If you’re a Democrat, attending a Jon Ossoff rally feels very good. Therapeutic, even. Many Democrats feel as if every day of the second Trump administration has brought some fresh horror: a discouraging development in the never-ending Iran war; a new vow of retribution from the 80-year-old leader of the free world; or the revelation of yet another money-making venture cooked up by the Trumps.
But now, from the South, a young senator has emerged, with a deep voice promising change and a speaking cadence not unlike Barack Obama’s. His dark hair sits just so; his skin is perfectly even—is that makeup he’s wearing? Never mind. We’re looking at his sleeves now, which are carefully rolled up and emphasize biceps that are, well, quite noticeably larger than they were when Georgia voters sent him to Congress in 2021.
More important, this senator sounds different from other Democrats. Ossoff is doing something on the campaign trail that basically no one else in his party seems able to pull off: elegantly and comprehensively skewering the Trump administration, while earning some Republican support.
He’s doing this in speeches at his campaign events, such as the one I attended on Sunday in Athens, Georgia. But those speeches seem carefully calibrated to be heard by an audience much farther away: Every week, millions of Americans are encountering Ossoff on their phones, through perfectly produced clips of the senator unveiling a new insult or innovative critique of the Trump administration. “He’s trying to put his face on the money. Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself,” he said in May. “He’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone.” Last month, the senator’s reference to the zealous Trump aide Natalie Harp spiked Google searches for Harp by 5,000 percent.
[Read: Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ moment]
The revelation of Ossoff’s particular talent explains why the senator is suddenly all over the news and Instagram, and why so many people in his party are breathlessly positioning him as the new favorite to win the Democratic nomination in 2028. Premature? Maybe. Ossoff might not be well suited for such a task. But Democrats are desperate for leaders and feel that the senator has pierced the party’s gloom like a beam of warm light. (Ossoff, through a spokesperson, declined an interview for this story.)
Outside the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Judith McWillie struggled to explain how she felt about her senator. The retired professor sighed, blinked, and sighed some more, like a computer malfunctioning after being assigned too many tasks. But then, at last, she smiled a dreamy smile. “It’s like taking a clean shower to hear these things spoken so clearly,” she told me. She hadn’t even gotten to see the senator in person—the rally was so packed that she’d had to watch on a screen from the taqueria next door. Disappointing. But she’d seen what she needed to see. “I’ve been waiting for the Democrats to do that for 15 years.”
Ossoff is expected to win his reelection bid in November against his Republican opponent. But it’s still not clear that the senator would be able to go beyond scripted zingers if he decides to campaign for higher office.
It’s obvious at an Ossoff event that the senator once worked as a documentary filmmaker. His rallies have an almost cinematic quality—professional lighting, well-dispersed signs with stylish fonts and vivid colors, plenty of American-flag bunting. Every clip the campaign releases after a rally is perfectly cropped for social media, and some photos are angled upward to show the senator looking out over the crowd, his sharp jawline front and center. (This framing has the added benefit of being recyclable for another, perhaps higher-profile, campaign down the line.)
In Athens, the press risers were, much to the chagrin of some attendees, right in the middle of the crowd. Ossoff himself stood on a part of the stage that jutted toward the audience. Behind him, his team had assembled a diverse display of good-looking young people. During his speech, the crowd was treated to language equal parts poetic and biting. On Iran: “We sink in the quicksand of reckless war.” On President Trump: “Our task is not just to contain his wickedness but to cure the rot that gave rise to it.” The current president is “the broken old man,” and Ossoff’s opponent, Republican Representative Mike Collins, is “a crumbling little bigot.” In a few short lines, Ossoff managed to squeeze in virtually every Democratic critique of Trump and his administration: “They doubled your insurance premiums and slashed Medicaid to cut taxes for their corporate donors and the ultrarich. They made you pay more for everything. They lied us into war and spent most of the last year covering up for the world’s most famous pedophile.”
Ossoff is eager to highlight and explain to voters the Trump family’s alleged state-sponsored enrichment schemes, and concluded for the Athens audience that “it pays to be a Trump, especially when the whole world knows Daddy’s a crook.” Days after a former Anthropic researcher warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity, Ossoff introduced a new line on AI, arguing that Trump has too many investments with tech companies to ever regulate them. “A capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people, rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism,” he said. “But President Trump is compromised.”
[Read: The only thing capable of uniting Bernie and Bannon]
During Ossoff’s speeches, he lays out the several endorsements he’s received from Georgia Republicans who commend his office’s constituent services. Then, in a call for national unity, he hits the crowd with an “e pluribus unum,” and everyone goes bananas.
Some progressives believe that Ossoff is too moderate—or worse, too generic. They argue that his appeal does not go much further than his generally pleasing aura. In fact, I have never attended a political rally where a candidate’s supporters seemed quite so unable to articulate a reason for their support. A couple of attendees cited Ossoff’s push for affordable insulin and his work preventing child trafficking. But mostly, their compliments were vague. “I couldn’t specify anything,” one woman told me before the rally, even though she’d arrived early enough to press right up against the barricade. “He votes the way I want him to,” another person said.
This changed after Ossoff finished speaking, when people sounded totally stunned. “He’s gonna be a star!” one woman exclaimed to her friend as they left the theater. Other attendees used words such as inspiring, articulate, and refreshing. Older voters heard the echoes of another well-spoken young Democrat. “Jon has the charisma that Kennedy had,” Susan Cartwright, a retiree from Athens, told me.
Ossoff events are a warm bath for Democrats because they represent exactly what they’ve been demanding since Trump’s reelection: a leader who demonstrates some mettle and who, by virtue of his youth, can communicate a vigorous, anti-Trump message using modern methods. Other Democrats “will take a term paper to a gun fight,” Fred Hicks, a Democratic strategist based in Georgia, told me. But Ossoff “is able to position things in sound bites and make complex ideas very simple.”
His looks also seem to help. “He’s gorgeous,” one elderly woman told me at the rally, adding, conspiratorially, “You know some people are calling him ‘Senator My Boo.’”
The task of stopping Senator My Boo has fallen to Mike Collins, but the situation doesn’t look promising for the Republican nominee. It’s shaping up to be a good year nationally for Democrats, and in Georgia, Ossoff has the advantage of incumbency. Collins is also facing a triumvirate of controversies that would be bad enough on their own but together amount to campaign poison: A former staffer for Collins posted a swastika and a photo of himself in a Ku Klux Klan–style robe on social media. Collins’s son-in-law, a social-media influencer, has shared white-nationalist rhetoric and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. To top it off, the House Ethics Committee is investigating Collins for allegedly misusing taxpayer funds. “Mike Collins is going to get his teeth kicked in; it’s just a matter of how many teeth,” a state Republican consultant, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, told me. “There’s nobody here who thinks he has a chance.” Meyer Siegfried, a spokesperson for the Collins campaign, dismissed this analysis as “a fantasy pushed by anonymous operatives captured by the Ossoff hype machine.” Georgia, he added, “remains a serious battleground.”
It seems obvious that Ossoff isn’t merely hoping to beat Collins. He’s hoping to win so big that his tide lifts all the other Democratic boats in Georgia—with the helpful side effect of demonstrating to his party that he enjoys broad appeal in a state that voted for Trump in 2024.
Some Democrats are predicting—or perhaps manifesting—that if he wins in November, Ossoff will turn immediately toward a bigger project: running for president in 2028. Ossoff has repeatedly denied that he is interested in doing this. If he won, he’d have to give up his hard-fought Senate seat, which, if Georgia elects a Republican governor this year, would be politically perilous for Democrats. Ossoff, who has two daughters under the age of 5, is also very protective of his family life.
But national Democrats don’t care much about these caveats, and many consultants can’t wait to draft him into the 2028 race—although none wanted to engage in such speculation on the record. One referred to him as an “S-tier” presidential candidate. On the prediction-market platform Kalshi, Ossoff’s odds of winning the 2028 nomination are higher than any Democrat’s.
The people at the Athens rally were certainly keen on the possibility. Similarly pugnacious candidates, such as Gavin Newsom, “have a lot of negativity that follows them around,” Cartwright said. But Ossoff “would be one of the best choices we could have.” Deborah Dykstra, a 68-year-old from Athens, slapped my arm excitedly when I suggested that her senator might run for president. “He’s young; he’s intelligent,” she said. “I heard him speak when Kamala was in Atlanta, and I liked listening to what he was saying better.”
[Read: Gavin Newsom would rather be wrong than weak]
It’s not entirely clear that Ossoff would be good at running for president. Like Obama, the Georgia senator is confident onstage reading from a teleprompter. Unlike Obama, Ossoff has yet to prove that he’s entirely comfortable speaking off-the-cuff. In interviews, he rarely seems willing to let down his guard. Asked for his favorite swear word in a conversation with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, who tends toward playful interviews, Ossoff would not be drawn in. “That’s just one of those private questions,” Ossoff said. The man is consistent. In a 2012 tweet, Ossoff wrote that he’d thought twice about sharing an explicit song because “I don’t want someone to ask why I linked to profanity in 15 yrs.” He similarly avoids playing along when TMZ reporters ask silly questions on Capitol Hill. You might call it being relentlessly on-message. “He’s always been serious,” Hicks, the Democratic strategist, said. “He would say the moment we’re in requires a little gravity.”
But, as the former Obama adviser David Axelrod once said, presidential campaigns “are like an MRI for the soul.” They require something more than straightforward speech-making: an ability to sit down with Joe Rogan for a three-hour, stream-of-consciousness interview, for example. Or, as the old political adage goes, an unbuttoned ease that makes voters want to pull up beside them at the bar.
Perhaps Jon Ossoff has yet to fully reveal himself. His supporters in Georgia predict that he will. “I get the feeling, too, that there’s a lot more even coming from Ossoff,” McWillie, the retired professor, said. “He’s doing it carefully, in stages, instead of trying to just throw everything out there all at once.” The 2028 presidential primary could hinge on whether the senator learns how to go off script.
The post It’s Jon Ossoff’s Moment appeared first on The Atlantic.
