‘I got to tell him’: Ojeda wins NC-09 seat just days before father passes away

ABERDEEN, N.C. — When he found out he’d won the race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, the first thing Richard Ojeda did was head upstairs to his father’s room. 

Ojeda’s father, also named Richard Ojeda, had been fighting Parkinson’s disease for six years. Ojeda’s campaign team held a small gathering at Ojeda’s house in Aberdeen on election night to watch the results. 

“I got to wake him up. I got to tell him that his son made it to Congress,” Ojeda said. “He had the biggest smile on his face.”

Ojeda’s father passed away two days later. The younger Ojeda said he plans to carry a small bag of his father’s ashes around his neck when he’s sworn into the 120th Congress. 

Ojeda’s victory is part of a blue wave that swept the nation last week. Democrats appear to have flipped seven U.S. House seats in the Tar Heel State, leading to a 11-3 majority in the congressional delegation. 

In the 9th District, Ojeda unseated GOP Rep. Richard Hudson in a surprise upset. Hudson has held office since 2013 and serves as the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s campaign arm. 

President Donald Trump won the south-central North Carolina district three times, most recently by 16 points during the 2024 election. Ojeda beat Hudson by 6,290 votes, or 2.3 points, according to unofficial results from the State Board of Elections. 

“Hudson, under normal circumstances in a more neutral year, would hang onto the seat, but he got swept out,” said David Holian, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “I didn’t see much of him on the air until fairly late in the campaign when people started to realize that this might be an actual contest.”

Ojeda and his team spent 22 months on the campaign trail. They received national support — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee placed the seat in its “Districts in Play” program in August. 

This cycle marks the second consecutive midterm election that hasn’t gone well for a chair of a party’s campaign arm. DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney lost his reelection bid for his New York seat in 2022. 

“Parties tend to confer this job every two years, or however often someone is willing to do it, to members who are in safe districts, precisely because they can spend more time concentrating on getting other folks elected and gaining seats or protecting seats than worrying about themselves,” Holian said. “The extent of the wave caught a lot of folks by surprise.”

Ojeda, 56, is a retired Army major who grew up in rural West Virginia. His grandfather was an immigrant from Mexico who changed the pronunciation of his last name — hard “J” — to better assimilate. 

Now, Ojeda will be the first Hispanic member of Congress from the Tar Heel State. 

Before running for Congress, Ojeda served in the West Virginia Senate from 2017 to 2019. There, he played a pivotal role in the 2018 statewide teacher strike. 

“He was one of the leaders of that effort to raise the pay of teachers and school service personnel,” said Mike Woelfel, a state senator who was Ojeda’s seatmate in Charleston. “He’s a character, and he has character, and that’s not always the case with politicians.”

Ojeda has garnered national attention for a social media post he made calling for the impeachments of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and border czar Tom Homan. He has also attracted criticism from conservatives for a 2022 podcast in which he said he’d be “happy to go to jail” to punch Stephen Miller.

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Former West Virginia state senator Mitch Carmichael, a Republican, served as Senate president during Ojeda’s tenure. He described Ojeda as a “loose cannon,” but said they got along personally. 

“He is somewhat radical in his approaches to certain aspects of the decorum of a body and so forth,” Carmichael said. “He’s really enthusiastic, very excitable, and we just wanted to make sure he brought all that passion and he was stable in the manner in which he displayed it.”

North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District covers all or portions of Alamance, Chatham, Cumberland, Guilford, Hoke, Moore, and Randolph counties. 

It includes Fort Bragg, the largest U.S. Army military installation by population. Ojeda spent more than 15 years there during his Army career. 

He said one of his top priorities is joining the House Armed Services Committee, and he’s been a vocal critic of the war with Iran. 

“I’m going to do everything in my power to not just elevate soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, but I’m going to elevate their families,” Ojeda said.