Ossoff Denies 2028 Run as Draft Talk Builds
Ossoff Denies 2028 Run as Draft Talk Builds
The News
Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat once seen as the Senate's most vulnerable incumbent, is now running so far ahead of Republican Rep. Mike Collins that pundits, strategists and prediction markets have started treating him as a 2028 presidential contender.
Ossoff says he isn't interested. He has dismissed the presidential chatter as a "curse" and repeatedly ruled out a White House bid.
Recent Georgia polling averages compiled by RealClearPolling show Ossoff, 39, leading Collins by almost 8 percentage points, according to Yahoo News — a bigger margin than any other battleground Senate candidate in either party.
Timeline
Ossoff is born in Atlanta, later becoming the first millennial to serve in the U.S. Senate.
At 29, Ossoff announces a run in the special election for Georgia's 6th Congressional District seat vacated by Tom Price. He breaks House fundraising records, forces a runoff and loses it by fewer than 10,000 votes.
Ossoff defeats sitting Sen. David Perdue in a runoff, and he and Raphael Warnock hand Democrats control of the Senate.
President Trump carries Georgia by 3 points, reversing his narrow 2020 loss there and setting up expectations of another photo finish for Ossoff.
Trump mocks Ossoff during a Georgia appearance.
Ossoff rallies 1,600 supporters at the Center Stage Theater in Midtown Atlanta, telling them "a wave is building."
Yahoo News publishes a guide to Ossoff's rise; the right-leaning site Citizen Free Press predicts flatly that he will be the Democratic nominee in 2028.
Reactions
"A wave is building," Ossoff told the Atlanta crowd Sunday, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "The kind of wave that comes once a generation when the people have been pushed too far, and they decide altogether all at once to say: Enough is enough."
Liberal commentator Jeremiah Johnson posted that "people are not prepared for a D+14 Georgia Senate seat," adding that "the effort to draft Ossoff is going to go into turbo mode after November."
Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist, wrote in June that Ossoff was "president-maxxing so hard."
Trump was less impressed. "He reminds me of Pinky Herman," the president said last month in Georgia, in a garbled reference to Pee-wee Herman. "He's not respected at all in Washington. You don't even hear his name mentioned."
What's Next
The Georgia Senate race is decided in November. Ossoff enters the fall stretch with a polling lead in every major public survey, a large fundraising advantage — the AJC reported he began the fall campaign with $42 million on hand — and an open effort to peel off Republican voters, including two Georgia mayors who have crossed party lines to back him.
The 2028 question only gets louder after that. Yahoo News reports Ossoff's odds of winning the Democratic nomination have tripled on the leading prediction markets since the spring, putting him roughly level with the current front-runner, California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
More
Ossoff is not a candidate of the party's left. In a 2020 Axios interview that has circulated again this summer, he answered "no" to the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, defunding the police, abolishing ICE and expanding the Supreme Court. Yahoo News describes him as a mainstream Obama-style liberal — an abortion rights supporter who backs Obamacare, LGBTQ rights and immigration reform — who has consistently kept his distance from the party's left flank.
He interned for the late Rep. John Lewis at 17, worked as a national security staffer for Rep. Hank Johnson, and co-founded a documentary company that produced investigations of international corruption and human rights abuses, several of which aired on the BBC.
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