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ATLANTA – Jon Ossoff is ending the Trump era the same way he started it: as a young Democrat unexpectedly at the center of the political universe.
He lost his first candidacy in June 2017, but the stakes were then largely symbolic. This time, some say, the fate of the country, and indeed the world, is at stake in what will be the last election of the Trump era. No pressure.
“Jon ended up running an incredibly expensive and high-profile race four years ago,” said Matt Westmoreland, member of the Atlanta City Council, a Democrat. “And now he’s found himself in a race with even higher stakes and more money because Senate control is at stake.”
In the unstable first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the then 30-year-old Ossoff won progressive hearts – and dollars – in a special election to overthrow Newt Gingrich’s former seat of Congress, which is became the most expensive House race in history and the first real indicator of the political tendencies that would define the era.
Now he is running for the Senate in one of two January ballots in Georgia that “will determine the direction of our country for the next 50 to 100 years,” according to his Republican opponent, Senator David Perdue. If Democrats win both seats, they will end the Trump era by giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the deciding vote in the Senate.
It would also be a justification for Ossoff, whose loss in the House race sparked a familiar circular firing squad among Democrats. Some party members have questioned whether they wasted precious money on the seemingly hopeless cause of winning a House seat in a heavily Republican district.
Republicans, who hope the outcome will be the same this time around, have not lost a Senate election in Georgia since 2000.
“Only a trust fund socialist could spend his 30s trying to run for office without any real success,” said Jesse Hunt, communications director for the Republican National Senate Committee. “It all started with Ossoff losing a top-level race after DC Democrats and California Liberals flooded the state in support of his candidacy, and that’s exactly how it will end.”
But Georgia Democrats say a lot has changed between those two Trump-era bookends: Ossoff is a better candidate, and as President-elect Joe Biden’s victory here shows, Georgia has become a state much. more user-friendly for them.
State Representative Jasmine Clark, a scientist who narrowly beat an outgoing Republican in the 2018 midterm ‘blue wave’, said you can draw a straight line from Ossoff’s first run to run Stacey Abrams’ near miss for governor, then to Biden’s projected victory this month.
“This 2017 special election was the catalyst for what we saw in 2018. And the 2018 election served as an even bigger catalyst for 2020, when the state finally went from red to blue,” Clark said. .
Georgia is one of the fastest growing states in the country, with a booming economy particularly appealing to young people of color. More than 600,000 new voters have been added to the lists since the 2018 election, and around 23,000 more young people will become eligible to vote just before the second round on January 5.
“Georgia got younger and more diverse by the hour,” Ossoff said when asked what was different this year. “What we’ve done to build infrastructure … much of this work led by Stacey Abrams has been historic.”
A year and a half after Ossoff’s loss, Democrat Lucy McBath won the 6th Congressional District with a pro-gun control platform in mid-2018. Bath, who is black and lost her son to gun violence, sailed for re-election this month.
Biden won the district by 11 percentage points, 55% to 44% – a startling turnaround after Trump narrowly wore it in 2016 and Republican Mitt Romney dominated him, 61% to 37%, in 2012. Next, in 7th Congressional District Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux gave the House its only true red-blue flip of 2020 in an otherwise disappointing year.
“Recognizing Georgia as a legitimate battlefield state is what’s different this time around,” said Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, founded by Abrams. “Demographics are the fire. Organization is the accelerator.”
Following Trump’s 2016 victory, several special elections were seen as tests of the new national mood. But the one that really caught fire was that of Ossoff in the northern suburbs of Atlanta.
After the March of Women, a newly reinvigorated progressive “resistance” movement sought something to do. He found a cause in Ossoff’s fundraising pitch for “Make Trump Furious,” opening their wallets and packing their Subarus to come and help.
Samuel L. Jackson recorded a campaign announcement. Trump traveled to Atlanta and hammered Ossoff as a radical left-wing lightweight in tweets. And a local TV station added news broadcasts to handle the influx of political ads.
Ossoff raised $ 8.3 million in the first quarter, an unheard of amount at the time that was the first sign of the “green wave” of Democratic money that would later help candidates like Beto O’Rourke break through. fundraising records.
“He’s a very disciplined activist. He’s a shrewd fundraiser,” said Sarah Riggs-Amico, who ran as lieutenant governor with Abrams and against Ossoff in the 2020 Senate primary.
Still, that was a lot for a former congressman and documentary maker who had never run for office, and he looked like a deer in the headlights at times in the face of all the attention as he tried unsuccessfully to keep the race focused on the local. problems.
“He has matured a lot as a candidate,” said democratic state representative Angelika Kausche. “He was very, very young, and at times it showed that he didn’t have the experience. None of us had the experience at that time.”
This year, during his last debate with Perdue, Ossoff went viral for dressing the senator over opportunistic stock trading during the pandemic that could have violated ethics rules. Perdue declined to participate in further debates.
The 2017 race was also the first real proof that Georgian suburbs were changing.
The House Democrats’ campaign arm took advantage of the race to host some of its first cycle focus groups that convinced it to focus on moving suburban seats from California to Texas to New Jersey in 2018 .
Kausche, a naturalized German immigrant, began volunteering in Ossoff’s campaign to learn more about American politics, but eventually ran for office herself.
“We couldn’t find anyone to introduce us, because the traditional assumption was that this region is so red, everything is Republican, there are no Democrats. But the data [from Ossoff’s race] told a different story, “she said.” So I said, “Well, if we can’t find anybody, I will.” “
She won in 2018 by 317 votes, toppling the seat of the State House formerly occupied by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“Without campaigning for Jon, I probably wouldn’t have done it,” she said.
Democrats are now hoping Georgia is on a similar path to Virginia, which has gone from red to purple to blue in just over a decade. But they know it may take longer than before January to get there.
And while Ossoff’s first run was for a House seat that wouldn’t have changed control of the chamber, this time it’s for good.
“Georgians recognize the high stakes of these two rounds of Senate voting, as this new administration needs the capacity to govern,” Ossoff said.
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