There is seemingly no end to the Democratic wishcasting that Jon Ossoff will run for president in 2028. The 39-year-old first-term Georgia senator may be deep in his tough reelection campaign against Rep. Mike Collins, but MS NOW devotees and Pod Save America fans already imagine him on a much larger stage. His attacks on Donald Trump are direct rather than performative, notably Obama-like, and routinely go viral. In the process, Ossoff has become one of the party’s largest fundraisers and perhaps its most effective messenger—one of the few Democrats who consistently cut through the fractured media environment. In other words, he’s an irresistible combination for a thirsty Democratic base.
Inside the Senate, however, Ossoff is almost the polar opposite: a stay-in-his-lane freshman in a chamber that prizes seniority. He doesn’t run to the cameras, Democratic colleagues don’t snipe behind his back, and he rarely comes up as a topic in Republican group chats and conference meetings. He has few close friends in Washington, skips much of the city’s social circuit, and flies home to Georgia every weekend to campaign and spend time with his young family. Democrats affectionately refer to him as “the accidental senator.”
That contrast helps explain why so many Democrats already see him as a future presidential contender. After all, the guy doesn’t seem like an attention addict or a swamp junkie. In fact, Ossoff was a failed congressional candidate with a background in journalism and documentary filmmaking when he upset incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue in a runoff in January 2021. Ossoff hammered Perdue over the Senate ethics investigation into his alleged insider trading, and rallied to victory with Trump’s attempted election interference as the perfect foil. (Republicans still privately blame Trump for losing Georgia, and control of the Senate.)
Georgia on His Mind
On January 20, 2021, Ossoff turned up in Washington looking more like a young staffer than a U.S. senator, still adorned in the ill-fitting, oversize suits that he’d worn on the campaign trail. When he showed up to congressional baseball practice, Rep. Mike Doyle, the Democrats’ coach, looked at him and said, “Who are you?” Ossoff had to tell him that he was the senior senator from Georgia.
Ossoff quickly concluded that survival in Georgia required the opposite of a television-ready persona. He dug in on constituent services, helping people with their passports and veterans benefits, and pressing for improvements in military housing and the foster care system. Even his detractors acknowledged that he stood out among the Georgia delegation. Just as important, he aligned himself with fellow Georgian Sen. Raphael Warnock, which helped to give him some heft and credibility. “We’re focused on the people more than our own individual politics,” Warnock told me. The two have operated as a political team since they won their runoff elections in 2021.
On Capitol Hill, Ossoff hasn’t engaged publicly in big bipartisan negotiations or chased the story of the day. Instead, he has quietly worked across the aisle on smaller pieces of legislation and showed up to committee meetings, earning a “meet expectations” rating of legislative effectiveness from the Center for Effective Lawmaking. One Republican senator admitted that many colleagues initially dismissed him. “Who’s the young-guy documentary filmmaker?” the senator remembered people asking. “Who does he owe his little money to? Is he single? Bullshit like that.” Over time, the Republican senator said, “I think he’s got substance. Maybe it’s not him growing into the job, but it seems to me more like a realization we’ve grown into him.”
The weight of representing Georgia in a closely divided Senate has made Ossoff unusually meticulous. Colleagues describe him as someone who obsesses over votes, overthinking and overanalyzing, miring himself in research. “What I respect about him is he takes it very seriously,” Sen. Peter Welch told me.
Welch said the two spent significant time discussing votes related to Israel, among the most politically fraught issues for Democrats at the moment. As the war in Gaza progressed, Ossoff broke with many in his party, eventually supporting two of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s amendments to cut off specific military aid to Israel, including tank and mortar rounds. He later voted for an amendment to cut off the sale of 1,000 pound-bombs to Israel. “It’s really important to him to do the right thing,” Welch told me. “He really struggles with making certain that he’s given really deep thought to what’s the right thing to do.” Sen. Brian Schatz, the likely next Democratic whip, told me, “It’s that level of attentiveness and precision that I think has caused him to be basically error-free.”
Obama Murmurs
In many ways, Trump has been one of Ossoff’s greatest political assets. The pattern began in 2017, when Ossoff challenged Republican Karen Handel in what became the most expensive House race in history. Ossoff focused on Trump corruption, then and Democrats mobilized nationally largely because they wanted to prove that Trump’s 2016 election was a fluke. Nearly a decade later, Trump’s fixation on Georgia continues to elevate Ossoff. When rumors spread that Trump planned to declare Ossoff and Warnock to be illegitimately elected, Democrats prepared for a fundraising windfall. It didn’t materialize only because Trump, at least for now, hasn’t followed through.
Trump has also given Ossoff some of his biggest political moments. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Ossoff grilled C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe over the notorious Signal chat that inadvertently included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. After Ratcliffe refused to call the episode a mistake, Ossoff pounced. The exchange went viral, turbocharged Ossoff’s fundraising, and gave a jolt to his newly launched reelection campaign. It also cemented his reputation on the Hill as one of Democrats’ more effective interrogators.
More than a year later—and roughly $90 million in fundraising in the bank—Ossoff did it again during Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton’s confirmation hearing. Social media went wild over Ossoff repeatedly pressing Clayton to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, even though Clayton had made clear earlier in the hearing that he would say only that Biden “was declared the winner.” Ossoff also forced Clayton to admit that Trump had pardoned a narco-terrorist, and rattled him with questions about Tulsi Gabbard’s reported appearance at an F.B.I. raid in Fulton County, Georgia.
As his national profile has grown, Ossoff has drawn inevitable comparisons to Obama, another first-term senator whose presidential prospects became a topic almost immediately. Ossoff has mastered an effective kind of on-the-spot speechifying—a teleprompter-like cadence that is often compared to Obama’s upscale vocal style. He even hired Fenway Strategies, the speechwriting firm founded by Obama alumni. He also seems to have hit the gym and bought better-fitting suits. (Thank god…) On the campaign trail, his videos are shot from low angles and edited with polish, making Ossoff appear towering, more reminiscent of a presidential campaign than a Southern Senate race. “While hundreds of thousands of Georgians lose their healthcare, Mike Collins builds Trump a ballroom,” Ossoff declared. “They worked harder burying the Epstein files than they ever worked to lower your grocery bill. While you pay more for everything, the Trumps are raking in billions from all over the world.”
Obama’s aides understood the danger of appearing too ambitious. During his first year in the Senate, as speculation about a presidential campaign mounted, he spent weekends back home or campaigning for colleagues. “We didn’t want people to think, Oh, here comes this arrogant kid who thinks he knows more than we do,” a former senior Obama aide told me. “He wanted to keep his head down, do the work, and show his colleagues that he was a team player.”
Ossoff enters the campaign as a prohibitive favorite against Collins, who keeps surrounding himself with white nationalists. Ossoff also continues to be the best fundraiser on the Democratic circuit, outraising Collins by more than eight to one in the last quarter and even using appearances on Morning Joe to solicit donations. If he wins, it won’t be by accident. The question is whether another Senate victory makes him an accidental presidential contender. “This thing about being a phenomenon—I’m not entirely sure that was his long-term objective,” one Democratic senator told me. “I think he is just better at this than maybe even he thought he would be.”
This story has been updated to clarify Jon Ossoff’s past opposition to specific military aid to Israel.