First Democrat Announces 2020 Presidential Bid

Like it or not, with the midterm elections in the rearview mirror it’s now already time to start looking ahead to the 2020 Presidential election. The Republican nominee is already set, as there’s no doubt that President Trump will seek a second term. The Democratic field, however, is shaping up to be a wild one.

On November 11, just five days after the midterms, the very first Democrat announced his intentions to challenge Donald Trump and run for President. While there are plenty of Presidential hopefuls in the Democratic Party that most people are familiar with – from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Cory Booker and several more – there’s good chance you may have not heard of this first Democratic candidate to file the paperwork to run.

His name is Richard Ojeda, and he’s just coming off a loss in the midterm elections where he failed to defeat Republican Carol Miller in the race to serve as the representative for West Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District. Undeterred, Ojeda still believes that he can win the Presidency.

“In the last 19 months while running for office in southern West Virginia, we received countless phone calls, e-mails, and messages from people all across the United States of America that educated me that the problems we have in southern West Virginia are the same problems that we have in the Southside of Chicago, in Flint, Michigan, in the Bronx, New York, the Rio Grande Valley and believe it or not even places like Silicon Valley,” Ojeda told ABC.

Despite his loss in West Virginia, Ojeda’s team believes that his good showing in a district that President Trump won heavily is actually a positive sign. To pull off a win in the 2020 Presidential election, Ojeda plans to simply take a page out of President Trump’s playbook and give it a different face.

Ojeda’s plan is to appeal to working-class Americans with a focus on jobs, the economy, and other issues that working-class Americans face. According to Ojeda, he can appeal to these voters far better than the President, who he describes as being a wealthy elite who does not understand their struggles.

The former Congressman is certainly different from the average Democratic candidate, who typically goes out of their way to appeal to voters on the coasts while essentially ignoring working-class voters in Middle America.

Interestingly enough, Ojeda notes he even voted for President Trump in 2016, citing Hillary’s lack of focus on jobs as the reason he pulled the lever for Trump.

However, that hasn’t stopped President Trump from already gearing up for the slim possibility that he might face off against Richard Ojeda in the general election. Trump has already given Ojeda a nickname, as he so often does for his opponents, calling Ojeda “stone cold crazy”. ABC notes that Ojeda has another nickname that he prefers to go by: “JFK with tattoos and a bench press.”

There’s no denying that Richard Ojeda doesn’t necessarily look or act the part of a typical President. He’s a large, muscular man with a shaved head who has the names of his fellow service members who died in action tattooed across his body. Ojeda insists, though, that his unorthodox look and behavior is a big part of his appeal. In our current political climate where unorthodox outsiders are favored over cookie cutter career politicians, he might be right.

Nevertheless, Ojeda will undoubtedly have a difficult road to the Presidency. Serving as an officer in the Army and as a state senator is certainly enough experience to run for Congress, but it’s not typically enough experience to win the Presidency. Without much experience to show, a candidate needs a ton of name recognition, as Trump had in 2016, and Richard Ojeda doesn’t have that either.

Ojeda will also likely receive very little support from the powers that be in the DNC due to the fact that his views don’t exactly fall in line with the Democratic platform and due to the fact that he voted for Trump in 2016.

However, Richard Ojeda is still the first Democratic candidate to cast his hat into the ring for what is already shaping up to be another wild, unusual race in 2020.


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