020 race, campaign officials said he had secured $10 million from 359,914 donors.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.