Jon Ossoff is writing a new playbook for Democrats in the South
ATHENS — On Sunday of last week, Mary and John Konkol drove to Athens from their home in Gainesville to go to the legendary Georgia Theatre to attend U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s latest campaign rally.
John, a Navy veteran and Democrat, and Mary, a lifelong Republican, are used to disagreeing over politics. But they agree on Ossoff.
“This is the first rally I’ve been to since Jimmy Carter ran for president and the first candidate I’ve ever donated to,” John said. “But I feel like Ossoff is going to be a future president. We both do.”
Mary nodded in agreement.
“We’ve got grandchildren who are 10, 8 and 5, and I don’t want to leave them the world like it is,” she said.
When I asked her what she likes about Ossoff, even as a Republican, she said, “I think he tells the truth.”
The truth according to Jon Ossoff has been on full display since early 2025, when the freshman Democrat kicked off his reelection campaign with a “Rally for Our Republic” in Atlanta. Trump had just won Georgia again, two years after Republicans swept every statewide office in the 2022 midterm elections. Democrats around the state were despondent, and with a 2021 runoff win by just 55,000 votes over Republican Sen. David Perdue, Ossoff was no shoo-in for reelection, either.
But instead of following the playbook of most Southern Democrats of the last two decades by mostly trying not to offend Republican voters on the way to Election Day, Ossoff ripped into Trump at that first rally and hasn’t let up since.
“This is not a drill, Atlanta; this is not a bad dream,” he said. “This is the test of our lifetime. Are you ready to fight?”
It was not entirely clear at the time what the politics would look like for Ossoff once his reelection came around in 2026. That was before Trump’s ballroom, before the tariffs, before the war in Iran and before $6-per-gallon diesel gas. But the Democrats at that rally were ready to fight. And they wanted more.
From there, Ossoff rolled out a regular series of rallies around the state, splashy, presidential-level events designed to give people who came out to them a show they could go home and talk about. Ossoff only intensified his criticism of Trump as the president’s second term went on and his poll numbers in Georgia dropped.
At a July rally in Savannah, Ossoff slammed Trump’s newly passed “Big Beautiful Bill” as an exercise in corruption and greed.
Rallies last fall and winter included takedowns of not just the president, but of his family too, whom Ossoff dubbed the “Mar-A-Lago Mafia.” Over the summer, he set off a national firestorm by describing a distracted president and singling out Trump aide, Natalie Harp.
“(Trump) doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
In the same way Ossoff has dispensed with soft-pedaling criticism of the president, he has also discarded the habit past incumbents have had of referring to their challengers only as “my opponent” to keep from increasing the other guy’s name recognition.
Instead, Ossoff not only names Collins, he routinely calls him, “Bigot Congressman Mike Collins,” including at the rally in Athens, which sits squarely in Collins’ 10th congressional district.
“Bigot Congressman Mike Collins is like a scandal piñata,” Ossoff said. “Every time you shake him, something new comes out.”
Although Collins has tried to get past the scandals of his staff and family, the regular public poundings during Ossoff’s rallies have made it nearly impossible.
So far, Ossoff’s take-no-prisoners approach to 2026 has more than paid off with Democrats.
“I’m trilled,” said Marilyn Wolf-Ragatz, the chair of liberal activist group Indivisible GA10. “He has matured so much in office.”
But napalming the other party on a regular basis really does have a way of turning off not just Republicans, but moderates and independents, too.
And that’s why Ossoff’s low-profile work in the Senate before this election season will end up being far more important to his chances in November than the Obamaesque events he’s staging around the state.
Although he has become something of a national sensation lately, Ossoff spent most of his first five years in office doing the extremely unglamorous work of just being a freshman senator.
He enlisted Delta’s customer service desk to help train his constituent services staff to treat Georgians “like the VIPs they are.” Instead of cable news shows, he spent much of his time cold-calling mayors and farmers and regular people to ask what they needed from leaders in Washington. The calls went to Republicans and Democrats and often ended up as legislation or funding requests for things such as a dialysis center or new local gas lines.
From the stage in Athens, Ossoff named the Republican mayors who have endorsed him over Collins, not because of the way he’s been hammering Trump, but because of the way he worked with them whether Trump was in office or not. A Democrat has to deliver both to get elected statewide in Georgia. Avoiding a challenge from Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t hurt, either.
As John and Mary Konkol headed for the door, the only debate between them was when Ossoff should run for president. Although John initially said 2028 would be too soon, his wife disagreed.
“I hope he runs in 2028,” Mary said.
Thinking again, John changed his answer.
“2028. Why not? Strike while the iron’s hot.”