The businessman and entrepreneur Andrew Yang has won support by pitching himself as a numbers-driven truth teller, whose status as a political outsider and business credentials have given him a uniquely clear-eyed view of America’s problems and how to solve them. His stump speech, which balances depressing data points with moments of levity and enthusiastic moments of call and response, encapsulates both Mr. Yang’s message and affable personality.

Many who have watched him give a version of this speech over the past year see, in Mr. Yang, an average guy earnestly worried about America’s future — a person not so unlike them. At this event, Mr. Yang was introduced by Kyle Christensen, an Iowa resident who has been receiving a monthly $1,000 “Freedom Dividend” since last summer as part of a trial program funded by the candidate.

Hello Des Moines, Iowa, how are you! This is the best birthday party a man could ask for! Wow. This is enormous! This is incredible!

Analysis Andrew Yang turned 45 the day he delivered this speech, at Drake University. The audience sang “Happy Birthday” to him and cheered.

Thank you so much. It’s tremendous to be back here in Iowa. I love this place so much, because you all have the future of the country in your hands. And I’m happy to say most of you know this.

Analysis He will expand on this idea shortly. He makes the same pitch to voters in New Hampshire, home to the nation’s first primary.

How many presidential candidates have you seen so far this cycle? And it can be people that have dropped out? So that’s like — this would be five [counting on his fingers], this would be four, two, 10, 27 — you’ve seen them all? I didn’t even know we got to 27; I’ve been pretty diligent about figuring out who’s running, too.

Analysis Mr. Yang peppers light moments throughout his stump speech, often finding humor in the very Democratic primary process that he himself is a part of.

The reason why we all come to you to present our vision for the country and win your support is because of this outsized power you have. I did the math; do you know how many Californians each Iowan is worth? Yeah, 1,000 Californians each.

Analysis By emphasizing the importance of each Iowan, Mr. Yang is simultaneously catering to and empowering the caucusgoers he needs to show up. This kind of creative number-crunching was particularly helpful to him early in his campaign, when his events sometimes attracted only a few dozen people.

So how many of us are here together in this room? I’m going to give a Trump-ian estimate: There are 7,000 people here. It’s the biggest room anyone’s ever seen!

This, legitimately, I believe, is something like six or seven hundred, which would be the equivalent of, gosh — use some math, you’ll be fine — that’s something like 15 football stadiums full of Californians. That’s the power right here in this room tonight. This is the power to actually change the course of history.

Analysis Many supporters sport hats that say “MATH” — an acronym for “Make America Think Harder” that speaks to Mr. Yang’s penchant for data and numbers.

And I know some of you know this power; some of you are incredibly diligent about how you are going to make use of it. Others of you are kind of new to it; you’re just kind of living your lives, maybe going to school here at Drake. How many of you are students here at Drake? Let’s get a sense of that.

Yeah, so you may be new to this, but it is true; it’s up to you to do something that the rest of the country only dreams of. Most of our fellow Americans look up and see our government as a series of pipes that are just clogged full of money — clogged with millions and millions of dollars of lobbyist cash – and they despair around our country that there is nothing they can do to change it. Americans are smart. They can generally do nothing to change it. It is going to be up to you all to change it on Feb. 3 and flush the pipes clean.

Analysis In some versions of his pitch to voters, Mr. Yang more specifically discusses his “democracy dollars” proposal, which he says would help drown out the influence of mega-wealthy companies and donors by giving each American $100 to support the candidates of his or her choosing.

Now I’m not a career politician. And certainly, the conversations at the Yang household growing up were not, “You’re going to run for president someday!” Like, that was not the message I got from my immigrant parents. My father got a Ph.D. in physics from U.C. Berkeley. When I was a little kid I used to think that everyone’s dad had a Ph.D. So I would go asking kids like, “What’s your dad’s Ph.D.?” And then one of them would be, like, “Here is what his Ph.D. is in.” [Makes punching motion] I was like, “Oh, no, what’d I say wrong?”

Analysis Mr. Yang is happy to lean repeatedly into perhaps the biggest contrast between himself and most of his remaining rivals: He is a political outsider. And he is now also one of only three people of color left in the race.

But we always had a very deep love of America in our household because my parents came here to find the American Dream, and it certainly worked for me and my brother. The message we got was “do well in school, get good grades, try to get a good job.” So that’s what I did.

I went to law school. I became an unhappy lawyer for five whole months. I then left to start a business. How many of you have started a business, or a club or an organization or a mailing list? Raise your hand? So if you have your hand up, you know a couple of things: No. 1: It’s much harder than anyone ever lets on; and No. 2, when someone asks you how it’s going, what do you say? “Great!” Everything is always going great. My business too went great until it failed. My parents told people I was still a lawyer.

Analysis Mr. Yang’s supporters have praised what they say is his self-awareness and willingness to admit failure. And although some Asian-Americans have criticized the way he has discussed his background, others say they relate to the portrait he paints of his upbringing.

But I was bitten by the bug. I worked at a small company again, and then another, and then another. And then I became the C.E.O. of an education company that grew to become No. 1 in the U.S. and was bought by a bigger company in 2009.

Analysis The company, Manhattan Prep, was bought by Kaplan. The sale made Mr. Yang a millionaire.

2009 was a very tough time in a lot of the country. How many of you were here in Iowa 11 years ago? And do you remember the financial crisis? How was it here in the Des Moines area? I was at an event earlier and I asked this question, and this 14-year-old boy said it was “really, really hard.” And I looked at him and I said, “How would you remember? You were 4 years old at the time.” And he said, “Well, my family had to sell our house — so I remember.”

It was a really tough time in so much of the country. And I had some insight, I thought, into why our economy crashed 11 years ago. It was because so many of the wannabe whiz kids I had gone to college and law school with had gone straight to Wall Street and come up with mortgage-backed securities and financial derivatives and these exotic financial instruments that had helped crash our economy. And I thought, well, that’s the opposite of what we should have people doing. So I decided to try and change it.

Analysis Here, Mr. Yang is beginning to build a narrative about himself that is central to his candidacy: He is a normal guy — but one who seeks to solve problems after he identifies them.

Now how many of you all work at nonprofits now? How many of you have volunteered at a nonprofit? You all should just raise your hand on that second one. That one’s pretty much, are you a nice person? Well yes I am! There was that one time!

So, and this is where my wife Evelyn starts to come in, because I went to her — I was a pretty normal guy when we met, I was working at a small company — and I come home and I’m like, “Hey, I want to quit my job and start this nonprofit to help train entrepreneurs to create jobs around the country.” And so how do you start a nonprofit? The way I started Venture for America was I founded a 501c3, I put some of our savings into it, and then I started calling rich friends with this question: “Do you love America?” The smart among them said, “What does it mean if I say yes?” And I said at least $10,000. And 12 of them said, “I love America for that much.” I was like, “I thought you did!”

Analysis One of Mr. Yang’s reliable laugh lines.

So we started with a couple hundred thousand, it grows and grows. Eventually, over seven years running this nonprofit, we helped create several thousand jobs in 15 cities around the country. It was so successful that I was honored by the Obama administration multiple times, so I got to bring Evelyn to meet the president. My in-laws were very excited about me that week. They were like, “She did alright! You should check out the picture!”

Analysis Mr. Yang has acknowledged that while Venture for America, which continues to operate under different leadership, did create a few thousand jobs, it is falling far short of his stated goal of creating 100,000 jobs by 2025.

But during my seven years traveling the Midwest and the south as C.E.O. of Venture for America, I saw so many parts of the country I had not seen before. How many of you grew up here in Iowa? How about the Northeast like me or the East Coast? West Coast? South? So I had never been to Missouri, or Alabama, or Louisiana or even Ohio prior to running Venture for America. And I was staggered by the gulf between regions in this country — where if you fly in between St. Louis and San Francisco or Michigan and Manhattan you feel like you’re crossing decades, and dimensions, and ways of life and not just traveling a few time zones.

Analysis Mr. Yang is introducing a core argument: that his experience as the head of the nonprofit gave him a window into what he sees at the root cause of nationwide anxiety and something that led to the election of President Trump: automation.

But I was still stunned when Donald Trump became our president in 2016. I know you all remember that night well. How did you react when Donald Trump won? Tears, shock, disbelief. Someone said bourbon. To me, it was a giant red flag where tens of millions of our fellow Americans decided to take a bet on the narcissist reality TV star as our president.

And even if you reacted with shock or dismay, we all have family members and friends and neighbors who celebrated his victory. And I know that’s the case here in Iowa because he won Iowa by more than 8 points. And this is a purple state.

So if you were to turn on cable news that night or really any night since then, why would you think that Donald Trump won and is our president today? So I heard Russia, Hilary Clinton, D.N.C. So relevant! I heard Facebook. Go ahead and shout out from the back. Insecurity. Emails. Not a politician. Fear. Immigrants. Despair. Reality Star. Facebook.

Analysis Mr. Yang and his campaign have feuded with the Democratic National Committee over its qualification criteria for the Democratic debates. He missed the cutoff for the January debate but he will be onstage for the first one in February.

These are the reasons that have been presented to us in some kind of mixture and said this is why Donald Trump won. But Des Moines, I’m a numbers guy — I went through the numbers looking for an explanation, and I found it: We blasted away 4 million manufacturing jobs over the last number of years, and where were those jobs based primarily? Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri and over 40,000 right here in Iowa.

Analysis Here he makes his argument about automation explicitly and ties it to swing states Mr. Trump won in 2016. Note that we are halfway through his speech and there has been no mention of topics like gun control, climate change or health care.

I have been to the towns in Iowa that have lost those manufacturing jobs, and after the plant or factory closed, the shopping district closed, people started to leave, the school shrank, and the community has never recovered. I have seen the exact same thing play out in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, and around the country. And unfortunately what we did to those jobs is now shifting to other parts of our economy.

How many of you have noticed stores closing around where you live here in Iowa? And why are those stores closing?

Audience Amazon!

Amazon, that’s right. Amazon is soaking up $20 billion in business every single year, closing 30 percent of our stores and malls. The most common job in the economy is retail clerk. The average retail clerk is a 39-year-old woman making between $8 and $10 an hour. What is her next job when the store closes? How much did Amazon pay in federal taxes last year?

Audience Zero!

That is your math, Iowa: $20 billion out; 30 percent of your stores and malls closed forever; you get zero.

Analysis Mr. Yang inserts enough data in his pitch to convince voters that he is the numbers guy he claims to be. By playing up his quantitative approach and painting himself as non-ideological, he is drawing a subtle contrast with some of his Democratic rivals.

Now it’s not just the self-serve kiosks we can see in the McDonalds, or the grocery store or the CVS. The changes are more pervasive. When you all call the customer service line of a big company and you get the software or bot, I’m sure you do the exact same thing I do, which is you pound “0-0-0” and say “human, human, human, representative, representative, representative,” over and over again until someone picks up. Raise your hand if that’s what you do. Oh, yeah, we all do that. That software is terrible. As soon as you hear it you think, “Oh man, I hope this company still employs a human,” and you try to get to one. But in two or three short years, the software is going to sound like this: “Hey Andrew, how’s it going? What can I do for you?” It will be fast, seamless, peppy.

Analysis Another of Mr. Yang’s most reliable laugh lines, vignettes like these help reinforce the idea that Mr. Yang has much more in common with voters than longtime Washington politicians.

What will that mean for the 2.5 million Americans who work at call centers right now making $10 to $14 an hour? How many of you all know a truck driver here in Iowa? There are 3.5 million truckers in the country — 94 percent men, average age 49.

Analysis Mr. Yang’s attention to the plight of truckers, especially early in his campaign, helped him build a base of support from white men across the ideological spectrum.

My friends in California are working on robot trucks that can drive themselves. A robot truck just transported 20 tons of butter from California to Pennsylvania two weeks ago with no human intervention. Why 20 tons of butter? I have no idea. But if you Google “robot butter truck” you will see the article; and then at the end of the journey there was a giant stack of pancakes in Pennsylvania.

Analysis Here is the article. In associating himself with tech and Silicon Valley, Mr. Yang tries to give the impression that he understands the internet and social media better than some of his septuagenarian rivals.

What will the robot trucks mean for the 3.5 million truckers, or the 7 million Americans who work at truck stops, motels and diners around the country that rely upon the truckers getting out and having a meal every day? How many of you have been to Iowa 80 in Davenport? Yeah, me too. They have a really reasonably priced buffet. They say that 5,000 people stop at Iowa 80 every day. How many people will stop there when the trucks no longer have drivers?

Analysis It’s not exactly doom and gloom, but Mr. Yang’s rhetorical questions are meant to leave voters with the distinct impression that things could get worse in America, in a hurry.

Iowa, we are in the midst of the greatest economic transformation in the history of our country – what experts are calling the “fourth industrial revolution.” When is the last time you heard a politician say the words “fourth industrial revolution?” Three seconds ago. And I am barely a politician.

So after Trump wins in 2016 I go through the facts and figures in 2017, I say ‘Oh my gosh, we’re scapegoating immigrants for things immigrants have next to nothing to do with. We’re going through this transformative period.

So I went to our leaders in D.C. and I asked them, “What are we going to do to help our people manage this time – this transition?” And what do you think the folks in D.C. said to me when I said, “What are we going to do?” The three big responses I got from the folks in D.C. were these: No. 1: “We cannot talk about this”; No. 2: “We should study this further”; and No. 3: “We must educate and retrain all Americans for the jobs of the future.” How many of you have ever heard something like that?

Analysis Mr. Yang’s rhetoric is not as pointed as that of some of his competitors. And he rarely targets mega-rich corporate leaders. Instead he saves his sharpest criticism for Washington politicians who he believes bear responsibility for failing to hold the other groups accountable.

But I’m a numbers guy and I looked at the studies. So I said to the folks who said we’re going to educate and retrain everyone, I said: “Hey, do you want to know what the effectiveness rate of government-funded retraining programs were for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs?”

You all want to guess what those effectiveness rates were? So, I’m anchoring you very low, so you know it’s low, but you also know it’s low because you’re human beings and you know what other human beings are like, and if you had 1,000 manufacturing workers walk out of the factory that closed, they don’t all say, “Alright, I’m ready for my coding skills training.” And they don’t go in being like, “Oh, this is what I wanted to do the whole time!” And six weeks later they aren’t being like, “Time to get hired by I.B.M.” I mean, we know that’s ridiculous.

Analysis Here, Mr. Yang leans on the sort of plain-spokenness that has won him supporters.

The real-life success rates of those government-funded retraining programs were between 0 and 15 percent. Almost half of the workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry in the Midwest never worked again. We then saw surges in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities because half of them filed for disability and they did not find new work. When I said this to the folks in D.C., they said, “Well I guess we’ll get better at the retraining programs then.” And then they went back to their lunch.

Analysis Mr. Yang makes a point of looking as if he is having fun on the trail and avoids going negative. This is about as scathing a criticism as he is likely to offer.

One person in D.C. said something that brought me here to you all today, Des Moines. He said, “Andrew, you’re in the wrong town. No one here will do anything about this, because fundamentally, this is a town of followers, not leaders. And the only way that we will do anything about it is if you were to create a wave in other parts of the country and bring that wave crashing down on our heads.” And I said, “Challenge accepted. I’ll be back in two years.” So that was two years ago, Iowa, and now we are three weeks away from the wave!

Analysis This is one of his major applause lines, and one that has grown in popularity as the caucuses have drawn closer.

I know many of you had not heard of me until quite recently. How many of you are here because you saw a TV ad? Not many of you, wow. We spent a lot of money on those ads. It’s actually quite upsetting.

It’s actually fine; I prefer when people find out from some other — from another human being, ideally.

This campaign is about taking hold of our government that has now just been completely overrun by the corporate money and return it to us — and then rewrite the rules of the 21st century economy to work for you, to work for your families, to work for communities.

Analysis This is another of Mr. Yang’s central messages. He spent many months introducing himself and trying to convince voters that he had properly identified automation as one of America’s core problems; as he has gained followers and raised money, he has started focusing more on the solutions, which he is about to lay out.

I know if you’re here today, at some point you heard there’s a man running for president who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month. And I know the first time you heard that, you thought, “That’s a gimmick, that’s too good to be true, that’s not possible.” But this is not my idea, Iowa. And it’s not a new idea.

Analysis This part of Mr. Yang’s speech represents his attempt to explain, support and normalize the idea of providing a universal basic income to every American, his signature proposal.

Thomas Paine was for this at the founding of the country; he called it the “citizen’s dividend for all Americans.” Martin Luther King, whose son I had the privilege of meeting with in Atlanta, was fighting for this in 1968 when he was killed, called the guaranteed minimum income. We celebrate his birthday every year, but we don’t actually celebrate what he was fighting for when he died.

A thousand economists, including Milton Friedman, one of the fathers of modern-day economics, endorsed this plan in the 60s. It was so mainstream, it passed the U.S. House of Representatives twice in 1971 under Richard Nixon. The Family Assistance Plan would have guaranteed every American family a certain level of income.

And then 11 years later, one state passed a dividend where now everyone in that state gets between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, no questions asked.

And what state is that? Audience Alaska! And how do they pay for it? Audience Oil! And what is the oil of the 21st century? Audience Technology!

Analysis This particular call and response with supporters has become a fan favorite — it injects energy into the crowd and often leaves people who are seeing Mr. Yang for the first time with a positive impression of the enthusiasm surrounding his campaign.

Data, technology, A.I., self-driving cars and trucks. A study just came out that said that our data is worth more than oil. How many if you saw that study? How many of you got your data check in the mail last month?

If our data is now worth billions of dollars a year, who is getting all that money? Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and the trillion-dollar tech companies that are paying zero or near zero back into our country. You see how this is working? You have this sense that we’re being sucked dry because we are being sucked dry. And your kids feel like they have to go some place else to access the opportunities that they want.

How many of you are parents like me and my wife Evelyn? If you have your hand up and you are a parent you’ve had this sinking feeling at some point in the last number of years that we are leaving our kids a future that is less stable, less secure, less prosperous than the lives that we have led. You know why we feel that way as parents? Because it is that way.

Analysis It is this sort of blunt, direct attempt at truth-telling that makes Mr. Yang’s supporters view him as an ally who understands their struggles.

If you were born in the 1940s in the United States of America, there was a 93 percent chance you were going to be better off than your parents. That’s the American dream — it brought my family here. If you were born in the 1990s, which I see is many of you, you’re down to a 50-50 shot, and it’s declining fast.

This is why Trump won. This is why people feel insecure about the future. It’s because we’re smart. It’s not just climate change. It’s that things are falling apart by the numbers. We have to build a trickle-up economy — from ourselves, our people, our families and our communities up. We have to make the machines work for us instead of all working for the machine.

So this is what you can all make happen just like that. That’s why I love being here. It’s because of this power that you have. You can take this vision of a trickle-up economy to the rest of the country and it will take off like wildfire. I just came from New Hampshire and they’re waiting for it so big time. You know what the third party of New Hampshire is? It’s Libertarians — and they love the freedom dividend. It’s half named after them.

If we get you our fair share of every Amazon sale, every Google search, every Facebook ad, eventually every robot truck mile and A.I. work unit, we can easily afford a $1,000 dividend for every American — particularly because the money does not disappear.

Analysis Mr. Yang does not offer much detail here about how he would fund universal basic income. Undecided voters sometimes ask about it during the Q&A portion, and many have said in interviews that they find his response — which involves a value-added tax — unsatisfying and complicated.

Where will it go after it’s in your hands? How much of it would stay right here in Iowa? Most of it. Not all of it. You might get your own Netflix password. But most of it would go to nights out and car repairs you’ve been putting off, and daycare expenses and Little League sign-ups and local nonprofits and religious organizations. It would make us stronger, healthier, mentally healthier, more trusting, more optimistic. We could get the boot off of everyone’s throats just like that. And we have to do it, because we’re in the midst of this historic transformation of our economy that is pushing more and more of us to the sideline.

We’re getting these messages all the time about how great things are. You see them, I know you do. Corporate profits — record high. G.D.P — record high. Headline unemployment — looks great. But how many of you know that also at record highs in this country right now: stress, anxiety, depression, financial insecurity, student-loan debts, even suicides and drug overdoses. Suicides and drug overdoses have gotten so bad that they have brought our life expectancy down for the last three years in a row.

You know the last time America’s life expectancy declined three years in a row? The Great Depression is a great guess. It’s a little bit earlier than that. It’s the Spanish Flu of 1918 — a global pandemic that killed millions. You have to go back a century to find a time in America where our life expectancy started to drop like this. This time it is dropping because suicides and drug overdoses have each overtaken vehicle deaths for the first time in history.

Analysis At times, the speech can feel less like a voter pitch than a mini college lecture that blends American history, politics and economics. Mr. Yang is betting that if he can “Make America Think Harder” about societal problems, voters will see logic in his pitch and gravitate to his camp.

For context, it is highly unusual in a developed country for your life expectancy to ever go down. It ordinarily just keeps going up because you’re getting richer, stronger, healthier. But not the United States of America. It’s gone down, and then down, and then down again.

So if corporate profits are going up and life expectancy is going down, which do you listen to? We know which one D.C. is listening to. D.C. can barely see people and life expectancy. D.C. can just see the dollar signs. Do you all know that Washington D.C. today is the richest city in our country? What do they produce? No one knows, but business is awfully good.

We need to have term limits for our members of Congress when they go to D.C. Their jobs should be to get something done for us and then come home. Their jobs should not be to crouch there as long as possible and be like, “Oh, oh, let me stay here a little while longer.” As your president, I will do the people’s business for eight years and then you will never hear from me again. And I’m certainly not going to stay in that town an extra day.

Donald Trump said he wanted to drain the swamp and got a lot of support from many people. I want to do something a bit different; I want to distribute the swamp. What does that mean? Why do we employ hundreds of thousands of employees in the most expensive city in our country? Wouldn’t it make more sense to move some of those jobs to Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri? We’d save billions of dollars in costs immediately – and I would argue that the decisions that our regulators make would improve because they’d actually live some place normal, instead of in D.C. where they’re just talking to each other all the time.

So here are some of the ways we can retake our government and get it working for us. They’re telling us how great things are but we can feel there’s something wrong going on where you work and live every day. And as usual, we have it right, and the numbers are heading the wrong direction. I know how wrong the numbers are because of my own family. My wife, Evelyn, is at home with our two boys right now – one of whom is autistic. How much is her work measured at in our statistics every single day or year? That’s a zero.

And it’s not just Evelyn and stay-at-home parents like her around the country; or caregivers like Kyle who are taking care of ailing loved ones; or volunteers and activists in our communities who are trying to make them better; or coaches and mentors who are trying to make people stronger; or 98 percent of the artists who can’t actually make ends meet with their creative pursuits; or, increasingly, local journalists. We have put 2,000 local papers out of business over the last number of months. How does a democracy function if no one knows what’s happening in their community? These are the things that we claim to value most: our families, our communities, our democracy. But we are allowing them to get zeroed out, one by one by one. This is what you all must change in 21 days.

Analysis One of Mr. Yang’s campaign slogans is “Humanity First.” Voters have said in interviews that they’re struck by the genuine concern they hear emanating from him, and that they appreciate his intimate approach and tone, which stands in contrast to candidates seeking a political revolution.

As your president I will go to our Bureau of Economic Analysis and say hey, G.D.P., 100 years old and really out of date. Robot trucks will be very good for G.D.P. and corporate profits; they’ll be very bad for a lot of people. So instead of following this measurement off a cliff, I will modernize it to include our own health and life expectancy; our mental health and freedom from substance abuse; student loan indebtedness and affordability; clear air and clean water and environmental sustainability; the proportion of Americans who can retire in quality circumstances.

These are the real measurements of our progress, and as your president, I will report them to you every year at the State of the Union. I will be the first president to use a PowerPoint deck at the State of the Union. If you like that visual, you definitely came to the right place.

Analysis Long one of his biggest applause lines, Mr. Yang leans into the portrait he has painted of himself as a nerdy, data-driven lover of numbers.

We have to get the measurements right to actually solve the real problems that are plaguing us that helped get Donald Trump elected. The Democrats to me are acting like Donald Trump is the source of all of our problems. He’s not. He’s a symptom and we have to cure the disease. This is the case you have to take to the rest of the country in a few short weeks, Des Moines. We have to let people know that we’re after the root causes, and not just blaming Donald Trump for problems that were here long before he got to the White House.

I am not running for president because I dreamt about being president as a kid. I’m running for president because, like many of you here in this room tonight, I’m a parent and a patriot. I have seen the future that lies ahead for the next generation and it is not something I am willing to accept.

Analysis In the fall, Mr. Yang began talking more about being a parent, and his insistence that we build a better future for our children. He is seeking to portray himself as someone who is not driven by political ambition, and who is running to ensure that better future.

Donald Trump is our president today because he had a very simple message: He said he was going to “make America great again.” And what did Hilary Clinton say in response? America’s already great. Remember that Des Moines? It’s been a long three years, I know. But it’s about to end. That was not the right response because we need to acknowledge the depth and severity and reality of the problems in our communities. But then we need real solutions to move our country forward. What were Donald Trump’s solutions? Build a wall. Turn the clock back. Bring the old jobs back.

Analysis Mr. Yang supported Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, in which Mr. Sanders ran against Hillary Clinton. Criticizing her, even gently, helps bolster his credentials with disaffected and anti-establishment Democrats — a core part of his base.

Des Moines, we have to do the opposite of these things. We have to turn the clock forward. We have to accelerate our economy and society to rise to the real challenges of the 21st century. We have to evolve in the way we see ourselves and our work and our value. I am the ideal candidate for this job, because the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math.

Analysis Originally a laugh line, this phrase, which draws on stereotypes about Asian-Americans, has now evolved into perhaps the biggest applause line of Mr. Yang’s speech.

Thank you.

MATH is an acronym and what does it stand for? Make America Think Harder, that’s right. That’s your job in 21 days; it is your job to move this country, not left, not right, but forward.