Until recently, Jon Ossoff was considered one of the Senate's most vulnerable Democrats. To secure his seat, the former investigative filmmaker barely defeated sitting Georgia Sen. David Perdue in a 2021 runoff. Then in 2024 President Trump won the Peach State by 3 points, avenging his narrow loss to Joe Biden four years earlier. 

The assumption was that Ossoff — a rare Deep South Democrat — was destined for another photo finish in November.  

Yet for now, at least, he seems to be cruising. The latest 2026 midterm polls show Ossoff, 39, lapping his Republican challenger, Rep. Mike Collins, by an average of almost 8 percentage points. No other battleground Senate candidate — Democrat or Republican — has built such a large lead.

"I refuse to leave my girls a world as dark and dangerous and cruel as this one threatens to become," Ossoff said at his Aug. 16 rally in Atlanta. "When Eva is old enough to ask me why I let this happen, I'm determined to answer, truthfully, that I didn't."

In fact, Ossoff's reelection campaign is going so well — clips from his speeches routinely achieve viral status — that pundits and politicos have started to predict he will parlay his sudden swing-state momentum into a 2028 presidential bid. 

"People are not prepared for a D+14 Georgia Senate seat," liberal commentator Jeremiah Johnson recently posted on social media. "The effort to draft Ossoff is going to go into turbo mode after November."

"President-maxxing so hard," Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist, wrote in June under a photo of Ossoff. 

Even Trump has taken notice. "He reminds me of Pinky Herman [sic]," the president said last month in Georgia. "He's not respected at all in Washington. You don't even hear his name mentioned."

According to the leading prediction markets, Ossoff's odds of winning the 2028 Democratic nomination have tripled since the spring, putting him roughly on par with the current frontrunners, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

None of which means the Georgian will capture his party's nomination in 2028, or even contest it. (Ossoff has dismissed the chatter as a "curse" and insisted he has zero interest in the Oval Office.) But regardless of what comes next, Ossoff is resonating right now for reasons that reflect many of the deeper dynamics at play in this year's elections.  

Here's everything you need to know about one of the key figures of the 2026 midterms.

Ossoff was born in Atlanta in 1987, making him the first millennial — and the first child of the 1980s — to serve in the U.S. Senate. His mother is an Australian immigrant; he refers to her as "mum." His father is a book publisher of Jewish descent. Ossoff identifies as Jewish. 

When Ossoff was 17, he interned for civil rights icon and longtime Georgia Rep. John Lewis, whom he considers a mentor. He went on to graduate from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service with a degree in politics and culture. During and after college, Ossoff served as a national security staffer and legislative assistant for Rep. Hank Johnson, another leader in Georgia's Black community. In 2013, Ossoff received his master's in international political economy from the London School of Economics.

Ossoff speaks during a Senate confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C., on July 15, 2026.

The same year, Ossoff used $250,000 of his inheritance to cofound a company called Insight TWI that produced documentaries about international corruption and human rights abuses: the mass rape of Yazidi women by ISIS; an investigation into an alleged Kenyan death squad; an exposé of bribery in global soccer, with a focus on Ghana. Several aired on the BBC. 

In 2017, Ossoff made his first foray into politics. Then just 29, he announced on Jan. 5 that he would compete in the first big contest of the Trump era: a special election to replace Republican Rep. Tom Price — Trump's pick for health secretary — in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, where Ossoff grew up. 

Despite the area's lopsided GOP lean, Ossoff broke national fundraising records for a U.S. House candidate and "transformed what was expected to be a quiet battle for a long-safe Republican seat into a proxy fight over Trump, the health care overhaul, and the partisan struggle for suburbia," according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Ossoff forced a top-two runoff, which he ultimately lost by less than 10,000 votes. The New York Times called it "probably the strongest Democratic turnout in an off-year election in at least a decade," crediting Ossoff with bringing a  "surprising number of irregular young and nonwhite voters to the polls."

Two years later, Ossoff challenged Perdue; he again shattered fundraising records and again forced a runoff. This time, however, the rematch took place on Jan. 5, 2021 — the day before Trump's supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden. With Senate control in the balance, Georgia voters chose Ossoff and his fellow Democrat Raphael Warnock over their Republican rivals. 

The moment marked "a generational transition as my generation asserts itself in our national political conversation and helps move the country forward," Ossoff said at the time. 

Ossoff's rhetoric has evolved over the years. As a rookie Democrat trying to flip a Republican House seat in 2018, he "often tried to avoid nationalizing [his] campaign over fears of losing moderate voters," according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He promised Georgians he would "cut wasteful spending" and hold "both parties in Washington … accountable to you." Ossoff's GOP opponent complained that he sounded "like a Republican."

Ossoff's policy preferences haven't really changed since then. He is a mainstream, Barack Obama-style liberal: pro-abortion rights, pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-Obamacare and pro-immigration reform. Beyond that, he has always sought to distance himself from the left wing of his own party. Here's a 2020 exchange with Axios that recently made the rounds on X: 

Axios: Do you support the Green New Deal?

Ossoff: No.

Do you support Medicare for All?

No.

Do you support defunding the police?

No. 

Do you support abolishing ICE?

No.

Do you support expanding the Supreme Court?

No.

Those were Ossoff's positions during "peak woke," and they remain his positions today.

In recent years, however, the senator has shifted his emphasis. Now, he's considerably more outspoken about the threat he thinks the Trump White House — "the most corrupt administration of all time," in his words — poses to American democracy. His national profile has risen as a result. 

In the 2026 edition of Ossoff's stump speech, he mocks Trump's social media blitzes and accuses him of profiting off of the presidency. "When he's not posting," Ossoff says, "he's been trying to rob us." He links Trump's actions to the foreign business deals that his sons "Prince Don and Prince Eric" have been making. He says all of this is symptomatic of the deeper "rot" in America's "coin-operated" political system — rot that predates Trump. But he insists the current president and his "Mar-a-Lago mafia" have taken things to a whole different level. 

"All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care," Ossoff fumes. "He's a failed president and a national disgrace." 

Today, Ossoff says his work as a filmmaker has shaped his message as a politician. "My belief that corruption is at the core of oppression predates my public life," he recently told the New York Times. "[Documenting] war crimes and human rights abuses in hostile environments, it was so clear how kleptocracy, corruption and authoritarianism so often go hand in hand."

Ossoff rallies supporters in Atlanta on May 31, 2026.

Somehow, Ossoff seems to be delighting national Democrats with his anti-Trump broadsides and deadpan interrogations of administration officials — while simultaneously expanding his lead in the purplest of purple states. It's a tricky tightrope to walk, and it is already earning him comparisons to the last young Democratic senator to leapfrog into the White House. 

"If you were cooking up an ideal 2028 candidate in a lab, he — and let's face it, it's probably a he — would look a lot like Ossoff," liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg opined in June. "He's young and handsome, with a picture-perfect family: a beautiful wife who works as an obstetrician-gynecologist and two small daughters. He's a Southerner from a reddish state with a history of wooing Black voters. And he's a Jewish critic of Israel who, as much as anyone in politics today, has the potential to bridge the Democratic Party's agonizing divide over Zionism." 

As Georgia's first Jewish senator — and a potential first Jewish president of the United States — Ossoff's stance on the war in Gaza is key. In 2024, Ossoff was one of just 19 senators to buck the Biden White House and endorse Bernie Sanders's initial resolution to block the sale of certain arms to Israel. "The American people are rightly horrified by the lack of sufficient concern for innocent Palestinian life that has left so many children unnecessarily dead in Gaza, without limbs or riddled with shrapnel," Ossoff said on the Senate floor. "We seem to have forgotten that we have the power to influence our ally's conduct."

At the time, this was seen as a risky move that could endanger Ossoff's reelection prospects. But much like Obama's early opposition to the Iraq War, it quickly became the Democratic consensus.

Meanwhile, Ossoff's studious focus on constituent services and bipartisan legislation — to investigate the impact of artificial intelligence on children; to fund colorectal cancer screenings for younger Americans — appears to have endeared him to at least a few Republicans.

Last week, two Republican mayors from the reddest parts of Georgia broke ranks to back Ossoff's reelection bid, telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his work for their communities outweighs any partisan differences. Former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona did the same. "I'm still a conservative Republican, but character matters," Flake told the paper. "And I want someone in that seat who takes the institution seriously and will protect the institution." 

Or as conservative radio host Erick Erickson put it on Aug. 5, "You talk to farmers in South Georgia, they can get him on the phone. They can get his staff on the phone. They can get help. You talk to Republicans in Houston County, very Republican part of the state, they know they can reach out to Ossoff, and he doesn't care that they're Republican. If they need something, he's going to get it done."

With a current average lead of 51% to Collins's 43% — and his constant criticisms of Trump — Ossoff can seem, at times, like he's already laying the groundwork for his next campaign. 

His counterargument is that what he really wants is to "restore checks and balances in these midterm elections" and "rebuke [Trump] so decisively that no president will dare try this kind of brazen corruption and abuse again for centuries." And the only way to do that, he says, is by electing a Democratic Congress. 

"If we do not," Ossoff told MS NOW in April, "I don't know that we have a free and fair presidential election in 2028. So let's keep our eyes on the ball, folks."

At the moment, the data journalists at Silver Bulletin give Collins a 6.3% chance of winning in November. That, of course, could change. But since clinching the GOP nomination in a June runoff, Collins has come under fire for online posts by his son-in-law and former chief of staff that have been "widely panned as racist and antisemitic," according to the Georgia Recorder. His general election campaign is off to a shaky start. And Ossoff recently reported that he has $42 million in his campaign war chest — nearly 20 times Collins's stockpile. 

For now, Ossoff is being touted as "perhaps [the Democratic Party's] most effective messenger," according to a recent Puck profile — "one of the few Democrats who consistently cut through the fractured media environment." His 2026 campaign is providing a new, Trump 2.0 template for how Democrats can compete in states like Georgia. And as no less an authority than former Obama strategist David Axelrod recently told the Times, if Ossoff does end up winning in November, "I'm sure people will come to him and say, you know, dude, we need you."