West Virginia state Sen. Richard Ojeda is the presidential candidate big-name Democrats should fear. Not because he could win, but because he can hammer on how out of touch they are with rural and working-class America.

And that’s not just because he speaks with a drawl and sports 36 tattoos.

Yes, it is crazy to think that a first-term state senator like Ojeda has a shot at the White House, especially after he lost a House race in November by nearly 13 points. But Ojeda, 48, is connecting with the reddest of red-state voters on some sort of populist level.

Ojeda, a retired Army major who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and won a Bronze Star, took 43 percent of the vote in a House district that Donald Trump won in 2016 by 50 points. The Democrat who ran for the House seat two years ago won 24 percent.

“People have to understand that you’re not going to beat Donald Trump with a cookie-cutter politician. You got to have somebody who is willing to get in there and fight, and that’s what I do,” Ojeda told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast during a recent campaign visit to Oakland.

Ojeda — and that’s pronounced “o-JET-a” where he’s from — still rocks the buzz cut from his 24 years in the Army, occasionally promises to “fistfight” someone over policy differences and drops the g’s in his “ings” naturally, not just when he’s campaigning in the shadow of a barn. Ask him about how he’d challenge his opponents on the opioid crisis, which has hit West Virginia as hard as any state, and his Mountaineer drawl takes on an edge.

”Don’t you sit here and say you’re going to fight the opioid epidemic and you’ve taken money from Big Pharma,” Ojeda said. He listed potential 2020 Democratic candidates in the Senate who have taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

“Big Pharma comes in here and throws their OxyContin and hydrocodone on our people like candy,” Ojeda said. “But we do nothing. Because why? Because lobbyists for Big Pharma greased the pockets of our legislators and buy their protection. It’s time for people to stand up and say this has got to stop.”

To Democrats craving someone who can speak to rural and Trump voters authentically, they don’t get much more authentic than Ojeda. He’s so authentic that he voted for Trump, which he now says he regrets.

“I voted for Donald Trump because No. 1, he come to West Virginia,” Ojeda said. “The things he was saying, I was not happy with. But he was the one who come down there to West Virginia and was talking about putting coal miners to work.”

Ojeda is no conservative; he voted for independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. But he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He couldn’t even bring himself to say her name when describing his choices in the general election.

“So it become those two people, OK,” Ojeda said. “At the end of the day, one person was saying that they were going to put people to work and the other was talking about job training about jobs that don’t exist in West Virginia.”

There are a million reasons why Ojeda is the longest of long shots. He decided to run for president 13 days after losing his House race. He has a narrow fundraising base, although he did raise nearly 25 percent of the $2.8 million for his House race from California — including two contributions from Sam Altman, head of the Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator.

Three of Ojeda’s top four policy priorities — described as “missions” on his campaign website — are still listed as “to be announced.” His stump speech is folksy, but often it’s also scattered and unfocused.

But the essence of why he’s running is clear. When he came home from the military in 2013, he said, he was “devastated at what I found.”

“I found children in my backyard who had it worse than the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Ojeda, a married father of two. “In Iraq and Afghanistan, a village will raise a child. Here, the mom and dad are addicted to drugs.”

He admits that some of his ideas “sound a little crazy.” Like the bill he is proposing in West Virginia for lobbyists to wear body cameras while they are around legislators.

“I think that if all lobbyists had to wear body cameras,” Ojeda said, “we’ll have a lot less backdoor dealings going on.”

Even though he’s from a deep-red state, his views are as progressive as they come. He supports single-payer health care, led the drive to legalize medical cannabis in West Virginia and backs the Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-crafted Green New Deal environmental proposal.

The Green New Deal isn’t exactly focused on reviving coal mining, a major industry in Ojeda’s district.

“I support the coal miner,” Ojeda said to emphasize the distinction between the dying industry and its workers, many of whom he counts as family and friends. “I know that we need to get away from fossil fuels. I’m saying, let’s bring those jobs from the Green New Deal to West Virginia now so we can transform these coal miners into something else.”

He talks about abortion rights from a class perspective, which makes the topic easier to talk about in one of the poorest — and most culturally conservative — states. He wants to quadruple federal funding for Planned Parenthood because “they provide contraceptives, they give classes, they convince people that they can have a child.”

“The rich have always had access. Always. It’s the poor who suffer,” Ojeda said. “I will stand with a woman’s ability to make that choice for her body. It’s her body.”

Ojeda says he understands why 30 to 40 percent of the country — including most of his home state — supports Trump no matter what he does.

“Because those people want — so bad — to believe his rhetoric,” Ojeda said. “We now know that a lot of the promises that he made were absolute garbage. But there are some people out there who still hold onto the hope that he’s going to follow through.”

Ojeda says Democrats need to nominate someone who can offer hope — and say it in a way that won’t make Americans living far from the liberal coasts roll their eyes.

“So we can sit and we can continue pushing the same folks,” Ojeda said. “And what’s going to happen is that you’re going to see a lot of tears in November when that man (Trump) wins.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli