Sen. Jon Ossoff almost didn’t run for reelection. Now some Democrats want to draft him for 2028 | CNN Politics

Savannah, Georgia — 

Outside the frame of the viral clips – shot by two cameras carefully positioned on either side of the stage – were over a thousand people, hot under the tin roof of a converted ironworks on Saturday afternoon. They applauded a few times and got one “USA! USA!” chant briefly going, but mostly they sat quietly listening as Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff spoke.

He practiced no consultant conventional wisdom of tacking center or soft in a purple state. Nor were there any swings for or against socialism. He made just one passing reference to the Reflecting Pool, but it centered on incompetence and wastefully sending the National Guard to surround the site, rather than giggling about the color. Ossoff drove hard at Donald Trump again and again, in a state the president won twice, while including his disgust at the conspiratorial obsession after Trump lost it the other time.

This is the strategy that appears to be working in a must-win race in 2026’s trickiest territory for Democrats and has turned Ossoff into an online sensation along the way. The rallies have become such events that vendors set up around the block from Saturday’s event to sell their own knock-off Ossoff T-shirts and bespoke spray-painted Barack Obama “Hope”-style portraits for lawn signs. He’s gone from flash-in-the-pan failed 2017 House candidate running for a written off Senate seat in 2020 to being pulled into presidential speculation.

Ossoff hates the talk, his advisers hate the talk, and he goes out of his way to avoid engaging with it. There’s “a fantasy football dimension” to anything about 2028, he told CNN a few blocks from the rally site on Friday afternoon, during a break from finalizing a draft of his remarks. Both for the sake of his psyche and his politics trying to be the first Democratic senator elected to a second full term in Georgia since Sam Nunn won his last race in 1990, he repeats in every way he can that he has zero interest.

“There’s a danger of that distracting from the mission critical task of winning the midterm elections,” said Ossoff, who will face Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins in the fall. Instead, he’s focused on the home front – on constituent services and on delivering what his staff jokes are his monthly ‘taking everyone to church’ speeches, which start by asking attendees to turn to their neighbors and pledge to work together.

Every rally is a half-hour grounding of the consequences of corruption, like Saturday’s ticking through Trump’s cutting health care subsidies to fund tax cuts for the wealthy before soliciting rich donors to fund his planned White House ballroom, “Prince Jared” Kushner negotiating to end the costly war in Iran while raising money for his investment company, and how Trump’s failed promises to bring down prices fit right in with how the “corporate disrespect is suffocating” American families.

“There’s an obligation for leaders to attack the obscenity of this, whether or not it’s the shrewdest political stance,” Ossoff said.

No longer as bristling to be taken seriously as when he first arrived in Washington at 33, Ossoff still tries to keep the non-political parts of his life private and pre-set the bounds of what he’ll discuss. Even in group lunches with other Democratic senators he doesn’t say much, said his friend, Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper, describing how the freshman lawmaker often asks questions about what issues they should or shouldn’t be considering, “kind of putting the breadcrumbs out there so that they get the sense of ownership and discovery that helps you win arguments.”

Ossoff didn’t expect the rallies to take off quite this much when he started holding them last year, and, while the former documentary filmmaker will weigh in on the camera setups, the life they’ve taken online can still surprise him. At the last minute before a rally in May, he almost cut a long story about the Trump administration’s approval of government funding for a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan that his two oldest sons have been linked to.

Ossoff says he doesn’t have any social media apps on his phone and marvels at how some of his colleagues get lost in them. “I guess I was wrong,” he later joked to aides when he heard that the salvaged bit racked up millions of views. On Saturday, he reprised it, adding “your tax dollars are backing a tungsten mine” to a litany of what he called “coin-operated” American politics: “Money goes in, favors come out.”

In Albania, they’re protesting another entangled Kushner deal so much it’s being called the Flamingo Revolution, Ossoff added, calling for Americans to start standing up too.

Ossoff considered not running for another term. Since his last race, he and his high school sweetheart wife have had two daughters, now ages 4 and 1. Over the course of several conversations with CNN, it was the rare moment that he paused without having an answer ready to go.

“I find the separation from my kids to be really painful,” he said after a moment, thinking back at the decision. But Ossoff said he felt compelled by a “worldview” to keep going as part of a bigger fight to restore faith in government.

Now 39, Ossoff is still the youngest member of the Senate. In the nearly six years since his last race, Ossoff has gone from helping win the majority to toiling in the minority, from Joe Biden in the White House to the return of Trump, but it was those girls at home that accentuated how much he felt like an interloper in what he called “the world’s most powerful senior center.”

“It’s not just that the Senate is overwhelmingly full of people of a certain age for whom parenting is a distant memory. It’s also full of people who have been senators for decades, which equally distances them from the daily reality of American life,” Ossoff said.

To J.B. Poersch, the head of the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, this is a big part of why party leaders are, to their amazement, not seeing as much of a need to spend money to protect Ossoff, who also happens to be sitting on more than $32 million according to his latest campaign fundraising report.

“He doesn’t feel like an incumbent. He’s young. There’s too much energy. He feels like change,” Poersch said.

Ossoff would prefer that more people remember that just four years ago, it took an intense campaign and millions of dollars for Sen. Raphael Warnock to beat Republican Herschel Walker by all of a percentage point — and that was with a swirl of controversy around Walker’s candidacy. He calls himself “the underdog” in what he predicts will be this year’s most expensive and closest Senate race.

Ossoff’s opponent seems to agree. “He’s losing, and he knows he’s losing,” Collins told CNN’s Manu Raju earlier in the week, adding “this guy is weak, he’s woke, and he will be defeated because at the end of the day Georgia is going have a choice, and that choice is clear as day.”

From the fundraising to the rhetoric to the rallies being staged by a presidential-level events firm, though, Ossoff is not acting much like an underdog, but that choice between Trump allegiance and himself is precisely what Ossoff wanted.

At the rally, the senator repeated what’s become a favorite line: “there’s a reason why (Republican Gov.) Brian Kemp worked so hard” to stop Collins from being the nominee. In the months after Kemp didn’t jump in himself to the Ossoff campaign’s relief, the senator’s team worked quietly behind the scenes to boost Collins and hurt who they saw as the more palatable former college football coach and Kemp-backed Derek Dooley, according to people involved.

Ossoff embraced the president’s endorsement of Collins days before the Republican Senate runoff, slamming him as Trump’s fellow extremist and puppet and rhetorically sliding him into the same system he describes of perpetual self-dealing. “The bigot congressman, who is only a congressman because his daddy was a congressman,” he said at Saturday’s rally, referencing scrutiny Collins has faced over past social media posts.

Collins argued the senator hasn’t condemned enough hateful people himself. He also stuck to his denialism about the 2020 Georgia results, falsely claiming “Trump won that race.”

After he won in 2021, Ossoff told staff to dig in on constituent services: smart politics for building up goodwill in a tough state, but he insists that it was more about doing his part to save democracy.

“The collapse of public trust in government is so intense, the recognition of the depth of corruption is so widespread, that something as seemingly simple as providing great service fulfills the essential function of restoring some confidence in the Constitution and American government,” he told CNN.

Fans include state Rep. Ruwa Romman, whom Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed for state Senate in Georgia this cycle. Romman told CNN, “for constituent services, I don’t think you’re going to find someone who can match his capabilities.” Even Dooley, in the middle of a radio interview blasting the senator in the lead-up to the GOP run-off, acknowledged, “He’s got really good constituent services, so if somebody has a problem with a passport, you know, he does good things like that.”

“I have been surprised how people express that they’re stunned to have been treated so well,” Ossoff said.

Though Ossoff is so guarded about his non-political life that he was surprised word got out, he confirmed to CNN that his favorite movie is “The Ghost Writer,” a 2010 Roman Polanski thriller about an author brought into a politician’s inner circle only to discover a scandal that he throws himself into exposing.

Ossoff spent seven years producing documentaries about international corruption and abuses, and argues that what he often talks about as his investigative journalism career defines him still – now with congressional subpoena authority and a bully pulpit. The investigations he’s spent the last five years on, though, aren’t the usual partisan or show hearing bait: he’s dug into foster care abuses and bad housing practices for military families, and his team likes to brag that he is the only Democrat to have subpoenaed a Biden administration official, the Bureau of Prisons director, over allegations of abuse and corruption in the agency.

That’s also meant working with stalwart GOP Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn or, when he won an award for the prisons investigation, earning praise from his Republican partner then-Indiana Sen. Mike Braun.

The documentaries exposed “what bad people who assumed they had impunity were doing when they believed they were acting in secret,” Ossoff said, explaining, “it is the same motivation to expose the abuse of power that has driven so much of my work in the Senate.”

His daughters were factors in this too, Ossoff said, inspiring him to start digging into foster care and military family housing in the first place.

Saying no, over and over, to the 2028 draft

From the cut-out “O” signs of Ossoff’s logo—a little darker blue than Obama’s, the red-and-white stripes cross the center instead of forming the horizon—waving behind him at the rally, or walking off stage to the same song Stevie Wonder performed at the opening of the 44th president’s new library in Chicago, Ossoff can seem like he’s purposefully stoking presidential chatter that has already ranged from a feature in the New York Times to Hasan Piker, a prominent left-wing streamer with a history of inflammatory remarks, calling the senator his “dark horse” for 2028.

A young White guy with proven appeal to Black voters, a supporter of the immigration detention legislation named for the killed Georgia student Laken Riley but also a fierce critic of how far Trump has gone, a Jewish son of an immigrant who supports the security of the Israeli people yet voted early to cut some arms funding to Israel and a Democrat who can win in actually tough territory: the logic seems so obvious that the excitement is already spreading, and advisers to potential rivals told CNN they’re already beginning to consider what taking him on might mean.

“It’s in my Twitter algorithm and I watch it, and I’ve seen him in person and he’s really, really good at that,” said Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, another friend in the chamber who told CNN in January he is actively looking at a 2028 run, but who’s bonded with Ossoff over their time together on the Intelligence Committee and occasionally about flying (Kelly was a Navy pilot and astronaut; Ossoff got his private pilot’s license in high school).

But Ossoff insists he’s not interested and that attention across the board should be on 2026. “I think we should judge these prospective presidential candidates by how much they’re doing to help us win battleground states and front-line congressional races to restore checks and balances. That to me will be the mark of their engagement with the political necessity of the moment,” he said.

Several of those prospective candidates have already been through Georgia. More have been reaching out. But pressed on whether that same standard for potential presidential candidates might apply to him as the one actually on the ballot in his battleground state, Ossoff didn’t bite.

“We have to win this Senate race and we have to win those battleground House races because if we don’t restore checks and balances, I’m not sure we have another chance to,” he said.

He’s as uninterested in sounding off on the broader Democratic identity crisis or telling other Democrats what to say and do, like when asked about last week’s democratic socialist spike in New York City.

“I don’t spend much time thinking about factional, Democratic politics,” he said, because while the divide exists, “it exists more in those places and for those people and groups for whom the Democratic primary is the horizon of politics.”

When pressed on Israel or immigration policy – two issues dividing the country and the Democratic primary season – Ossoff also stays tight on message, stressing both the dignity of every human being and acknowledging a need for safety and security in the US and other countries.

That’s the kind of disciplined response that made rounds online a few weeks ago when a TMZ reporter pressed Ossoff on Trump’s new derogatory nickname for him. In the clip, Ossoff listened with an attentive but unmoving expression, then responded by ticking through a few ways the president is “disgraced” before slipping in a plug to his campaign website.

“I am disciplined, and I have an obligation to defend this seat,” he told CNN. “And in the defense of this seat, with real electoral stakes, discipline is a virtue.”

Working the rope line after Saturday’s rally, Ossoff stopped for a moment to reflect on the way the crowd had responded. Online, as usual, the speech would quickly take off – Obama administration alumni and “Pod Save America” host Tommy Vietor summarized his sentiment: “I want to roll this speech up and smoke it.”

“Every single one of these, the intensity is growing. People are starting to feel that the moment is at hand when they can use their power as citizens to turn things around,” Ossoff told CNN at the side of the stage.

He was rushing off to catch a flight back to his wife and daughters, planning to largely disappear from the political conversation until he pops up for his next rally in a few weeks.

“I think about what kind of world I want them to grow up in. Every one of these gives me hope and confidence that we’re going to be able to make a major statement and a big difference this fall.”