AP, Washington :
A Democrat who made big inroads in a heavily pro-Trump state but lost his race in last week’s midterms has declared he is running for president.
Sorry, Beto buffs, the new 2020 candidate isn’t Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, but West Virginia state Sen. Richard Ojeda, a retired Army paratrooper who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I’m Richard Ojeda and I’m running for the president of the United States of America,” he declared in a live Facebook video Monday. Ojeda vowed to defend working-class Americans and to end Washington corruption.
Ojeda lost his race for the open House seat in West Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District with 44 percent of the vote to 56 percent for Republican state delegate Carol Miller, a bison farmer who promised to “cut the bull out of politics.” But Ojeda’s performance came in a district that President Donald Trump won in 2016 by nearly 50 points.
“I never dreamed that I would come home only to find children in my own backyard that have it worse than the kids that I saw in Afghanistan,” Ojeda says in the opening to a campaign video posted online.
After backing Vermont’s independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, Ojeda voted for Trump in the general election over Hillary Clinton, largely because he believed Trump would be better for West Virginia’s coal miners.
In a fiery concession speech on Tuesday, Ojeda vowed to keep fighting “for working families that voted for a president that would stand up for them and instead got a president surrounded by Wall Street millionaires and socialites.”
Ojeda first gained national attention when he was badly beaten at a campaign barbeque during his successful run for the state Senate in 2016.
