Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal officially announced his campaign for the presidency on Wednesday.

“My name is Bobby Jindal, and I am running for President of the United States of America,” Jindal wrote in a blog post previewing his formal announcement speech, which will take place in New Orleans. The post featured video of him first breaking the news to his three children.

Jindal will become the 13th Republican seeking the nomination. In his speech, the 44-year-old Indian-American governor will present himself as a “truth-teller,” per his pollster Wes Anderson, and someone who would bring about bold change as president. He will say that he has the record to back up his rhetoric, pointing to the fact that as governor he implemented school choice and shrunk the size of state goverment.

The youngest candidate in the field (he was born 12 days after senator Marco Rubio), Jindal has long been talked about as a likely presidential candidate — but his star has fallen somewhat over the past two years, and he will have an uphill climb in a field that’s expected to expand to 16 major candidates. In national polls, Jindal barely scratches the surface, with at most one percent of Republican primary voters saying he would be their top pick. He doesn’t fare much better in polls of early primary states, where he has rarely broken the same one-percent barrier.

The campaign says they are unconcerned by those polls. Anderson noted that Jindal “has a day job,” so he has had other things to focus on and is “not a senator who can camp out on cable news.” In such a crowded Republican field, where none of the candidates are all that well-known and even the top candidates are polling only around 11 percent, “this thing is as wide open as wide open gets,” Anderson said.

Supporters say he has room to grow, pointing to his record as governor, helping to turn Louisiana around in the years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and his policy chops on education, energy independence, and health care. (He has proposed a detailed alternative to Obamacare.)

#related#In the lead up to a long-expected presidential bid, Jindal has cast himself as a warrior for social-conservative principles. In one of the most high-profile cases, he was a prominent supporter of the Robertson family that stars in A&E’s Duck Dynasty when the show’s future was thrown in doubt by patriarch Phil Robertson’s comments on gay marriage.

But he will have serious competition for the social-conservative mantle within the crowded GOP field — candidates such as Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ben Carson are already fighting vigorously to win such voters.

— Alexis Levinson is the senior political reporter for National Review.

Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated since its initial publication.