ATLANTA — On paper, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia should be among the most vulnerable incumbents this year. He is the only Senate Democrat defending a seat in a state President Trump won in 2024. But the race has not turned into the nail-biter most anticipated, and Democrats outside Georgia are taking notice – at a time when the party is debating how to escape the political wilderness and win back a majority in Congress.
"He reminds me of Obama, honestly," says 28-year-old Courtney Rogers, who came of age as the Obama years gave way to Trump. In Ossoff, the first millennial senator, Rogers sees traces of an earlier era. Rogers was waiting to buy an Ossoff T-shirt at an Atlanta rally this month.
Nearby Rebecca Bruno and Beth Louise arrived already wearing theirs. The two friends met while knocking doors for Ossoff's 2020 Senate campaign, when he and the Rev. Raphael Warnock flipped Georgia's Senate seats blue for the first time in a generation.
Ossoff arrived on the national stage three years earlier as he came close to flipping a suburban Atlanta House seat in an early test of the Trump resistance. Prior to that race, Ossoff had run a documentary film company focused on corruption — now a throughline in campaign speeches alleging graft in Trump's orbit. "Our task is not just to contain his wickedness but to cure the rot that gave rise to it," Ossoff told the Atlanta crowd.
"That this broken moment is an opening not for restoration, but for reformation." "He just knows how to boil it down," Bruno says, adding it also does not hurt that he is handsome. These speeches, which Ossoff writes himself, have become a sensation among liberal voters, fueling talk of a presidential bid. Despite running in a purple state, where winning purely Democratic voters is not enough to carry a statewide race, Ossoff does not hold back in his blistering takedowns of Trump.
"He doesn't want to do the job," Ossoff said. "He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar." That brief mention of Trump aide Natalie Harp ricocheted around the internet for days, prompting Trump to respond, calling Ossoff "Pee-wee Herman." MS NOW host Chris Hayes, author of the The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, says lines like this, filmed from multiple angles and clipped for social media, exemplify how Ossoff has managed to remain substantive and break through a crowded media environment that tends to reward the outrageous. "Be provocative and say crazy stuff, that doesn't really work for him," Hayes says.
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