Fear Jon Ossoff

By Rich Lowry on Nov 5, 2026

Republicans have a lot of things to worry about after their catastrophic 2026 midterm, and one of them might be Jon Ossoff, the newly reelected Democratic senator from Georgia.

The presidential buzz had begun even before Ossoff won reelection by 18 points in purplish Georgia, and will get more intense now.

Perhaps he doesn't run -- and the odds are probably against it -- but Ossoff is exactly the kind of vehicle and message that Democrats should be looking for.

He has proven success in a swing state, isn't aggressively woke, is a forceful communicator and is a fierce Trump critic on the safest possible political grounds of corruption and the president's out-of-touch obsessions.

The political trick for a Democrat running for the nomination in 2028 is to find a way to placate the left without giving in to all of its unpopular policy and cultural commitments. The risk of relative moderation in a primary battle is that a candidate can come across as dull, wishy-washy and uninterested in taking the fight to the opposition, especially when compared to a full-throated progressive like an AOC or Abdul El-Sayed.

In his Senate race, Ossoff squared this circle by producing viral clip after viral clip of pungent, well-crafted attacks on alleged Trump administration self-dealing. There was no doubt that he was in the fight, while he was a pioneer of the argument that corruption is the reason people are struggling in their everyday lives.

This is a nonexistent connection, but there's no doubting its emotional resonance.

"Corruption," he said on the campaign trail, "is why nothing works for ordinary people. It's why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. It's why your insurance company gets away with denying your cancer treatment after you paid your premiums for decades."

The other advantage of corruption as an issue is that no one is going to think you are weird for talking about it (like, say, pronouns), or worry about the consequences for their communities (like, say, an open Southern border).

Ossoff clearly understands the power of words and marshals them with care, an attribute of another young Democratic senator who famously made it to the White House, Barack Obama (whose cadences Ossoff echoes). His victory speech on election night sounded like an acceptance speech at a national convention.

Unlike Kamala Harris, Ossoff is a cogent speaker. Unlike AOC, he doesn't have an affiliation -- the Democratic Socialists of America -- that will be used to try to disqualify him out of the box. Unlike Pete Buttigieg, he has a record of winning black voters. Unlike Gavin Newsom, he doesn't have a policy record of destroying a major state.

Youthful and good-looking, with a taste for soaring, idealistic rhetoric, the 39-year-old Ossoff could activate the reflex of the Democratic Party to always look for the next JFK. If Texas is a new swing state, he could compete there. He fits the profile of the relatively moderate Democratic candidates in the midterms who delivered heretofore reliably red states.

All that said, landslide results at the state level -- especially when running in a favorable year against a weak opponent as Ossoff did -- don't necessarily translate to the national level. The charisma and organizational skill it takes to win a presidential race are a different order of magnitude than what it takes to succeed as a senator or governor.

Ossoff is Jewish -- a potential impediment in the newly anti-Zionist Democratic Party -- and if he ran for president, he'd have to do much more than produce carefully curated video clips of his set speeches, which have done so much to drive his national profile. It will be a massive Democratic field for a 2028 nomination that looks like it's worth having, and Ossoff has said he's going to serve out his term.

So, maybe he sits this one out on the almost always mistaken assumption that he can wait. Even if he ran, he might fizzle, but Republicans should prefer not to find out.

========

(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)