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Everyone should be as lucky in their adversaries as Jon Ossoff. On Wednesday, President Trump held a rally in Marietta, Georgia, where he attacked the Democratic senator—or rather, he tried.
“Jon Ossoff, he’s terrible,” Trump said. “He reminds me of Pinky Herman. Do you ever see Pinky Herman?” The line might have landed better if he had gotten Pee-wee Herman’s name right. You’d expect Trump of all people to remember weird ’80s kitsch.
Ossoff has benefited before from the president’s approach. In a runoff on January 5, 2021, he unseated GOP Senator David Perdue—a defeat that many Republicans blamed in part on Trump’s meltdown after he lost the 2020 presidential election; he was focused more on false claims of fraud in Georgia than on campaigning for Perdue or Senator Kelly Loeffler, who also lost. Ossoff’s narrow win made him look like a bit of an accidental senator, but his 2026 reelection bid is shaping up differently. Republicans have struggled to mount a strong campaign against him, and even in a red-leaning state, most forecasters expect Ossoff to beat Republican Mike Collins, who limped to the nomination out of a messy primary.
Now buzz has begun over whether Ossoff might be a strong Democratic candidate for president in two years. The hype has grown stronger in recent weeks, even though Ossoff is less well-known and has a less defined image than some of the other possible candidates. Ossoff may not end up running for president—and, indeed, may not win his reelection race—but here are a few theories on why he’s capturing 2028 attention right now.
1. Roll the Tape
In the age of clippers, a politician who can deliver a strong message or moment in one to two minutes will inevitably draw lots of attention. Like his fellow Millennial Zohran Mamdani, Ossoff seems to have a knack for it. Ossoff appears to have coined (or at least popularized) the Epstein class as a way of tying the Jeffrey Epstein story to broader questions of corruption and inequality in the Trump GOP. When rumors circulated that Trump might declare Ossoff and his fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock “illegitimate,” Ossoff had a crisp response. He’s also had politically effective exchanges with Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence (about who won the 2020 presidential election), and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (about past claims of victory in the still-raging Iran war) during recent committee hearings.
2. Finding His Voice
It’s not just what Ossoff says—it’s how he says it. For almost two decades, the Democratic Party has been plagued by guys (almost always guys) who sound like they’re doing their best Barack Obama imitation. Ossoff has been guilty of this in the past, but lately, he seems to have developed his own cadence. In the exchanges with Clayton and Hegseth, he adopted a forensic, almost monotone voice to interrogate them. (He’s not a former prosecutor or even a lawyer, and he doesn’t have the flair for courtroom drama that many of his colleagues do.) Witnesses’ fumbling looks bad by comparison, and Ossoff sounds righteously angry without being rageful. It’s a kind of grandstanding-by-not-grandstanding, and it stands in sharp contrast with Trump’s over-the-top infotainment style or J. D. Vance’s awkward pandering.
3. Earnest, Not Anxious
Politics has become fixated recently on the idea of “authenticity,” another way of saying whether a politician seems comfortable in his or her own skin. Ossoff comes off as earnest and a little nerdy: His stump speeches and questioning in hearings suggest a guy who has done a lot of preparation and doesn’t feel a need to hide that. But unlike some other Democrats in the 2028 hunt (Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and, most glaringly, Gavin Newsom), he also doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard. He doesn’t frantically jump into every ephemeral news moment, and he hasn’t taken up swearing to try to show that he’s not a regular senator; he’s a cool senator.
4. Not That Kind of Man
Both parties are focused on machismo at the moment. The secretary of Health and Human Services can’t stop working out on video (in jeans), and Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, when he isn’t doing calisthenics (poorly). Many Democrats were so eager for an answer that they rushed to nominate an oysterman to the U.S. Senate despite, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey put it, “a bouquet of red flags.” Ossoff represents a different kind of masculinity, one that owes less to Sly Stallone and more to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: square-jawed, but bound more by principle than muscle.
5. A Blank Slate
Trump has been talking a lot about Democrats as “Communists,” and at Wednesday’s rally, he tried to lump Ossoff in. That’s a tough order: Ossoff isn’t a DSA-aligned candidate and doesn’t have Mamdani’s or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s left-wing credentials. In fact, he’s a bit of a blank slate on the national stage, without a clear ideological profile or strong ties to any party faction. That makes him alluring to Democrats of all varieties, who can project onto him whatever they wish—at least for now.
Eventually, a national figure has to start staking positions and disappointing some people, and buzzy moments in Senate hearings don’t necessarily mint presidents, or else we might be in Booker’s or Harris’s second term. Then again, Ossoff may not want to be a national figure. He has repeatedly said that he is not running for president in 2028, and although that’s an obligatory statement for any senator running for reelection, it might also happen to be true. At the moment, Democrats seem to be thirsting for an alternative to the familiar likely names, and few things excite the heart like someone who insists that he’s not interested.
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Evening Read
A Planeload of Informants
By Kevin Sieff
The governor of Baja California is a 40-year-old attorney and former big-city mayor named Marina del Pilar. Her state, which includes the megacity of Tijuana, is a magnet for American tourists, and also for narcotics cartels. As a politician of some experience, she is presumably unfazed by the sorts of challenges that come with governing a volatile section of her volatile country.
And yet, in what has quickly become a very famous recording of a phone call that leaked last week, she has difficulty masking her shock about an unusual predicament. “Are they saying they want to extradite me?” she asks her interlocutor, who is apparently an intermediary for the FBI. The “they” in question is the United States government. Almost immediately, her tone becomes more businesslike, and she makes a not-so-cryptic offer: “Can’t they tell me what they want me to talk about? I might know or hear a lot of security-related things.”
In other words, the governor of the strategically important border state of Baja California was just caught on tape offering to become an FBI informant. The remarkable thing here is that she would not be the first; the list of current and former Mexican officials and drug traffickers who have offered to cooperate with the U.S. government is now lengthy.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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