Ossoff’s $43M war chest is 20 times Collins’s cash on hand
Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff leads his Republican challenger, Rep. Mike Collins, by between four and eight points in public polls ahead of the November midterm — a margin no Georgia Democrat has posted in the state since the late 1990s — while repeating in interviews and on the debate stage that he has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, The Guardian reported in a profile published Friday. The lead comes despite President Donald Trump’s two-point victory in Georgia in 2024 and as Ossoff has assembled the largest Senate campaign war chest of the 2026 cycle.
Ossoff, 39, has delivered the “zero interest” line to CNN, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, MS Now (twice in August) and a local television station, and repeated it in his second Senate debate on Tuesday night, according to the profile. “His political rise in a Republican-leaning swing state, his viral speeches on conspicuously national issues, and Democratic demand for a new figure to lead the party forward are conspiring to fan the flames of speculation,” The Guardian reported. “But when Ossoff, 39, lands on a message, he sticks to it like gum under a desk. His discipline and doggedness show up in Senate hearings, in campaign rallies and debates — railing against ‘the Epstein class’ and mocking Trump in blunt snippets that spread far and wide online.”
In that Tuesday debate, Ossoff hammered at Collins, dubbing the encounter the “trial of Mike Collins” and pressing him on his prior votes in support of the Iran war and Trump’s tariffs, as well as ties to white nationalists in his office and family. “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club,” Ossoff said. “His office has been in cahoots with some of the most notorious white supremacists in the country. He himself has amplified neo-Nazi propaganda. He’s never apologized for it. And he should tonight.”
Charlie Bailey, director of the Georgia Democratic Party and a trial lawyer by trade, described Ossoff’s voter appeal in courtroom terms. “A campaign is just a bigger, longer jury trial,” Bailey told The Guardian. “The best trial lawyers, they are themselves. They talk plainly to the jury. They say straightforward things, and the jury can tell that they’re being themselves, and they just believe what they are saying.” When Ossoff talks to voters, “it not only matches up with their experience, their anger, and their frustration; they know he’s telling the truth,” Bailey said. “That’s leadership.”
Ossoff’s political rise began with a loss. The son of Heather Fenton, a co-founder of New Power Pac, which worked to elect women to local offices in Georgia, and attorney Richard Ossoff, he grew up in Northlake, an unincorporated middle-class part of DeKalb County near Atlanta, attended the city’s elite Paideia school and interned for Rep. John Lewis before undergraduate study at Georgetown. He later worked for Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democratic congressman who represents part of Atlanta and DeKalb County, and earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in 2013. Using $250,000 of an inheritance, he bought a stake in a documentary film company and spent the next four years in London as chief executive of Insight TWI, producing investigations into corruption and human rights abuses — examinations of Fifa, Beijing’s investments in Africa, and a documentary on female Yazidi soldiers that aired on the BBC.
When Republican Tom Price resigned his House seat in February 2017 to become Trump’s health and human services secretary, Ossoff entered the special election for Georgia’s sixth congressional district. The district used a “jungle” primary — candidates of all parties run on a single ballot, with a runoff between the top two if no one wins more than 50 percent of the vote. “You have to remember, everyone on the local level was a Republican,” said John Ernst, then the only Democratic mayor in the district and a former mayor of Brookhaven, a city in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. The district was, in Ernst’s words, “the bastion of the proto-Maga movement … but without the craziness. It’s the business wing of the movement.”
Atlanta’s streets had filled that year with women in pink hats in the largest such demonstration since the civil rights movement, and they were looking for a way to strike back. This special congressional election provided stunned Democratic voters their first chance to register their outrage at Trump’s provocations, at least by proxy. Ossoff raised an eye-watering $23 million in small donations from around the country and forced a runoff against former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel — a notably moderate Republican — but lost 52–48. He walked away with the largest Democratic donor database in the United States, The Guardian reported.
After his 2017 defeat, “everyone” was asking Ossoff the same thing, according to Ernst — a question he is likely to get just as much, if not more, should he meet expectations and win next month: what is he going to do next? “Think about it. He was a guy who came out of the blue,” Ernst said. “He wasn’t a known entity outside of a few congressional offices in Washington DC.”
Ossoff decided against challenging Handel to a rematch in 2018. Instead, he started building political relationships across the state of Georgia, using his war chest and new national standing to help Democrats in local elections. Ossoff’s 2017 campaign sowed seeds that he subsequently spent years watering. “When I ran in 2011 for the first time on council, I did it by myself. I had no idea what I was doing,” Dunwoody Mayor Lynn Deutsch told The Guardian. “I ran for mayor [in 2019] but I wasn’t going to do it by myself. So I convened all these women … and they had all helped on the Jon campaign. And they had all knocked on doors for Ossoff.” Three years after Ossoff’s loss, Democrats had taken control of local offices in most of Atlanta’s affluent, politically powerful northern suburbs. “There was just an energy about him,” Deutsch said of Ossoff, in the shadow of Trump’s first presidency. “And remember, everybody was operating kind of from a space of panic, right? What the heck just happened? And when you talk about the areas that flipped, they’re generally highly educated. We didn’t just flip because there were Democrats who weren’t voting. We flipped because there were people who were independents, mostly, that said, ‘I can’t vote for Republicans any more.’”
Ossoff announced his campaign for U.S. Senate in November 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic turned the race on its head. Incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue, one of the wealthiest lawmakers in U.S. history, was the Senate’s most active stock trader and made some opportune trades during the pandemic. Ossoff pounced, characterizing his opponent as a caricature of Gilded Age wealth. “It’s not just that you’re a crook, senator. It’s that you’re attacking the health of the people that you represent,” Ossoff told Perdue during one debate. “You did say Covid-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while, you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio. And you did vote four times to end protections for pre-existing conditions. Four times.” Perdue pulled out of the final debate; Ossoff debated an empty podium to make his message heard. Perdue raised about $100 million to defend his seat; Ossoff raised more than $150 million to challenge him. Ossoff won by about 56,000 votes, 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent. In his victory speech, Ossoff said: “Everybody who cast your ballot, everybody who put your faith and confidence in democracy’s capacity to deliver the representation we deserve, whether you were for me or against me, I’ll be for you.”
The fundraising model Ossoff built in 2017 has scaled with the office. Contributors have given him more than $98 million for the November election, with about 90 percent of donations under $100, The Guardian reported. He had about $43 million in cash on hand at the end of July — the largest war chest of any U.S. Senate candidate this cycle and about 20 times the cash on hand Collins has reported, The Guardian reported. His campaign declined repeated requests for an interview.
In the Senate, Ossoff has pushed hard to end stock and cryptocurrency trading by members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children; campaigned for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate spending in elections; and investigated abuses and corruption in federal prisons. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat for whom Ossoff once worked, praised his former staffer’s small-donor base. “I think Jon’s cultivation of support from small-dollar donors from across the country strengthens his ability to pursue policy goals that favor the common good, as opposed to policies that favor the wealthy and the well connected,” Johnson said.
Ossoff still faces the same challenge Democrats up and down the ballot face, two years after the party’s crushing defeat to Trump: motivating the base. A young Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worker in Atlanta, who requested anonymity for fear of political retribution, described life under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a key Trump appointee, while watching Atlanta’s Pride parade this month. “We’re personally very, very burnt out, and very overstretched,” she told The Guardian. “We’re just nervous that we’re going to get fired every single day.” She has knocked on doors for Ossoff in the past and plans to vote for him, but that is about it. “I feel like I’ve done that a lot over the past few years, especially for Stacey Abrams and Kamala [Harris],” she said. “I think I’m just burnt out. I’m going to vote and I’m going to encourage people to vote, but I’m not doing what I’ve done in the past because it’s just been too much.”
Voter Rockwell McKay, also at the Pride parade, was more skeptical about what a single senator could deliver. “Even if his heart is in the right place and he’s trying to do these things, he can’t do it in two or four years,” McKay said. “They churn up in the House with the Democrats and the Republicans. In the next three or four years, we’ll have somebody else in wanting to redirect their movement. I don’t see it.” McKay added: “I’m past the Obama shit, with the hope. Fuck all that.”
Some Republicans are backing Ossoff as well. Donald Chase, a peanut farmer from south Georgia who lives about 30 miles from Plains — the home town of former President Jimmy Carter — told The Guardian there are few Carter Democrats left in south Georgia, but some Republicans are voting for Ossoff, and he is among them. “He’s not afraid to stand up, and I appreciate that,” Chase said. “The second thing is he’s demonstrated really clearly that he’ll come to south Georgia, that he’ll listen to the issues, and he’ll try to do something where he can.” “Republican leadership in Georgia has done a lot of good things,” Chase added. But tariffs and diesel fuel prices have damaged the peanut business. “The tariff situation, I saw it coming, and I just was — this is going to hurt peanut farmers,” he said. “Our two primary export countries are Canada and Mexico. And with this latest spat, I will call it, the tariffs on peanut products went up 295%.”
Ossoff is, in many ways, unique. Should he ever find himself drawn away from Georgia, Democrats in the state fear his successes would be hard to replicate — in part because he has a gift for being the right person, in the right place, at the right time.
“Eventually, Jon Ossoff maybe should run for president, but not anytime soon,” Deutsch, the Dunwoody mayor, told The Guardian, taking solace in the fact he had “not indicated that it’s on his short-term, or even medium-term, plan.” His departure from the role “would be a terrible loss” for Georgia in the Senate, she added. “But one of my young adult children, who lives in Texas, wants him to run. He thinks he’s the only choice. And I’m like, I don’t think so.”
Ernst, the former Brookhaven mayor, can see the appeal of an Ossoff presidential bid. “I mean, in this day and age, being a Democrat, white, male — young, white male — it’s kind of rare,” he said, noting that the Senate generally skews older. “And no one says he’s a raging liberal. No one says he’s conservative. No one says he’s moderate. He’s just Jon Ossoff.”
Twice, in 2017 and 2020, Ossoff found himself at the center of America’s political attention. Both times, he capitalized on that attention — to the political benefit of Democrats, and the financial benefit of his future campaigns. Might he do it a third time? The chances are greater than zero.