CHARLESTON, W.Va. — As Donald Trump, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigned in West Virginia this month before thousands of voters, ex-convict Keith Judd slipped into the state unnoticed.

There were no campaign rallies. No preplanned speeches. No organized public events. Just a chance for the Democratic presidential candidate who received 41 percent of the vote in the state’s 2012 primary against President Barack Obama to drive around and see it for himself.

He never got to West Virginia four years ago, because he was in prison.

This time Judd drove nearly 1,400 miles from his hometown of Midland, Texas, and spent a week visiting towns such as Charleston, Beckley, Huntington, Logan, Parkersburg and Williamson before heading back on Sunday, two days before West Virginia’s presidential primary.

“I wanted the people to get to know who I was,” he said.

That wasn’t the case in 2012, when most West Virginia voters had no clue. But they were determined to rebuke Obama, whose clean air regulations remain deeply unpopular in the coal-producing state. So 73,138 of them voted for Judd.

“You really don’t expect to get that many votes when you’re sitting in a prison cell,” Judd said.

Now, after 15 years in prison for threatening and trying to extort his wife in divorce proceedings and for a parole violation, Judd, 57, is a free man. And he is improvising another run for president. His old campaign photo, which looks more like a police mug shot, still shows him with a bushy dark mullet on his website, “Keith Judd for President of USA 2016.”

In person, Judd has gone gray, his hair in front is shorter and he wears a suit and tie. He’s taking this race seriously enough to have gotten onto primary ballots in Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Texas and more, failing to muster even 1 percent of the vote anywhere.