What Jon Ossoff Gets That Far Too Many Democrats Don’t

The Georgia senator is showing his colleagues that in the attention-era, conflict is king.

There’s a new Democratic presidential frontrunner, according to the Kalshi prediction markets at least. Over the weekend, Jon Ossoff claimed first place (whatever exactly that means on Kalshi), at 18 percent, followed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at 17 percent and then Gavin Newsom at 15 percent (here’s the link, but remember that the figures change constantly; from the time I started writing this to the time I finished it, AOC nudged back into the lead).

Whether he’s first or second, what’s undeniable is that the Georgia senator has caught fire in a way few politicians manage to do. His dig at “Natalie” is still reverberating, more than a week later. In his reelection race, he’s up seven or eight points over Republican Congressman Mike Collins, and for those for whom a Senate race in mid-summer is a little too under the radar for you, you’d be interested to know that he just roasts Collins on a regular basis. He constantly refers to Collins as a corrupt antisemite racist (“a crumbling little bigot,” as he colorfully put it at a recent rally). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls it Ossoff’s “no mercy strategy.”

What’s also true is that, at least in my anecdotal experience, Ossoff has both progressives and moderates interested in him, curious to learn more. That’s something to pull off, in this year when the left-center divide in the Democratic Party is probably the greatest it’s been since the early 1970s, when the party was bitterly split into two camps over the Vietnam War. So, what’s Ossoff got that a lot of the other haven’t got?

In a word: conflict. He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral. What was brilliant about the Natalie Harp mention was the way he........

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