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Can Senator Jon Ossoff Hold Onto His Seat?

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........

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