THE NEW TRUMP DEMOCRAT
ON MOST nights during the nine-day West Virginia teacher strike last winter, Richard Ojeda could be found at his office in Logan County, gesturing wildly at his iPhone. Ojeda, a 47-year-old former paratrooper who is rarely seen outside the state Senate chamber in anything other than a tight-fitting Grunt Style T-shirt, had been logging on for Facebook Live segments about once a week since getting elected in 2016. During his first year as a state senator, he typically got a few thousand viewers for his riffs about the corruption in the Democratic Party or his proposal to turn decommissioned surface mines into vast fields `of marijuana and lavender.
Then, in January, Ojeda became the first politician in Charleston to say publicly what the teachers in his district had been discussing among themselves: If the state didn’t shore up public-employee health plans and increase their pay, they’d walk. Soon, his videos were drawing tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of viewers. By the time the protests got going, a
