Part of running for President is the contest to tell the best story about the problems of the country. Both Donald Trump and some of his Democratic rivals have spent significant time narrating the economic uncertainty in the lives of all but the richest Americans, a feeling of entrapment and helplessness.

The odds that the Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang will last long in the race are slim, but in the contest to describe what’s wrong with America he has become a compelling and distinctive figure. Yang’s story begins with the displacement of workers by automation. He blames Donald Trump’s 2016 victory on the loss of four million manufacturing jobs in swing states. The loss of jobs, he emphasizes, has not been limited to manufacturing. Technology has taken revenue from malls, from newspapers, from taxi-drivers. For Yang, our country’s divisions are a purely economic story, with other problems—nastiness, racism, misogyny, bad ideas—caused in part by the decline in reasoning that sets in when you can’t pay your bills. Yang talks about the rise in suicide, the rise in drug overdoses, the increase in the numbers of people claiming disability benefits. What he describes is a loss of meaning on a massive scale.

One good way to patronize a lot of small American businesses is to run for President. On a rainy Thursday in mid-June, Yang was at Crackskull’s, a ramshackle coffee shop and used-book store in the town of Newmarket, in southern New Hampshire. Stickers that read “Buy local,” “Make jobs not war,” and “Take big $ out of politics” were plastered on the door, and watercolors by a local artist decorated one wall. A bulletin board advertised a support group for addicts. A crowd of about seventy people waited for Yang to arrive, the milk foamer steaming while they chatted politics.

Every four years, the entire state of New Hampshire gets wooed by Presidential candidates, and at least some segment of the population treats attending meet-and-greets like a part-time job. Someone remarked that Julián Castro’s audience in the same venue had been only half as large as the crowd that now gathered for Yang. “Carly Fiorina—now, she was always on time,” a retiree named Gene Bishop remembered, of a bygone primary season. He was among four or five already-converted supporters wearing Yang T-shirts. There was also a knot of teen-age boys representing the Timberlane High School Owls, and a man wearing a shirt that read “Unity,” printed by a group called No Labels that advocates for bipartisanship. There were couples, retirees, and a family with kids.

Yang entered theatrically, at a slight jog, waving as if he were taking the stage to an audience at Macworld and not the damp confines of a small-town café. The café’s stage, set into a bay window, had a striped vintage armchair that seemed more appropriate for children’s storytelling hours. Yang, who wore a navy-blue suit, a light-blue shirt, and no tie, opted to stand. He began his speech with an overview of his résumé—his childhood in upstate New York, his education at Phillips Exeter Academy and Brown University, his ups and downs as an entrepreneur—operating under the reasonable premise that a majority of the people in the room had no idea who he is.

Yang is a natural public speaker who delivers his stump speech like it’s a TED talk, laden with references to statistics and social research and with an emphasis on the counterintuitive. He favors information over ideology, with an approach to narrative that mimics the chatty colloquialisms of an NPR podcast rather than preacherly rhetorical flourishes. It’s less a stump speech than a social-studies lesson. After the short biographical introduction, Yang started talking, as he often does, about truck drivers.

Driving a truck, he told the room, is the most common job in twenty-nine states, including New Hampshire. “There are three and a half million truck drivers in this country, ninety-four per cent men, average age forty-nine, and they make about forty-six thousand dollars a year,” he said. The audience considered this person, the middle-aged, middle-income, male truck driver. He still has a full-time job; soon, as self-driving trucks become more common, he may not.

The primary advantage of the robot truck is that it never stops driving. It does not need to get out and stretch or stop for a gas-station burrito or use a coin-operated truck-stop shower or go to sleep in a Motel 6. Yang described how, when the truck driver loses his job, those businesses will also lose money. The job losses, he added, will continue into other sectors, including professional ones. Yang asked if local businesses have been closing. The audience answered yes. He asked why.

“Amazon,” several people called out.

“And how much is Amazon paying in taxes?” Yang asked.

“Zero!”

Yang likes to say that Trump got all the problems right but offered the wrong solutions. The answer to the decline in blue-collar work is not bringing back coal jobs or protectionist tariffs. A tech company is not going to invest in retraining a fifty-year-old truck driver with chronic health problems. Yang’s vision for the country begins with universal basic income, or, as he decided to call it after some market research, the “freedom dividend.” Under this policy, every American over eighteen will receive a thousand dollars a month from the government. (In certain cases, people already receiving government assistance will have to choose between their benefits and the monthly payment.) The income will be funded by a value-added tax on the nation’s corporations. He compares it to the oil dividends received by every adult in the red state of Alaska.

“And what is the oil of the twenty-first century?” he asked in New Hampshire.

“Technology!” his followers chorused.

I met my first Yang supporter at a strike by Uber and Lyft drivers in Los Angeles, last spring. His name was Sam Nuzbrokh, and he came to a rally in a park next to Los Angeles International Airport dressed in business-casual clothes and carrying a box of bumper stickers. He told me that, in 2016, he had been drawn to Trump’s message of dissatisfaction about the economy. “Trump was a scream against that, but it was incoherent,” he said. He became a Yang supporter after hearing the candidate on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a podcast that explores topics such as bodybuilding, hunting your own meat, standup comedy, and psychedelics, and had thrown himself into campaigning. Sam said he had helped organize a Yang rally in Los Angeles in May and handed out info at a dockworker solidarity march earlier in the year, another sector threatened by automation.

Yang has several mottos. There’s “Humanity First.” There’s “Not left, not right, it’s forward.” He is a centrist, not as Kamala Harris or Joe Biden are centrists, by not diverging too far from the status quo, but in that he presents his policy proposals in language that disorients voters from the known ideological maps of their political platforms. His technocratic populism attracts podcast listeners, tech-industry venture capitalists, libertarians, Trump supporters, proud Asian-Americans, and white men who feel they have been unfairly blamed for the perpetuation of inequality.