Presidential candidate Andrew Yang said Friday he walked away from Thursday night’s debate not “encouraged” for the Democrats’ future.

“I stood at the center of the political universe last night and did not come away encouraged by our future. Will do my best to change that,” the former tech executive tweeted.

Mr. Yang only spoke for two minutes and 50 seconds, the least amount of speaking time between all 20 candidates who debated Wednesday and Thursday.

He claimed to supporters that his microphone was “not on” when he tried to interject during the Miami MSNBC debate.

“There were also a few times, FYI, where I just started talking, being like, ‘Hey, I want to add something there,’ and my mic was not on. And it’s this sort of thing where, it’s not like if you started talking, it takes over the [conversation]. It’s like I was talking, but nothing was happening. And it was like, ‘Oh f***.’ So that happened a bit too,” Mr. Yang said.

This led to the viral hashtag “#LetYangSpeak” to trend on Twitter on Friday.

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