A year ago, pundits declared Georgia’s Jon Ossoff the senator most likely to lose his seat. On Tuesday, he won decisively. National Republicans had largely conceded the race months ago. The Associated Press announced his victory shortly after the polls closed.
Mr. Ossoff won so decisively, in part, because he articulated a message that connected Democrats’ fear of authoritarianism to the broader public’s fear that life is unaffordable. It’s a message that other Democratic candidates, like James Talarico in Texas, have emphasized as well. It could prove central for the party again in 2028. And it boils down to one word: corruption.
Donald Trump’s shameless self-dealing made Mr. Ossoff’s argument easier. Since returning to the White House, according to news reports, Mr. Trump has made more than $1 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses alone. Americans of both parties have noticed. A Washington Post poll last month found that one-third of Republicans and independents who lean Republican now believe Mr. Trump is enriching himself in office, while a Fox News poll ranked corruption as voters’ top concern nationally.
Mr. Ossoff courted Republicans by speaking in bipartisan terms: He acknowledged that Mr. Trump didn’t invent political corruption. “Yes, the system really is rigged,” he said. “But he’s not unrigging it. He is re-rigging it for himself.”
Of course, it helped that Georgia Republicans chose a weak nominee. But Mr. Ossoff didn’t only benefit from a favorable political environment. He also spoke differently from the Democrats who challenged Mr. Trump two years ago.
Authoritarianism was a central theme of Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign; public graft fell further down her list of concerns. That cost her. Exit polls found that Ms. Harris won 80 percent of voters who called democracy their most important issue, while 81 percent of voters who prioritized the economy backed Mr. Trump. In Ms. Harris’s 2024 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, she used the words “freedom,” “democracy” and “liberty” a total of 15 times. She didn’t mention “corruption” once.
By stressing corruption, in contrast, Mr. Ossoff made Mr. Trump’s assault on the rule of law tangible. He showed voters how democracy and economic distress are intertwined. On the campaign trail, he argued that “corruption is why nothing works for ordinary people. It’s why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. It’s why your insurance company gets away with denying your cancer treatment after you paid your premiums for decades.” In this way, he showed that the president wasn’t just transgressing abstract norms of good governance. He was helping the rich and powerful rip Americans off.
In that sense, Mr. Ossoff was following a path forged by other parties trying to defeat aspiring autocrats. Peter Magyar, who decisively ended Viktor Orban’s 16-year rule in Hungary this spring, gained national prominence with a 2024 viral video in which he accused Mr. Orban of turning the government into a “family-owned business.” The good-government group Democracy International reported that Mr. Magyar’s campaign “reduced complex democratic concerns into a simple proposition: ‘Corruption has a cost.’”
Similarly, in Serbia this September, student protesters angry over the long and corrupt run of President Aleksandar Vucic voted in a new era. “The focus of the protest was on corruption, government corruption,” Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told PBS. “We’re seeing that issue become a real global issue.”
If Democrats retake Congress, they’ll have a chance to use congressional hearings to lay the groundwork for making corruption a key theme again in 2028. Mr. Ossoff could make it the centerpiece of a presidential campaign. Given how much power the ultrarich now wield in Washington, and how many ordinary Americans are struggling simply to get by, it won’t be hard to convince Americans that JD Vance, Marco Rubio or any of Mr. Trump’s likely Republican successors are tainted by his administration’s epic graft.
The hard part will be convincing them that Democrats — who even Mr. Ossoff concedes are viewed as corrupt themselves — can be trusted to behave differently if they regain power.
Peter Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. He is also a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York and an editor at large at Jewish Currents, and he writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. His latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”
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