The Saturday morning coffee rush is in full swing at one of the many Dunkin’ restaurants sprinkled acrossManchester, New Hampshire’s most populated city, as Khrystina Snell seta up her campaign materials at a table near the counter.

Crew members wearing brown aprons and headsets pivot and jostle as they fill orders for customers in Red Sox caps and flip-flops and tend to the drive-thru line.

This pink-and-orange coffee shop straddles a metaphorical line between tradition and progress: Customers can order the same types of donuts that have been on the menu for decades, but they can now order them using phone apps. Other changes are coming. The 70-year-old chain rolled out a rebranding initiative and announced its intentions to embrace automation last year, which means at some point customers may be able to order through a robot.

No one can predict exactly what will happen to employees like these as automated systems increasingly displace workers. But on this overcast morning in a fairly typical New England working-class neighborhood, a handful of activists try to get people talking about what they believe is a critical and overlooked topic, less than a year before the New Hampshire presidential primary on February 11, 2020.

They call themselves the “Yang Gang.” — supporters of entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a Democrat and one of about two dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls lined up with hopes of snagging the nomination next year. Snell, who serves as New Hampshire state director forYang’s presidential campaign, expects just a half-dozen people at two weekend canvassing events planned in the state.

That’s hardly surprising. Even here in New Hampshire, where politics loom large, it’s too early to get people to commit to a candidate. And of the many candidates vying for attention in the February 2020 primary, Yang, 44, a former tech executive campaigning on the splashy promise of a universal basic income to support workers displaced by technology, is one of the least known in a field that includes Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg; and former vice president Joe Biden.

But Yang has a message that should resonate for people in Manchester — once a manufacturing hub with a textile mill employing more than 17,000 people — as well as cities in the Rust Belt and Appalachia with similar stories. Just as the robots of Dunkin’ will automate away cashier jobs, Yang sees that employment in mining sectors, for example, and manufacturing have vanished with technological innovation. He doesn’t want to tamp down the innovation, but he sees his Universal Basic Income proposal — which he calls a “Freedom Dividend” that would pay $1,000 per month to everyone in the country over age 18 to take care of basic expenses — as an answer to it, a way to encourage entrepreneurship in areas where innovation has lead to job loss.