Jon Ossoff, Once the Senate's Most Vulnerable Democrat, Won Reelection by Running Against Trump's Corruption

Voters have clearly embraced Democratic candidates tonight—not necessarily because they like them, but because they like President Donald Trump considerably less.

Granted, a president’s party is expected to lose seats in the midterms. But Trump has behaved so poorly during his second term that Georgia voters handily reelected Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who was once considered a longshot.

In November 2020, when voters ejected Trump from the presidency, there were reverberations further down the ballot. In Georgia, two U.S. Senate races went to a runoff, where Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, two Democrats with no prior experience in elected office, won the state’s Senate seats.

Georgia had not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 2000, and it now had two.

Democrats were ecstatic, but any claims of Georgia going permanently blue were short-sighted: Ossoff and Warnock each had the advantage of running at a time when Trump made Republican candidates adopt his harebrained rhetoric about stolen elections. It’s difficult to inspire your base to turn out and vote when you’re simultaneously telling them the system can’t be trusted to count it properly.

Two years later, when Warnock ran for a full term, he had further good fortune when Trump interceded and convinced Georgia Republicans to nominate Herschel Walker, a former football player with a sordid history who didn’t even live in the state. Warnock won again.

Still, a permanently blue Georgia looked like a progressive fantasy. Trump won the state handily in 2024 on the way to recapturing the presidency.

But once back in office, Trump governed in a slash-and-burn fashion: signing dozens of executive orders on his first day, imposing double-digit tariffs on nearly every other country on earth, and deploying armed, masked federal agents into American cities. Going into the election, inflation stood at 3.7 percent—whereas the New York Federal Reserve calculated that without Trump’s tariffs, many prices would have fallen.

And then, of course, there’s his war against Iran, the gasoline and diesel price hikes that the war caused, and the flagrant corruption to enrich himself and his family.

Over the past year, Ossoff made corruption a major theme of his campaign, railing against Trump and the “Epstein class.” Not only did that raise Ossoff’s profile, but he is now spoken of as a potential 2028 presidential candidate.

One year ago this week, Roll Call listed Ossoff as his party’s most vulnerable U.S. senator; on Tuesday, barely an hour after the polls closed, the Associated Press called the race in his favor.

Maybe a more competent Trump could have saved the Georgia Senate seat, and maybe not. But given Democrats are flipping seats in even such reliably red states as South Carolina and possibly Kansas, it’s looking a lot like Trump’s utterly unhinged record is to blame.

The post Jon Ossoff, Once the Senate’s Most Vulnerable Democrat, Won Reelection by Running Against Trump’s Corruption appeared first on Reason Magazine.