Jon Ossoff’s rise to US Senate was meteoric – how high can he go?

Jon Ossoff has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, he declared during a debate this week. Jon Ossoff has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, he told a local TV station last month. Jon Ossoff has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, he told MS Now – twice – in August.The Democratic US senator for Georgia said as much to CNN. And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And MS Now, again. And in his second Senate debate on Tuesday night.Are you getting the message?Plenty aren’t. It doesn’t matter how many times the media-savvy senator delivers his well-rehearsed line: in Washington, and beyond, there is markedly more than “zero interest” in the prospect of Ossoff running for the White House.His political rise in a Republican-leaning swing state, his viral speeches on conspicuously national issues, and Democratic demand for a new figure to lead the party forward are conspiring to fan the flames of speculation.But when Ossoff, 39, lands on a message, he sticks to it like gum under a desk. His discipline and doggedness show up in Senate hearings, in campaign rallies and debates – railing against “the Epstein class” and mocking Trump in blunt snippets that spread far and wide online.After Donald Trump won Georgia by two points in the 2024 presidential election, Ossoff had been expected to face one of the most bruising contests of any incumbent US senator this November. The race, however, does not appear close. Ossoff – whose team declined repeated requests for an interview for this story – has consistently led between four and eight points in most polls against his challenger, the Republican congressman Mike Collins – a lead no Democrat has posted in Georgia since the late 1990s.On the debate stage in October, Ossoff hammered away at Collins, dubbing the encounter the “trial of Mike Collins”, and demanding Collins explain his votes in support of the Iran war and the president’s tariffs, as well as ties to white nationalists in his office and his family.Jon Ossoff takes part in a debate with his Republican opponent Mike Collins in Atlanta on Tuesday. Photograph: Miguel Martinez/AJC/Reuters“If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club,” Ossoff declared. “His office has been in cahoots with some of the most notorious white supremacists in the country. He himself has amplified neo-Nazi propaganda. He’s never apologized for it. And he should tonight.”Ossoff’s ability to deliver such lines – as memorable as they are clippable in this social media age – is part of his broader approach to winning support, vote by vote, in a state where it cannot be taken for granted.“A campaign is just a bigger, longer jury trial,” said Charlie Bailey, director of the Georgia Democratic party, and a trial lawyer by trade. “The best trial lawyers, they are themselves. They talk plainly to the jury. They say straightforward things, and the jury can tell that they’re being themselves, and they just believe what they are saying.”When Ossoff talks to voters, “it not only matches up with their experience, their anger, and their frustration; they know he’s telling the truth”, Bailey said. “That’s leadership.”Ossoff has not always been a winner. His meteoric political rise dates back almost a decade, to a defeat.When Republican Tom Price resigned his congressional seat in February 2017, after Trump appointed him to serve as health and human services secretary, Ossoff stepped into a special election with a “jungle” primary for Georgia’s sixth congressional district: the candidates of all parties run on a single ballot, with a runoff between the top two if no one wins more than 50% of the vote.It looked like a stretch. “You have to remember, everyone on the local level was a Republican,” said John Ernst, former mayor of Brookhaven, a city in Atlanta’s northern suburbs; at the time, Ernst was the only Democratic mayor in the district.Jon Ossoff, then the Democratic candidate for the sixth congressional district Jon Ossoff, leaves a campaign office in Marietta, Georgia, on 20 June 2017. Photograph: David Goldman/APThe district was, in short, “the bastion of the proto-Maga movement”, said Ernst, “but without the craziness. It’s the business wing of the movement.”But Atlanta’s streets had filled that year with women in pink hats in the largest such demonstration since the civil rights movement, and they were looking for a way to strike back.This special congressional election provided stunned Democratic voters their first chance to register their outrage at Trump’s provocations, at least by proxy.“There’s all this momentum, and there’s all these people excited, and things are going pretty crappy at the national level, and I probably then started to think, ‘Huh, this is interesting,’” Lynn Deutsch, mayor of Dunwoody, Georgia, said. Ossoff raised an eye-watering $23m in small donations from around the country.While Ossoff took the former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel to a runoff, Handel – a notably moderate Republican – beat Ossoff 52-48. But Ossoff walked away with the largest Democratic donor database in the US.After his 2017 defeat, “everyone” was asking Ossoff the same thing, according to Ernst. It is a question he is likely to get just as much, if not more, should he meet expectations and win next month: what is he going to do next?“Think about it. He was a guy who came out of the blue,” Ernst said. “He wasn’t a known entity outside of a few congressional offices in Washington DC.”He didn’t completely come out of the blue, of course. Ossoff grew up in Northlake, then a middle-class unincorporated part of DeKalb county near Atlanta. His mother, Heather Fenton, is a prominent political figure in her own right, who co-founded New Power Pac, which worked to elect women to local offices in Georgia. His father, Richard Ossoff, was an attorney.In his youth, Jon Ossoff took his parents’ political capital and an education at Atlanta’s elite Paideia school to an internship with Representative John Lewis before undergraduate study at Georgetown.Representative John Lewis, for whom Ossoff interned, poses for a photo with other civil rights leaders in 2004. Photograph: Scott J Ferrell/CQ-Roll Call via Getty ImagesHe later worked for Hank Johnson, a Democratic congressman who represents part of Atlanta and DeKalb county. Ossoff left to earn a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in 2013.Using $250,000 of an inheritance to buy a stake in a documentary film company, Ossoff spent the next four years in London, producing investigations as the CEO of Insight TWI, covering corruption and human rights abuses, looking at Fifa, Beijing’s investments in Africa, and working on a documentary on female Yazidi soldiers, which aired on the BBC.He returned home to run for Congress. And one defeat was not enough to kill his political aspirations. Following his 2017 loss, however, Ossoff decided against challenging Handel to a rematch in 2018. Instead, he started building political relationships across the state of Georgia, using his war chest and new national standing to help Democrats in local elections.Ossoff campaign in 2017 sowed seeds that he subsequently spent years watering.“When I ran in 2011 for the first time on council, I did it by myself. I had no idea what I was doing,” Deutsch said. “I ran for mayor [in 2019] but I wasn’t going to do it by myself. So I convened all these women … and they had all helped on the Jon campaign. And they had all knocked on doors for Ossoff.”One by one, local offices began to flip. Dissent against the Trump administration from Atlanta’s professional class had crystallized into sustained, organized political action.Three years after Ossoff’s loss, Democrats had taken control of local offices in most of Atlanta’s affluent, politically powerful northern suburbs. Many had been involved with Ossoff’s congressional campaign.“There was just an energy about him,” Deutsch said of Ossoff, in the shadow of Trump’s first presidency. “And remember, everybody was operating kind of from a space of panic, right? What the heck just happened? And when you talk about the areas that flipped, they’re generally highly educated. We didn’t just flip because there were Democrats who weren’t voting. We flipped because there were people who were independents, mostly, that said, ‘I can’t vote for Republicans any more.’”When Ossoff announced his campaign for US Senate in November 2019, no one knew what was on the horizon. The Covid-19 pandemic turned the race on its head, as he accused his opponent – the incumbent Republican senator David Perdue, one of the wealthiest lawmakers in US history – of corruption.Perdue was the most active stock trader in the Senate, and made some opportune trades during the pandemic. Ossoff pounced, characterizing his opponent as a caricature of Gilded Age wealth.“It’s not just that you’re a crook, senator. It’s that you’re attacking the health of the people that you represent,” Ossoff told Perdue during one debate. “You did say Covid-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while, you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio. And you did vote four times to end protections for pre-existing conditions. Four times.”Perdue pulled out of the final debate, as money poured into the race. Ossoff debated an empty podium to make his message heard.Jon Ossoff gestures to an empty lectern during a debate for US Senate on 6 December 2020, in Atlanta. Senator David Perdue declined to attend. Photograph: Ben Gray/APPerdue raised about $100m to defend his seat. Ossoff raised more than $150m to challenge him.But Georgia voters had heard enough. Ossoff beat Perdue by about 56,000 votes, 50.6% to 49.4%.“Everybody who cast your ballot, everybody who put your faith and confidence in democracy’s capacity to deliver the representation we deserve, whether you were for me or against me, I’ll be for you,” he said in his victory speech.Donald Chase is a peanut farmer from south Georgia. He lives 30 miles (48.2km) away from Plains, where Jimmy Carter rose from obscurity to the White House 50 years ago. There are few Carter Democrats left in south Georgia. But there are some Republicans voting for Ossoff; Chase is among them.“He’s not afraid to stand up, and I appreciate that,” said Chase. “The second thing is he’s demonstrated really clearly that he’ll come to south Georgia, that he’ll listen to the issues, and he’ll try to do something where he can.”“Republican leadership in Georgia has done a lot of good things,” added Chase. But tariffs and diesel fuel prices have damaged the peanut business.“The tariff situation, I saw it coming, and I just was – this is going to hurt peanut farmers,” he said. “Our two primary export countries are Canada and Mexico. And with this latest spat, I will call it, the tariffs on peanut products went up 295%.”Ossoff still faces the same challenge Democrats up and down the ballot face, two years after the party’s crushing defeat to Trump: motivating the base.A young Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worker, who requested anonymity for fear of political retribution, described life under the leadership of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr – a key Trump appointee – while watching Atlanta’s Pride parade this month.‘Stay Strong CDC We Love You’ signage outside the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, in December 2025. Photograph: Megan Varner/Bloomberg via Getty Images“We’re personally very, very burnt out, and very overstretched,” she said. “We’re just nervous that we’re going to get fired every single day.”She has knocked on doors for Ossoff in the past, and plans to vote for him. But that’s about it.“I feel like I’ve done that a lot over the past few years, especially for Stacey Abrams and Kamala [Harris],” she said. “I think I’m just burnt out. I’m going to vote and I’m going to encourage people to vote, but I’m not doing what I’ve done in the past because it’s just been too much.”At the same event Rockwell McKay said: “Even if his heart is in the right place and he’s trying to do these things, he can’t do it in two or four years.“They churn up in the House with the Democrats and the Republicans. In the next three or four years, we’ll have somebody else in wanting to redirect their movement. I don’t see it.“I’m past the Obama shit, with the hope,” he added. “Fuck all that.”Ossoff is, in many ways, unique. Should he ever find himself drawn away from Georgia, Democrats in the state fear his successes would be hard to replicate – in part because he has a gift for being the right person, in the right place, at the right time.Contributors have given him more than $98m for November’s election, with about 90% of donations under $100. Ossoff had about $43m as cash on hand at the end of July: the largest war chest of any US Senate candidate in this election cycle, and 20 times as much as Collins, his opponent.“Eventually, Jon Ossoff maybe should run for president, but not anytime soon,” said Deutsch, the Dunwoody mayor, who took solace in the fact he had “not indicated that it’s on his short-term, or even medium-term, plan”.Senator Jon Ossoff greets supporters after he cast his vote on the first day of early voting in Atlanta on Tuesday. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/ReutersAs senator, he has pushed hard to end stock and cryptocurrency trading by members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children; campaigned for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate spending in elections; and investigated abuses and corruption in federal prisons.His departure from the role “would be a terrible loss” for Georgia in the Senate, she added. “But one of my young adult children, who lives in Texas, wants him to run. He thinks he’s the only choice. And I’m like, I don’t think so.”Ernst, the former Brookhaven mayor, can see the appeal of an Ossoff presidential bid. “I mean, in this day and age, being a Democrat, white, male – young, white male – it’s kind of rare,” he said, as the Senate generally skews older. “And no one says he’s a raging liberal. No one says he’s conservative. No one says he’s moderate. He’s just Jon Ossoff.”Johnson, the congressman for whom he used to work, said: “I think Jon’s cultivation of support from small-dollar donors from across the country strengthens his ability to pursue policy goals that favor the common good, as opposed to policies that favor the wealthy and the well connected.”Twice, in 2017 and 2020, Ossoff found himself at the center of America’s political attention. Both times, he capitalized on that attention – to the political benefit of Democrats, and the financial benefit of his future campaigns.Might he do it a third time? The chances are greater than zero.