Georgia Senate: Republicans Try to Take Back Ground
A decade ago, Jon Ossoff was a documentary filmmaker tweeting links to his BBC projects and tagging airlines in public posts to get help with booking issues. Today he is the senior senator from Georgia and the top target for Senate Republicans looking to deny Democrats any path back to the majority.
Ossoff’s rapid rise still grates on Georgia Republicans, who grouse about the “accidental senator.” But they take him far more seriously now than in 2020, when he won an upset victory over a former Fortune 500 CEO and incumbent senator.
At the start of the 2026 cycle, Republicans were hopeful that the popular outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp would challenge Ossoff and immediately put him on his back foot. But Kemp passed on a bid and the GOP has been left to sort out an unsettled primary, while Ossoff, already a strong fundraiser, stockpiles for the general election.
Democrats have a narrow road to the Senate majority that involves flipping four out of six seats in Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Texas and Iowa. But it also involves holding onto all of their own seats, including Georgia, one of two states won by Trump that Democrats are defending this cycle.
The Lay of the Land
Donald Trump’s 2-point win in Georgia in 2024, 50-48 percent, was an important moral victory for the former president, who insisted without evidence that he had won the state in 2020 (when he lost by 0.2 percent to Joe Biden).
But it did not fully mask the underlying leftward trajectory of the…
