What Is It About Jon Ossoff?

When Jon Ossoff was first elected, in January 2021, he felt a little like an accidental senator. He was 33 years old and had won by just 55,000 votes, defeating the unpopular Republican incumbent, David Perdue, in a runoff election overshadowed by President Trump’s bogus claims of voter fraud.

He doesn’t feel accidental anymore.

Ossoff cruised to reelection tonight. The final margin of victory is not yet known, but networks called the race early; soon after the polls closed, any drama was gone, even though he had been campaigning in a state that is barely purple. His triumph does not change much about the Senate’s electoral calculus overall, because Democrats were expected to hold his seat, but the decisive victory immediately propels him into the top ranks of the party and any discussions about the 2028 presidential contest.

Ossoff’s win is a testament to his deftness as both senator and candidate. In office, he has emphasized constituent services but also mastered the art of getting under the skin of Republican officials during Senate hearings, without ever seeming ruffled himself. On the stump, his campaign showed an acute sense of how to use media, even producing a new coinage—the “Ossoff angle”—to describe the upward camera perspective that his team worked to produce.

He paired these good visuals with a knack for the sound bite. In the most famous instance, in August, he slyly said that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie.” Although he omitted her last name, the moment made the president’s assistant Natalie Harp—who was previously familiar only to political reporters and political junkies—into a prominent figure. The ensuing news cycle was both damaging and distracting to the White House. As the youngest senator, Ossoff has shown a mastery of short-form video that few of his peers can dream of.

Like many other Democrats this cycle, Ossoff benefited from the president’s unpopularity, disastrous agenda, and lack of political focus. He was running in a state that Trump had won by barely two points in 2024. Ossoff was also very lucky in his opponent. After failing to recruit a stronger candidate, Republicans landed on Mike Collins, whose many connections to white nationalists, including his son-in-law, helped sink him. But Ossoff made some of his own luck by intimidating better candidates into not running. He also showed a killer instinct on debate stages, savaging Collins over his ties to racists.

Ossoff’s campaign was impressive enough that his name is on the lips of what the columnist Russell Baker called “The Great Mentioner,” the rumor mill of possible candidates for president. During the campaign, Ossoff promised to finish his next term as senator if he were reelected. “I have zero interest in running for president,” he said during a debate. “I’m not running for president. I’m running for reelection to the Senate.” But candidates who wish to do so have squirmed their way out of stronger commitments.

What an Ossoff presidential campaign might look like is unclear. He resides more on the moderate wing of the party than on the left, but he does not have a strong ideological profile, and he has avoided confrontations with more progressive Democrats. To become a major national figure, he’ll have to define himself more clearly. And although in many ways the 2028 cycle has already begun, that election is a long way off in political time.

The skills required to run for president are also on a different tier from those needed to win at the state level, as many senators and governors have learned the hard way in the past. Ossoff’s talent outside of carefully packaged media has not yet been demonstrated on the national level. One of the backhanded compliments he gets is that someone so good at direct-to-social video messaging can’t possibly be as charismatic one-on-one. His triumph tonight guarantees that he’ll instantly be in heavy demand on television and at Democratic events across the country, where he’ll have a chance to test and hone those skills.