Undaunted in Georgia

A rising star looks like a winner for 2026.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) has found his voice and his moment in his reelection campaign. In a recent rip-roaring speech, he clobbered the Trump regime for its economic blunders, moral rot, and increasing inability to hide either from the American people.

His most memorable line hit the regime’s connections to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the wider lack of accountability from rich, powerful men. “Now, you remember we were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. Do you remember that? But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich,” he said. “It is the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class, ruling our country. They are the elites they pretend to hate.” The powerful analogy to Epstein goes beyond the subset of men who had direct dealings with him. It points to the billionaire class that plunders the economy, compromises institutions (e.g., news outlets), and supports a cruel, racist autocrat.

Ossoff continued ticking off Trump’s domestic outrages. “So, prices are up, jobs are going away, Medicaid and school lunches are slashed, nursing homes are getting defunded. If you’re Steve Bannon and your pitch was Trump for the forgotten man and woman, how do you sell any of this?” Instead of fighting for average Americans, Trump is “literally closing rural clinics and hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros and Elon Musk,” Ossoff observed.

His forcefully delineated Trump’s racism, sickness, and corruption:

On ICE he thundered: “Why are roving gangs of masked men — who look like they couldn’t pass the Army physical exam — dressed up like pretend Delta Force operators on our streets, demanding papers, dragging people from their cars, and shooting people to death?” (Though Ossoff has been a strong critic of Trump’s draconian and illegal immigration raids, he did not dismiss voters’ legitimate concerns about a secure border. “The American people demand and deserve secure borders,” Ossoff said last month. “The American people also believe every human being should be treated with dignity and respect.”)

Ossoff has also been front and center in the response to the wholly illegitimate seizure of Fulton County, Ga., ballots. In a written statement, he decried the raid as “a continuation of this sore loser’s crusade, despite repeated audits and independent reviews confirming that Donald Trump was indeed defeated.”

Critically, in his speech, he put the ballot seizure in the context of Trump’s scheming to disrupt the 2026 election:

The president said we’d never need to vote again. Then he said we shouldn’t have elections. Now, he says he wants to take over the elections. And like a scene out of some banana republic, Tulsi Gabbard, the spy chief comes to Fulton County, Georgia to oversee the seizure of ballots. Your ballots. Tulsi said the president asked her to go… which means the president is personally managing federal raids on election sites in battleground states. all in service of his obsession with overturning the 2020 election and laying the groundwork for whatever they’re plotting this year.

His warning was prescient, considering the revelation on Tuesday that the affidavit for the raid came from “a leading election denier in the Trump administration and relied heavily on claims about ballots that have been widely debunked,” as the New York Times explained. (In addition, as Joyce Vance and Andrew Weissmann pointed out in a briefing for the press, the affidavit identified no criminal suspect or source or did more than offer bizarre speculation about an outcome that has already been thoroughly litigated.)

Ossoff, like the very best communicators, frames the moment we are in as a moral and political inflection point. “I believe we will escape this moral tailspin and recommit ourselves to the values that have powered 250 years of progress,” he said in his speech. “But none of this is possible without victory this November.”

Echoing the mantra of the Civil Rights movement, Ossoff declared:

It feels like every day the depravity deepens, the chaos accelerates and deep down, maybe you fear whether our republic — now in our 250th year — can survive it all. But Atlanta, I’m here to tell you, we will overcome this together.

Ossoff was supposed to be one of the most vulnerable Democrats on the ballot. But in a blue-wave election, he seems more secure than Democrats had imagined, in part because the GOP primary is snarled in a three-way race. Ossoff, meanwhile, has demonstrated that he is a fundraising colossus. (“Ossoff, seeking his second six-year term, raised nearly $10 million during the fourth quarter of 2025,” the Georgia Recorder reported. “He starts the new year with an astonishing $25 million on hand, the most of any incumbent senator facing a competitive race this year.”)

At 38, Ossoff is the youngest member of the Senate, where the median age of Democrats is 66. He also demonstrates a mix of aggressiveness and niceness that few politicians can pull off. (James Talarico, running for the Texas Senate seat, is another.) Ossoff has strong ties to the African American community, winning over 90 percent of the Black vote in his election runoff in January 2021. (The late John Lewis was a mentor.)

In short, Ossoff will face a tough fight in November, but the combination of his strong campaign skills, solid support in the Black community, fierce opposition to the Trump regime, and a blue-wave election have given Democrats confidence he will win, perhaps comfortably, in a race crucial to potentially winning back the Senate majority. If he wins with room to spare, he will secure his position among the rising stars in the Democratic Party, part of a long-overdue transition from the stale, septuagenarian set to a generation of politicians who can connect with younger voters.

Ossoff has been undaunted, unafraid, and uncowed when it comes to denouncing the “Epstein elite” and projecting a better vision of America. Georgia voters (as well as pro-democracy voters nationwide) are fortunate to have him in the Senate, especially when his state may be the target of an unconstitutional putsch to seize ballots and defy the will of the voters this November.

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