The Georgia senator was considered the most vulnerable incument this cycle. He cruised to a commanding victory, with lots of lessons for 2028.
Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff came into his reelection contest judged the most vulnerable incumbent in the Senate, the only Democratic senator running in a state Trump won two years ago. On election night, Ossoff was the first Senate candidate called a winner. At 7:18 pm—yes, just 18 minutes after the polls closed—the respected Decision Desk declared him the victor over Republican Representative Mike Collins, 59–41 percent. What happened?
Shortly before the midterm vote, we saw polls showing that 90 percent of voters considered political corruption their top issue, while just behind were voters who said it was the cost of living. That explains Ossoff’s win. Throughout the campaign, he led the way in showing Democrats how to link the grifting of Donald Trump, as well as the white supremacy and self-dealing of his Trump-loving opponent Representative Mike Collins, to Georgia voters’ own struggles.
The link wasn’t necessarily obvious at first, but once Ossoff did it, I was surprised no one else figured it out.
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I have been covering Ossoff since his unsuccessful but close congressional race, and his victorious 2020 Senate race. I’m on the record as an admirer. But in the last year, I’d become a big Instagram fan—his staff clips the greatest hits of his campaign talks. But it was more powerful seeing him in person in Savannah, watching him twin the two devastating effects of the Trump era, elite corruption and middle-class immiseration, and put it to voters in a way that they got it.
“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 the Savannah crowd. “That’s after he gave some felon donor a no-bid contract for the Reflecting Pool, and it filled up with algae.”
But then he hit Trump’s domestic agenda. “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 knew, indeed.
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Ossoff went on: “While hundreds of thousands of Georgians lose their healthcare, Mike Collins builds Trump a ballroom. They worked harder burying the Epstein files than they ever worked to lower your grocery bill. And while you pay more for everything, the Trumps are raking in billions. from all over the world. Illegal tariffs, failed war, healthcare cuts, and unmatched corruption.”
But I found myself most drawn in by the most everyday stories Ossoff tells: how most of us, even those who aren’t in crisis, feel the walls of corporate power closing in. “The corporate disrespect is suffocating,” he told the Savannah crowd. “Instead of reading to your child, that precious spare hour after work is spent on the phone, fighting your bank, or the cable company, or the insurer that’s denied your claim and dared you to fight back while you’re sick. A toddler’s ambulance is followed by a $3,000 bill. Hedge funds buy up houses till there are none left to afford, then rip off the renters. We were promised a political system that delivers for the public, but instead, it delivers for the donors.”
Maybe not surprisingly, Ossoff returned to those themes in his victory speech Tuesday night, with new polish and conviction. “While the wealthy and well-lobbied feast on inside information and official favors, America’s forgotten families are treated to systemic corporate disrespect and official indifference, working harder and harder while the treadmill just gets faster and steeper and the bills get higher and higher,” he told the Atlanta crowd.
“Instead of reading your daughter her favorite book, that precious spare hour after work, you’re on the phone begging the insurance company to cover the medicine that prevents her seizures. You report the black mold to your landlord, who doesn’t fix the leak, and the ambulance for your toddler’s asthma attack is followed by a $3,000 bill.” The senator just a year ago judged the most vulnerable found new power in channeling the growing vulnerability of American voters.
Ossoff told me back in June, as he tells everyone, that he will not run for president in 2028. I chose to believe him, since he is a 39-year-old senator running for his second term, with two small daughters and a wife with a medical practice. I still believe he has plenty of time and plenty of crossroads ahead. But he ran such a flawless campaign, he’s going to face this question incessantly.
For now, I’m going to leave him with his own summary of what his victory, and the stunning wins by Democrats from the Senate to the House to state legislatures, have to say about the country’s political health. “In sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck president, Donald J. Trump.” Indeed. Ossoff’s overwhelming victory Tuesday night makes him a major player in deciding what comes next, whether he decides to run or not.
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