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Sen. Jon Ossoff is going on offense against President Trump, emerging as one of the Democratic Party’s most aggressive critics on elections — an issue that hits close to home for the Georgia Democrat.
Ossoff won his seat in the Senate in a runoff election held on Jan. 5, 2021 — a day before the infamous Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, when Trump supporters forced the evacuation of lawmakers seeking to certify the results of the 2020 presidential contest.
Those supporters were egged on at the time by Trump, who insisted he won the 2020 contest and who Thursday in a national address reiterated his claims about election security.
Even before Trump delivered his primetime speech, Ossoff, increasingly seen as a potential presidential contender in 2028, was speaking out on the issue.
On Wednesday, he drew headlines for a heated exchange with Jay Clayton, nominated by Trump to serve as director of national intelligence. During the confirmation hearing, Ossoff repeatedly asked Clayton, “Who won the 2020 election?”
When Clayton refused to answer a number of times, Ossoff told him: “Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president’s delusions?”
Ahead of Trump’s address on Thursday, Ossoff pushed back on any suggestion that Trump would claim his own victory in 2021 was somehow fraudulent, telling reporters, “the world’s most famous sore loser will deliver a primetime presidential sour-grapes address to pursue his six year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country.”
And a few hours before Trump spoke, Ossoff in an interview sought to get ahead of the president in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“If there’s one person who committed election fraud in Georgia, it’s Donald Trump when he dialed up our state’s senior most election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and tried to bully him in a recorded phone call to quote find the exact number of votes Donald Trump needed to win in a state that he had lost,” Ossoff told Tapper.
He said he expected the Trump speech to be “equal parts pathetic and dangerous.”
While Ossoff has been generating buzz as talk of the 2028 election heats up, he has said he isn’t interested in running and is focused strictly on winning reelection to the Senate this fall. Ossoff remains a top GOP target, given Trump’s victories in Georgia in 2016 and 2024.
But talk of Ossoff as a presidential candidate has picked up steam as Democrats have watched in recent months while the senator’s videos and speeches have gone viral.
“I think he is speaking truth to power and I think he is meeting a need that a lot of Democrats have been looking for and that’s somebody who fights hard and who understands how to cut through the noise,” said Democratic strategist Anthony Coley. “And he has a way of speaking in a language that every day people can understand. It’s not poll-tested. It’s just simple language.”
While Republicans still hope to pick off Ossoff, he’s the favorite in his race, and some non-partisan handicappers have rated the race as leaning Democrat.
The polls signal why.
A Fox News poll out earlier this month showed Ossoff leading his opponent Rep. Mike Collins 56 percent to 43 percent.
A second poll by Wick showed the race a little closer with Ossoff leading Collins 46.7 percent to 42.9 percent, with roughly 10 percent of voters undecided.
Democratic strategist Eddie Vale credited Ossoff with doing “a good job of pivoting off what Trump is doing and turning it back into how he is actually the one who would help people in Georgia.”
Ossoff’s rise has come against a backdrop of intense Democratic infighting between progressives and centrists. That fight is being carried out in primaries around the country.
Amid that fight, Vale said Ossoff is “a great example of a candidate who doesn’t fit into anyone’s perfect ideological mold of what someone should be.”
“And instead of getting involved in national ideological fights is focused on the grind and putting in the work in the Senate and on the campaign trail to win,” he said of the Georgia senator.
Vale also added that Ossoff, who is 39, is “young and dynamic and knows how to run a modern content-based campaign.”
During the interview with Tapper, Ossoff proved the savviness of his reelection campaign when he urged supporters to go to his campaign website electJon.com.
When Tapper spelled it out J-O-N and then added, “I just need to remind people if you’re going to do that, like they might misspell it. And unless you bought J-O-H-N.”
“We did,” Ossoff said.
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