In 2016, Richard Ojeda, an Army veteran who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, challenged state Senator Art Kirkendoll in a Democratic primary in Logan County, West Virginia. Two days before the election, Ojeda was attending a campaign event when a guy he grew up with asked him to place a bumper sticker on his truck. Ojeda bent down and was affixing it to the vehicle when the man jumped him from behind. Witnesses say the assailant attacked Ojeda with brass knuckles and tried to run him over with a truck. The man later pleaded guilty. Ojeda went on to win the primary, then the general election.

Ojeda, in other words, is no stranger to fighting. And he’ll need to sharpen his elbows for what will be his biggest fight yet: a full-scale melee for U.S. Representative Evan Jenkins’s (R) seat in West Virginia’s 3rd District. Ojeda ran for it once before, in 2014, when it was held by 38-year incumbent Nick Rahall, a Democrat of the old West Virginian mold: culturally conservative, beholden to Big Coal. Jenkins’s departure—he is running for the U.S. Senate—has set off a mad dash among several candidates, with more likely to emerge in coming months. The question is whether voters in West Virginia are ready for someone like Ojeda, a politician who represents a new kind of West Virginia Democrat.

The challenges in the 3rd District are real and pressing. West Virginia’s poverty rate in 2015 was 17.9 percent, 45th in the nation, and its effects are felt most deeply in southern parts of the state. “A lot of drugs, a lot of poverty. Very few people up this holler here have decent employment,” Ojeda said as he drove his red Jeep Wrangler up Bradshaw Hollow one morning in September. Many of the trailers and houses, set against steep, tree-covered ridges, were charred or rotten. Every now and then a person stood outside, watching us drive past. “I’m going to tell you, if I drop you off up here in this holler and you walk out of here, I don’t know that you’d make it,” Ojeda said.

Roads throughout the region run past neighborhoods pockmarked by burnt, boarded, and decrepit buildings. Opioid abuse wreaks havoc on communities. And while the coal sector has recently seen a production and employment bump due to a rise in global demand for metallurgical, steel-making coal, it has been devastated by bankruptcies, layoffs, and large-scale shifts to mechanization and cleaner sources of energy.

The 3rd District once was solidly blue, but no longer. Jenkins won his 2016 re-election bid by 44 percentage points, while Donald Trump won an eye-popping 73 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 23 percent—an even greater margin than his 69/26 statewide win. Those numbers underscore the feat Rahall managed by holding on to the seat until 2014, longer than most other Appalachian Democrats, who once dominated the region.