West Virginia state Sen. Richard Ojeda (D) on Monday announced that he will run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, less than a week after losing a congressional bid.
“I don’t think that this office is not obtainable. I believe that I can relate to people,” Ojeda, an Army veteran, told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.”
Ball serves an outside adviser to Ojeda’s campaign.
“We need people that are actually going to get out there and fight for the citizens across this country, and I don’t think we have that,” Ojeda continued.
The state senator went on to slam President Trump and Congress for continued “political infighting.”
“I don’t see anything changing. I don’t see anyone willing to step up and fight for these things,” he said. “The things that I fought for to run for Congress are things that need to be fought for across this country.”
Ojeda, who once endorsed Trump, was beaten by Republican Carol Miller in the race for West Virginia’s 3rd District by just more than 12 percentage points in a district that voted for Trump by nearly 50 points in 2016.
The populist Democrat has sparred with the president, who recently called him a “total wacko” and “stone-cold crazy.”
“If you want to label me a ‘stone-cold crazy wacko’ because I cannot go to sleep at night knowing that we’ve got children hungry, that we’ve got elderly people cutting meds in half because we are attacking Social Security; we have an opioid epidemic that has killed more than the lives lost and we don’t have nobody who has a backbone to stand up to Big Pharma, then I will gladly be ‘stone cold crazy’ and I will be your ‘wacko,'” Ojeda responded to Trump last week on “Rising.”
Ojeda is joining what could potentially end up being a crowded Democratic primary field, with names such as former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) being floated.
“The Democratic Party is supposed the party that looks out for the working class citizens. That’s what they do. We don’t have that today,” Ojeda said on Monday.
— Julia Manchester
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