After his performance at the South Carolina Democratic Convention — which is available on YouTube — presidential hopeful Andrew Yang jumped to third place in a betting market for the winner of the 2020 presidential election on PredictIt, a New Zealand-based prediction market. Others experienced a small decline in odds following the event, including Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg.

Yang used his appearance to speak about his belief that automation is posing a threat to the way of life for many people in the United States, and his plan of using Universal Basic Income (UBI) to pave the way to a solution.

“As most of you know, I am not a career politician,” Yang began. “I’m an entrepreneur and problem solver, and I’m here with you all to help solve the problem of our time. And the problem speaks to this question: how did Donald Trump win the election in 2016?”

Yang continued to highlight that although many reasons are circulating around cable news and other outlets, they are missing the real reason.

“I believe that the fundamental reason that Donald Trump is our president today is this: we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all the swing states he needed to win — and did win.”

Yang continued to say that his friends in Silicon Valley believe that in the same way that manufacturing jobs — which he says “defined a community and a way of life” — were replaced with automation, so too will retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs, and others throughout the economy.

After tonight’s performance in SC, Yang has jumped to 3rd in betting markets for the presidency.



Third.



Behind Biden and Trump.



It’s happening #YangGang pic.twitter.com/9r42uEyfDx — Zach Graumann (@Zach_Graumann) June 22, 2019

As The Inquisitr previously reported, Yang has had a tough time getting support from mainstream media outlets, not unlike Sanders’ difficulty with his 2016 presidential campaign. He was removed from a list of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates provided by MSNBC earlier this month and was again removed from a graphic showing photos of the candidates set to appear in the first debates. The network went so far as to include one candidate who didn’t qualify, Seth Moulton.

Yang has previously criticized the media for their coverage of President Donald Trump. He claims that they are failing to explain Trump’s appeal, and believes that Trump got a significant amount of credit for simply pointing out the pain of communities that were affected by job losses due to automation. Yang believes Trump was elected in large part due to this, as opposed to racism, ignorance, immigration, and other factors commonly pushed in mainstream narratives.