He’s the most vulnerable incumbent in the Senate race, and his state is ground zero for the new Jim Crow attacks on voting rights.
June wasn’t the best time to be seeking an interview with Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, just as The New York Times, USA Today, and other outlets published articles focusing on the buzz around him as a potential 2028 presidential candidate. Ossoff would like to remind me, you, and everyone else in the world that first he needs to win his Senate race this November: He is still the Democrats’ most vulnerable incumbent senator, sitting as he is in a purple state that went blue in 2020, the year he was elected, but stayed in GOP hands at the state level (and voted for Donald Trump in 2024). Former state legislator Stacey Abrams, one of the architects of Georgia’s Democratic uprising, lost her two bids for governor, in 2018 and 2022, the second time by a larger margin than the first.
In 2020, Ossoff benefited from having a charismatic, locally renowned candidate on the ballot with him: the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, who was also running for the Senate in a special election. Warnock came up for reelection in 2022 and won. But in the wake of the Democrats’ 2020 wins, the GOP-controlled state Legislature has created more and more obstacles to voting: It has shortened the period for runoff elections; required an ID to verify mail-in ballots; and prohibited people from distributing food and water to voters waiting in long lines at polling places, a problem that’s mainly confined to poorer Black communities. And Trump has turned Georgia into public enemy number one in his Big Lie about how voter fraud was to blame for his and other Republican losses. Ossoff knows what he is up against. So he would like all of us to settle down about 2028 and focus on reelecting him in 2026.
I promised Ossoff’s communications staff that I shared his view—Democrats too often get ahead of themselves in off-year elections, failing to mobilize for the midterms, which this year could provide a crucial check on our authoritarian president’s abuses of power. That must have struck a chord, because in the end his folks cleared me, and I got to spend a weekend on the campaign trail with him in sweltering, soulful Savannah in June. There, I witnessed Ossoff blast Trump and indict his corrupt MAGA Senate opponent, Representative Mike Collins. But he didn’t stop there: He reminded voters of all the ways he’s helped stem Trump’s assault on Georgians’ rights, healthcare, and economic security, citing his work fighting against Medicaid cuts and the closure of state hospitals and advocating on behalf of constituents who have lost access to their cancer treatments.
Ossoff has always put himself at the center of the resistance to Trump, and now he’s at a crossroads: Can he win reelection, help Democrats take the Senate, and vanquish Trump once and for all? If he does, the speculation about 2028 will only get louder, no matter what he says he wants. That’s a problem that Ossoff is willing to face, as long as he wins reelection.
I first met Ossoff in June of 2017 in Atlanta, when he was running in a special election for former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s old seat, in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District in the Atlanta suburbs. My daughter was working as one of his field directors, so I couldn’t report on the race, but I went to Georgia anyway to cover the posse of women activists who’d flocked to his campaign. It was one of the first races to show that the flash point represented by the 2017 Women’s March would lead to sustained, local electoral organizing, often driven by women, to put anti-Trump candidates in office.
Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker, was 30 at the time but looked 20, with a preternatural seriousness but also a youthful sweetness. He was a protégé of Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died in 2020—Ossoff had read Lewis’s biography at 16, wrote him an admiring letter, and wound up interning in his Washington, DC, office—and Lewis’s backing gave him standing in the Black community. He’d wear a suit and tie when it was necessary, but on the campaign trail he liked to roll up his sleeves and shake hands, heartily clasping one of yours with both of his. Ossoff had produced hard-hitting documentaries on human rights and international corruption, but it was still difficult to imagine this charming neophyte winning, except for the big and feisty, mostly female coalition around him—oh, and the volunteers and money from Democrats all around the country that came pouring in during those first months of the Trump presidency. A fledgling chapter of Indivisible, the group Liberal Moms of Roswell and Cobb, and the women-led Pave It Blue all knocked on doors and phone-banked for him.
The new Indivisible leaders held a meeting in a local library that February, expecting 20 people; over 100 came. One was a handsome young man in a dark suit. “I joked, ‘Who’s the young Republican?’” activist Elizabeth Luther says with a chuckle. It was Ossoff. He asked to speak, and they were impressed.
Ossoff seemed to understand early on that he would need to build a multiracial coalition in order to win. In 2017, one of his most prominent Black supporters was Stacey Abrams, then the minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, who was about to launch her 2018 run for governor. Several contenders for the congressional seat sought her endorsement, but she went with Ossoff, even though he had never held office.
“What Jon said is that you can’t win this special election by running the same kind of candidates we had traditionally run in Georgia: solid Democrats, but Democrats who were afraid to offend Republicans, which meant that you could not offend those on the right by pointing out what was wrong,” Abrams told me. “He said, ‘Look, this isn’t about conservative versus liberal. This is about right versus wrong.’” She continued: “Jon came to me with the most-thought-out plan for field engagement, for media engagement, and for talking to communities who had not previously participated. And for the first leg of the race, it worked.”
Several members of the ragtag group of suburban women activists who had assembled behind Ossoff that year told me similar things. They were beginning to see, as Abrams described it, “this new coalition that Jon saw,” as the Sixth District gradually grew more diverse ethnically, educationally, and ideologically. Ossoff and his Republican opponent, Karen Handel, an anti-abortion activist who briefly led the Susan G. Komen Foundation but was forced out by a donor and member rebellion, ultimately faced each other in a June runoff election, which Ossoff lost. But the local activists didn’t despair. “This is about the district really getting to know itself, to know who really lives here,” Essence Johnson, who later became chair of the Cobb County Democratic Party, told me in 2017. “And it’s never going back to the way it was.” A year later, Handel lost the seat to Lucy McBath, a progressive gun-reform activist. That same year, Abrams almost won the governor’s race against voter-suppressing Secretary of State Brian Kemp. “What we were able to pull off in 2018 was a turnout level that built on the energy that Jon helped harness,” she told me. “We just multiplied it across the state.”
In 2020, Ossoff ran against incumbent Senator David Perdue, a member of a powerful Georgia political family. Ossoff, Warnock, and President Joe Biden all won their races—Ossoff and Warnock in runoff elections in which the winners were declared on January 6, 2021. Georgia Democrats’ joy was muted by the violent insurrection that day, but Ossoff’s supporters still celebrated. “We’re still so proud of him,” Luther tells me nine years after his first bid for Congress.
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Despite his wariness of the 2028 chatter, Ossoff isn’t afraid to nationalize his race, arguing that Georgia represents ground zero in the GOP’s attempts to impose Jim Crow 2.0. “From the very moment Georgia voters rejected [Trump] in 2020,” Ossoff said on the stump in mid-July, “he’s been on the warpath, because he was humiliated by the rebuke that Georgians dealt him. And he was humiliated and furious in particular, as a committed lifelong racist, that it was Black voters in Georgia who were instrumental in his defeat.”
In Savannah, the senator ran through the greatest hits of his Trump-the-grifter attacks. “I don’t know if you saw the mess in Washington last week. The president was so humiliated in [the Strait of] Hormuz, he threw his toys out the stroller,” Ossoff told a fired-up multiracial audience of several hundred. “That’s after he gave some felon donor a no-bid contract for the Reflecting Pool, and it filled up with algae.”
Then he moved on to Trump’s domestic agenda, which is hitting Savannahians hard. “He promised to bring down prices on day one,” Ossoff said. “Y’all know what today is? Today is day 524, and groceries, rent, and healthcare are at their all-time highs in American history. Donald Trump and his puppet Mike Collins—they doubled health-insurance premiums for more than a million Georgians and threw 300,000 Georgians off their insurance altogether. I heard from a woman with cancer who waits tables for a living and said she was going to lose her health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy. And they did this to pay for a tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich and to corporate America. Did you know that, Savannah?” Savannah roared.
Ossoff is as hard on his opponent in the Senate race as he is on Trump. Mike Collins is “unfit for office,” he said from the stage, “and the reason is that Mike Collins is a bigot and an antisemite under federal investigation for the illegal misuse of tax dollars.” (Collins has been accused of funneling public funds to his chief of staff’s girlfriend.) He is, Ossoff continued, “widely known as a man of poor character, who lacks the judgment and integrity to serve in the United States Senate. He is only a congressman because his daddy was a congressman, but now he wants a promotion. But Savannah, come November, we will end his political career instead.”
“I love this guy!” the Rev. Dr. Gerald Durley, pastor emeritus of Atlanta’s Providence Missionary Baptist Church and a strong Ossoff supporter, tells me over the phone. “White women love this guy!” he adds. “And together we can win.”
I spoke with Ossoff briefly in Savannah, then had a long telephone interview with him after we’d both returned home. Despite my promises, of course I had to bring up 2028—I couldn’t help but observe that if the Democrats lose Ossoff’s Senate seat, we might not even have a competitive presidential election in 2028. The senator indulged me briefly. “Yeah, I think that the 2028 fantasy football risks distracting us from the urgent task at hand,” he told me. “If we don’t restore checks and balances in the midterms, I don’t know that we have a free and fair election in 2028.”
But there were a zillion things Ossoff would rather discuss than the next presidential election. He spoke about his work crusading “for oversight of our federal prisons” and against “civil rights abuses in prisons and jails, the mistreatment of military families by defense contractors, the abuse of foster children instate care. Because I think that that work equally restores people’s confidence in our democracy.” Some of this work has been bipartisan: Ossoff and Senator Chuck Grassley worked together on the Rural Opioid Abuse Prevention Act, which passed in 2022 and now is popular in Georgia’s drug-treatment community. He worked with GOP senators John Cornyn and Marsha Blackburn to strengthen federal oversight of foster-care agencies. Another outrage, he says, “is what Americans of all walks of life experience right now, which is surround-sound disrespect from corporate America and from government at all levels. It just feels increasingly like nothing works. You’re constantly at war with your insurance company, your bank, the cable company.” Addressing those sorts of issues can be “restorative of confidence in democracy and in the power and relevance of the vote, because people elected new representation and have seen tangible results.” During the 2021 runoff, he and Warnock argued fiercely that Democrats had to deliver on their promises of Covid-relief checks. “We had promised them [in the November election],” he told me, “and people need to see something tangible for their votes.”
Of course, Covid relief wasn’t the only thing Ossoff and Warnock delivered to Georgians. “There’s a quarter of a billion dollars of investment that Georgia’s historically Black colleges and universities received because Senator Warnock and I were elected that otherwise never would have come to the state,” he said. “Seniors on Medicare can’t be charged more than 35 bucks for their insulin because Senator Warnock and I were elected…. Georgia voters have the recent memory of our votes mattering,” he added.
Ossoff understands that he has to combine on-the-ground service delivery with the fight for voter empowerment, says Stacey Abrams, who as founder of Fair Fight Action is still a statewide leader. As an example, she tells me about how Ossoff and Warnock successfully fought to bring a public sewer system to Wilkinson County for the first time. “Wilkinson County is one of the counties that was targeted to lose one of its polling places,” she says. “These are people who don’t think government will ever do anything, so why should they vote? Why should they bother to show up? Because for 30 years they were trying to get someone to literally help them clean up their water.” Now someone has.
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In addition to his attacks on Trump, Ossoff has recently gone viral for a resurfaced 2020 clip in which he rejects defunding the police, abolishing ICE, expanding the Supreme Court, and Medicare for All, among other priorities of progressive Democrats. Given the authoritarian moment we’re in, in which our legislative and judicial structures are buckling under GOP malfeasance, has he rethought increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court? Or term limits? “I’m open to various proposals for judicial reform,” he tells me mildly. “Clearly, there’s an urgent need for ethics reform. I’m open-minded about the broader conversation.” That’s not a yes to expanding the court, I note. He doesn’t correct me.
But Ossoff has refused to be drawn into the progressive-versus-centrist feuding that has recently consumed the Democratic Party. “No Georgia voter has yet asked me about elections that were 800 miles away,” he tells me. Referring to the intraparty warfare, he adds, “I don’t know why we do this to ourselves.”
The activists I spoke with who helped launch Ossoff’s political career in 2017 are optimistic about his chances this fall. Johnson, Luther, and Louise Palmer, an activist and educator, are all proud of having supported the young senator way back when. All are even prouder of the local anti-MAGA movement they’ve built. Their once-red district is pretty blue now, having sent Lucy McBath to Congress and elected Democrats as sheriff, district attorney, and county commissioner in Cobb County.
Their assessments of Ossoff’s achievements since then vary, however. Luther is the most enthusiastic, full of praise for his achievements securing improved drug-treatment programs and protecting people’s healthcare. A case manager at a substance-abuse and mental-health treatment center, she credits Ossoff with helping folks in her field, especially those in rural areas.
Johnson and Palmer also credit him with hard work on behalf of Georgians. But his and Warnock’s heyday, they note, was under the Biden administration, when post-Covid recovery programs, from relief checks to the child tax credit to rental assistance, helped out everyday Georgians, and when the Inflation Reduction Act put a lot of money into Georgia businesses and nonprofits. When Republicans pulled the plug on much of that public funding, progress stalled in the state, and Johnson and Palmer argue that Ossoff could have done more to mitigate the harm—or at least to ensure that Georgians know he feels their pain. And they hear this, they add, when they’re out canvassing voters.
“It’s a really desperate time right now out in the field,” Palmer says. “I know he’s gonna be reelected. But I just wish he would spend more time meeting with everyday Georgians, who really need it.”
“His messaging on Trump is excellent, but I just need him to touch down more,” says Johnson, who runs a small environmental firm. “The voter fatigue is real.” And Trump’s assault on social-safety-net programs is making things even more dire for the poorest Georgians. Johnson would like to see Ossoff out at food banks. “People are suffering,” she adds.
All three women admit that the corruption and cruelty in Trump’s second term has taken some of the fun out of politics. “I remember the unity in the first race, when we all were getting together. We are exhausted now,” Luther says. “It’s hard to have some of that joy we all felt. We’re just beat up.” Still, they all believe Ossoff has managed to win over a critical mass of Republicans, whose votes will be crucial in November. “There’s a segment of Georgia Republicans, they’re comfortable with Jon,” Palmer tells me. “He’s been in position for six years. He’s not done anything crazy or had any scandals. He’s really smart. He stays out of any drama.” Two Republican mayors, Scott James Matheson of Valdosta and Julie Smith of Tifton, have endorsed Ossoff in his reelection bid, even though their counties voted for Trump by double-digit margins.
“When you put that up against [Ossoff’s] opponent, I think it’s a very clear choice,” Palmer says. “Joy will come in November,” Johnson promises me.
Some observers ask me whether i think Ossoff can win without his running buddy Warnock in the race. “I would recast that completely,” Abrams says. “What Jon did was defeat an incumbent from a storied family with almost absolute power in Georgia, and that’s the credit he deserves. He did not shrink from what was an incredibly difficult race. Jon delivers, and that’s why he’s evolved into a sitting senator who is a formidable candidate.”
Abrams doesn’t like the 2028 buzz around Ossoff any more than he does. She knows firsthand what can happen when a statewide race becomes a national story. “There’s a political-class and media hunger for archetypes and for solutions that present themselves before the hard stuff happens,” she says. “And as someone who has experienced this, that has a drawback.”
But if Ossoff isn’t running for president, pundits ask, then why are his comms staffers slicing and dicing speeches and television hits in which he delivers cutting blows to Trump and the MAGA GOP and spitting them out all over social media?
Maybe because they’re really good. And maybe that’s how he’ll win reelection to the Senate. And honestly, if you want to take a minute and fantasize about Ossoff running for president, please watch his complete humiliation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July. Ossoff asks Hegseth whether he still believes, as he said on day 14 of the Iran conflict (as I write, it’s day 177), that Iran’s military had been “destroyed” and rendered “combat-ineffective.” He adds: “Was that an accurate statement?”
For almost five minutes, Ossoff repeats his questions as Hegseth huffs and puffs, getting angrier as Ossoff gets calmer. It’s a rout. One man is presidential in the exchange, and it’s not our “war secretary.” Ossoff may be trying to tamp down the 2028 speculation, but I can’t deny that this sort of stagecraft fuels it. So did his mid-August claim that Trump preferred “traveling with Natalie” [Harp, a close and worshipful aide who is blonde and 35] to doing his job, which drove the news cycle, and drove Republicans crazy, for days.
The Ossoff friends and supporters I’ve spoken with truly don’t think he will run in 2028, regardless of whether he has a resounding victory in 2026. He is only 39, and he has two young children. “He has plenty of time,” a friend tells me. Elizabeth Luther says, “You know, I just believe him. He’s that trustworthy.”
“I can’t wait to see what he’s doing when he’s 45 or 46,” Luther continues. Until then, she says, Georgia needs him. Ossoff would seem to agree.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her most recent book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.