COLUMBUS — Back when politics were predictable and gas still cost $1 a gallon, a Democratic senator like Jon Ossoff, running for reelection with a Republican in the White House, would try to be acceptable to Democrats but also as inoffensive to Republicans as possible.
That Georgia two-step might have included a line like, “I’ll work with the president when he’s right, but oppose him when he’s wrong.”
But politics in Georgia are anything but predictable now. And Ossoff is the only Democratic senator in the country running for reelection in a state that President Donald Trump won in 2024.
So at events across Georgia this week, Ossoff ripped up the old Democratic playbook and set out on his own path, highlighting his work with Senate Republicans, warning of the existential threat of the new Trump presidency and hammering the Republicans he said don’t have the “spine” to stop what they know is wrong.
Ossoff’s to the Rotary Club of Atlanta last week was a prime example. After saluting veterans in the audience, he described his work with Republicans to fully fund the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and build new enlisted housing on Georgia military bases.
“I have built strong and effective bipartisan relationships,” he told the lunchtime crowd. “I count many of my Republican colleagues as partners and as friends.”
If you’re asking yourself who these Ossoff-friendly Republicans are, there have been many. He and Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson co-chaired a panel for two years investigating conditions at U.S. prisons, including the Fulton County Jail. He sponsored multiple bills with Tennessee’s Sen. Marsha Blackburn on child welfare, and even teamed up with Senate Majority Leader John Thune before Thune rose to lead the Senate Republican caucus.
But no sooner had Ossoff rolled out his bipartisan credentials to the Rotarians than he stopped to warn them that these are not normal times — and that the Republican president is the reason.
“This situation is untenable,” Ossoff said. “These are not just the ordinary disagreements over public policy … this is a road to nowhere good.”
He was just getting started. Trump’s trade policy, he said, is a “game of tariff musical chairs,” while the president’s activation of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. “is performance of power by an individual … who has made clear that he admires and envies the trappings and the powers of authoritarian leaders around the world.”
Next, Ossoff warned that Trump’s slashing of scientific research is “an act of immense national self harm.” And he told the business leaders that it is time for all of them to speak out against it, too.
“There is no safety in silence,” he said.
It was a stark message for the suits used to a pleasant policy speech over a hot chicken lunch, but it’s the message Ossoff wanted to leave them with.
Next up was the annual Georgia Chamber lunch in Columbus, where he rolled out a similar bipartisan report card on what he’s doing for veterans health care and military procurement before unloading on Trump for endangering Georgia businesses in his “tit-for-tat tariff war.”
It’s a complicated message for the coming election year, but Georgia is a complicated state. Trump lost Georgia in 2020, won in 2024, and Republicans’ massive tax-and-spending package is already proving unpopular in the AJC’s latest poll.
Vice President JD Vance came to Peachtree City Thursday to reframe the bill as the “Working Families Tax Cut,” which sounds a lot better than the $1 billion in Medicaid cuts that the new law also included. But it was obvious that Vance came to Georgia for another reason, too: Ossoff.
“Jon Ossoff doesn’t give a damn about the people of Georgia, but we do,” Vance told the conservative crowd, which included all three Republicans challenging Ossoff next year.
He also claimed that once the election gets closer, Ossoff will pretend that he has supported Trump’s agenda all along once the election gets closer.
After watching the senator rip Trump for the last two weeks, there’s little chance of that. Before Vance ever came to town, Ossoff called the vice president “embarrassing” and said Vance was sent by the president on a “little errand” to sell the bill that can’t sell itself.
People close to Ossoff say all of the GOP collaboration, coupled with hammering Trump, isn’t some campaign strategy cooked up by consultants to win in 2026. It is genuinely how he feels.
But is it good politics in an election year?
Brian Robinson, a longtime GOP strategist in Georgia, said Ossoff’s approach is “the only strategy.”
“His emphasis on bipartisanship targets the ‘deciders,’ namely the people who voted for Warnock in 2022 and also voted for Kemp,” Robinson said, “while the attacks on Trump focus on the one issue that unifies Democrats: opposition to the president. The gamble is whether enough deciders will agree with him on Trump.”
To Robinson and most operatives, Georgia is still a modestly Republican state. So he said Ossoff also needs to appeal to the voters who would prefer to support a Republican in an election, but would consider a Democrat “under the right circumstances.”
Those right circumstances may or may not line up for Ossoff next year. But he’s writing the playbook to make it happen if they do.
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