Richard Ojeda (25 September 1970-) was a member of the West Virginia Senate (D-7) from 11 January 2017 to 9 January 2019, succeeding Art Kirkendoll and preceding Paul Hardesty.
Biography[]
Richard Ojeda was born in Rochester, Minnesota in 1970, and he grew up in a Democratic family. He served 24 years in the US Army and served in the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War before retiring as a Major in 2013; he went on to work as a high school teacher. In 2016, he was elected to the West Virginia Senate as a Democrat, and he supported legislation to legalize medical marijuana. During the 2016 presidential election, he supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, but he went on to support Republican nominee Donald Trump, believing that he would do something for West Virginians. However, he was disappointed and announced his regret in 2018. Ojeda was known to be a populist Democrat who sacrificed his personal pro-life views because he felt that blocking access to abortion would disproportionately hurt the poor. He ran for the US House of Representatives in 2018, but he lost to Carol Miller with just 44% of the vote. After a failed presidential primary bid in 2020 and an unsuccessful US Senate race in West Virginia that same year, he ran for Congress in North Carolina in 2025