Donald Trump won 2,584 counties in the 2016 presidential election; Hillary Clinton carried only 472. But the Democratic nominee’s accounted for nearly two-thirds of America’s economic output, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.

This is one vivid illustration of America’s great divide. Glittering coastal cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington are becoming richer and more influential, attracting more jobs, better hospitals and schools, and technology. Small towns and rural communitiesare falling further behind, feeding a sense that, to paraphrase LP Hartley, the coasts are a foreign country – they do things differently there.

Andrew Yang, a New York and Silicon Valley entrepreneur and David taking on multiple Goliaths in the Democratic race for the White House in 2020, is here to tell you that it’s about to become much, much worse – and that is why he is running for president.

Yang, 44, is the founder of Venture for America, a national public service fellowship that places recent graduates in struggling communities. “I would fly between St Louis and San Francisco, or Michigan and Manhattan, and I would feel like I was traversing dimensions and ways of life rather than just a couple of time zones,” he told the Guardian in Washington this week.