When Richard Ojeda first comes into view, he barrels down the hallway like a bowling ball and with barely a pleasantry exchanged, he’s already on the attack.

“I’m fit’na light a fire today!” are nearly the first words out of the West Virginia state senator’s mouth. He’s animated about a state supreme court justice accused of bilking taxpayers with a lavish office redesign, including a $32,000 couch. “You’re gonna see how I roll, just wait.”

There is a wait indeed, as the session of the state senate dawdles on well into the night. Ojeda has to hold his fury until the last order of business around 8pm, and fellow lawmakers seem mostly uninterested by then in his dramatic call for impeachment.

“I’m a military guy, and these guys mess with my military time,” he says of life as a legislator after more than two decades spent jumping out of planes with the US army, retiring as a major after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ojeda is part of a wave of blue-collar and military-minded Democrats challenging for congressional seats in the 2018 election in districts where Donald Trump won by double digits.

The district Ojeda is competing for: West Virginia’s third, where he was born and raised, elected Trump by an eye-popping 49-point margin. The current Republican House representative, Evan Jenkins, whose seat he is hoping to take, won by nearly as much.

Still Ojeda, who was nearly killed in a vicious assault during his state senate bid, is undaunted, if not downright cocky. “Put me in a room with 50 people and I guarantee you 48 them are going to walk out saying ‘Ojeda’s my guy’,” he said to a room full of campaign volunteers. “And if they’re Republicans I can still get ’em.”

West Virginia Democrats tend to diverge a bit from the national party, typically marrying a yeoman’s populism with heavy doses of social conservatism. Ojeda is different still, with aggressively and blunt rhetoric reminiscent of Donald Trump, and politics that run the gamut but skew towards the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. On abortion, Ojeda said “I hate the idea of telling a woman what to do with her body,” and expresses support for Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood. He supports Dreamers in their battle for immigration reform, is open to some forms of gun control, marijuana legalization and makes a case for a government role in providing healthcare.

Ojeda supported Trump in 2016, but calls the past year of the administration a ‘trainwreck’ and is especially frustrated by Trump’s tweets, ‘put the phone down. Be president!’ Photograph: Jeff Swensen/The Guardian

“We always keep saying ‘we’re the best, we’re the best.’ Other countries offer healthcare for their people. We don’t, so how are we the best there? We’ve got poverty all over the place and it’s the haves and the have-nots, so how are we the best there? Just because you have a military that could kick everybody’s ass doesn’t necessarily mean that means you’re the best,” he said.

‘Airborne!’

Ojeda supported Trump in 2016, but ask him if he’d do it again and he nearly interrupts the question to answer with a confident no, calling the past year of the administration a “trainwreck”. He’s especially frustrated by Trump’s tweets, “put the phone down. Be president!” and his appointment of family to high-level positions.

Even though their politics are quite different, in 2016 Ojeda appreciated that Trump made a point of promising to revive coal production in the state of West Virginia. “I know coal is dirty, but that’s all we got,” Ojeda said. “So as much as I’d love to have clean energy – solar panels everywhere – right now all we have is coal. The people I love and the people that I grew up with, that’s their livelihood, and I don’t want to see them starve.”

Ojeda speaks his mind with little self-policing, and has lots of choice terms for his political opponents. Don Blankenship, a former coal executive and current candidate for the state’s 2018 senate race is “an absolute piece of trash”. Attorney general Jeff Sessions? “Full of shit.” And so on.

He’s also Trump-like in the way he connects to voters with the message of a populist outsider, though his brand of populism is, objectively, a lot more genuine than that of a billionaire New York real estate developer.

For example, while he supports “coal” in the abstract, he’s quick to refer to industry bigwigs as “coal barons” and isn’t shy with his belief that many should be in jail for the way they have treated workers. He’s kicked energy lobbyists out of his office, and calls big pharma “no different than the Taliban and al-Qaida that I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan”. West Virginia has been among the regions hardest hit by the ongoing opioid crisis in the US.

Ojeda’s still every bit the army man, too, even in a suit and tie moving about the state capitol in Charleston. He peppers his talk liberally with cuss words, describes his political monologues as “lighting folks up” and frequently uses the exclamation “Airborne!” for emphasis, the way a preacher might use “God willing” or “amen”.

Ojeda is in good company. Nextdoor in western Pennsylvania, Conor Lamb, a marine and former federal prosecutor is attempting a similar congressional swing in a special election next month. So is Randy Bryce, an army veteran and iron worker (nicknamed “iron-stache”) who is challenging the House speaker, Paul Ryan, for his seat in Wisconsin’s first district.

What all these candidates share, beyond their military bona fides, is the ability to connect with working- and middle-class white voters who have been steadily abandoning the Democratic party for more than 40 years, and pull them back into the fray. “Democrats, rightly or wrongly, have gotten the image … of being the party of the coastal elites,” said Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University who focuses on US political movements.

Many experts say that has to change if Democrats are going to be competitive in elections in the near term after their shock defeat in 2016. The consensus is that Democrats have to win some of what Kazin calls the “fairly small but important number of white working-class people” in the midwest who voted for Obama in 2008, but Trump in 2016, if they want to take back either Congress in November’s midterms or the White House in 2020.

‘I’d rather fight than eat’

After multiple combat tours over a 23-year army career, it was on a creek bank in Logan County in 2016 that Ojeda, then campaigning for state senate, came closest to losing his life.

As he tells it, a man whom he had grown up with asked Ojeda to place a campaign bumper sticker on his car, and when he bent down to affix it, the man struck him in the head with a pipe and clobbered him with brass knuckles into a coma. Doctors inserted 58 plates into his face to stabilize the multiple fractures.

Ojeda believes, but can’t prove, the attack was politically motivated, “because they knew that if I left that creek bank alive, I was going to be the next state senator”.



The suspect, Jonathan Porter, said it was a fistfight, took a plea deal and served six months before being paroled.

Ojeda was still in the hospital on election day, two days later, when he won the state senate seat. The attack only strengthened Ojeda’s resolve, and more than any particular platform, or party loyalty, that’s what Ojeda seems to be selling to voters. “I’m a fighter. And I ain’t gon back down … I’d rather fight than eat.”

Internal polling commissioned by the Ojeda campaign suggests he holds a double-digit lead on his most likely opponents for a general election, but a majority of voters are still undecided. Photograph: Jeff Swensen/The Guardian

He’s up against three other Democrats in a primary on 8 May, and if, as expected, he wins, he’ll challenge one of seven Republican candidates in November for the open seat in the House, left vacant by current occupant Evan Jenkins’s decision to run for the Senate.

Internal polling commissioned by the Ojeda campaign suggests he holds a double-digit lead on his most likely opponents for a general election, but a majority of voters are still undecided. His name recognition is peaking now more than ever thanks to his frequent, Facebook Live videos which have started to go viral on a regular basis. He’s also become something of a cult hero to West Virginia teachers, who chanted his name this month during protests for better pay.

How that will translate to the May primary or the November general election remains to be seen. According to the Cook Political Report, a generic Republican has a 23-point advantage in the district over a generic Democrat. Ojeda, though, is betting that voters don’t see him as a generic Democrat, but as a fighter.

“If the Democrats don’t do what’s right by the people when they get into power, I will become their own worst enemy. I don’t care about party, I care about people doing what’s right. And if you don’t do what’s right. Make no mistake about it. I will let you know.”