The Democrat everyone suddenly wants to believe in

For the past month, one name has dominated discussions of the 2028 Democratic primary: Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff.

Though Ossoff is running for reelection in a crucial swing state, his consistent polling lead is prompting national observers to leapfrog all the way to 2028. Features in both the New York Times and Politico have touted him as a leading candidate. His odds on the Polymarket prediction site have more than doubled since late May: he’s now given a better chance than Vice President Kamala Harris (who is currently the leader in nearly all national polls).

There are good reasons for this. Ossoff is a repeat winner in one of the most important presidential battlegrounds who appeals to everyone from the Never Trumpers at the Bulwark to leftist streamer Hasan Piker. His rhetorical focus on Trump’s corruption elevates a theme that energizes Democrats of all stripes. And his background as a filmmaker makes him almost uniquely well-suited to the short-form video age.

“I have been jokingly calling him…the Lisan al-Gaib, which is a Dune reference to the Timothée Chalamet figure — essentially, the chosen one,” Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, said on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show. “I think he has figured out a way, in a broadly palatable ideological fashion, to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different Democratic factions.”

And yet, there’s some reason to think this hype is getting over its skis.

Ossoff is a certain kind of archetype who often emerges in divided parties: The mythical “unity candidate.”

These figures are typically broadly appealing elected officials without any one defined base of supporters. They have traits that seem to correct for the party’s failures in the previous election, have qualities that can attract fans from a wide range of factions and demographics within it, and they have yet to alienate anybody important. But the “unity candidate” has a mixed record in recent contests — they often look perfect on paper, then struggle in practice.

Whether Ossoff is the Democratic savior or another unity candidate poised to flame out remains to be seen. There’s a reasonable case in either direction.

But the fact that Ossoff is already generating so much attention tells us something undoubtedly important: that Democrats are deeply frustrated with their early frontrunners and looking for alternatives. That could augur a wild, perhaps even unpredictable, outcome in the eventual primary.

Let’s start with one important caveat: Ossoff might not run. He has steadfastly denied rumors of presidential ambition, saying he’s focused on the Senate race.

Of course, that’s what anyone in his position should be saying — even if it’s insincere. But many in Democratic and Georgia politics seem to think that it might not just be for show. It will be harder for him to run if Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms doesn’t win the governor’s race, which would allow her to appoint a Democratic replacement for his seat. It will be harder still if fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, a star in his own right, launches a bid.

But should he run, there are considerable reasons why so many Democrats believe Ossoff is poised to take off in 2028.

He’s a proven winner in the swing state, an excellent public speaker, a telegenic young guy with an inspiring and unifying message: he’s basically the stuff that Democrats dream of. It makes sense that pundits and bettors would anticipate a boom even before it emerges among voters; the raw material is all there.

What’s especially impressive is his ability to straddle the party’s internal divides without making enemies.

His vote to block military aid to Israel in 2024, when that position was less common among Democrats, endeared him to the left. The party’s centrist faction admires his vote for the Laken Riley Act imposing harsher punishments on undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. And he managed to avoid taking hardline stances on social issues that many Democrats took during Trump’s first term — the ones that left Kamala Harris with a trail of quotes and positions for Republicans to attack in 2024 — without alienating liberals.

“He not only refused to join along with the craziness of 2017 to 2020, but actively explicitly rejected it without becoming defined by the negative,” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist WelcomePAC.

Ossoff’s multifaceted appeal makes even more sense when you look at the emerging field. Across poll averages, the top four candidates are consistent: Harris on top, California Gov. Gavin Newsom in second, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg battling it out for third.

Each of those candidates has a major strike against them with at least some important corner of the party. Buttigieg is unpopular on the socialist left and has long polled poorly with Black voters. AOC is hated by Democratic centrists and will need to convince electability-minded voters that she can appeal to the center. Gavin Newsom is seen by many as oily, insincere, and a traitor on trans rights. Kamala Harris, of course, carries enormous baggage both from Biden’s presidency and her own unsuccessful presidential runs.

In a party looking to move beyond its Trump-era doldrums, many see these choices as either uninspiring or divisive. There is a deep hunger for someone new. Ossoff, who is less weighed down by prior party debates, can fill that need.

At the same time, Ossoff isn’t just defined by who he isn’t — he’s genuinely impressed observers with his messaging strategy. Not just the focus on corruption, though that’s part of it, but the means by which he communicates. Instead of the long-form podcast interviews and direct-to-camera videos most candidates employ nowadays, Ossoff primarily communicates through slickly produced clips of his speeches at rallies or Sunday services at a Black church (and the occasional cable news hit).

Perhaps counterintuitively, this works really well in the TikTok age. The clips do great numbers — again, he’s a documentarian by training and a talented orator. Making speeches his primary means of communication also allows him to keep tight message control: There is far less risk of a slip-up where he manages to infuriate one of the Democratic Party’s various subfactions.

But there’s a big risk to this something-for-everyone strategy: it can leave you without a base.

In 2016, for example, Marco Rubio had a similar profile to Ossoff. He was a young Tea Party insurgent who unseated an old incumbent, but with an establishment-friendly profile on foreign policy and welfare-state politics. For electability-minded party leaders worried about Latino voters, his Cuban roots and fluent Spanish were viewed as an asset — just as some on the left now hope Ossoff’s Judaism might smooth over debates over Israel and antisemitism.

But ultimately, he got squeezed. Ted Cruz had outmuscled him to the right with ideological conservatives, the truly moderate Ohio Gov. John Kasich had taken over the center lane, and Trump ultimately beat all of them running as the charismatic outsider with populist appeal. Rubio dropped out before the race was done.

Similarly, in 2020, Kamala Harris looked like a unifying bet on the Democratic side. She had taken some quite left-wing positions in the Senate, but also had a moderate-appealing tough-on-crime background as California attorney general. Like Ossoff, she generated excitement among voters with widely shared clips — in her case, televised grill sessions with Republicans. Yet she flamed out even earlier than Rubio, suspending her campaign in December 2019 before the first primary vote was even cast.

Both Rubio and Harris suffered from their lack of a clear identity and support base: In offering something for everyone, they ended up being few people’s first choice. As they filled in their platforms with more detail, each sought to find a compromise on issues dividing party factions — Rubio backtracked from his earlier support for immigration reform, Harris endorsed Medicare-for-all then put out her own plan — only to find their answers pleased no one.

Currently, Ossoff is starting from a weaker place than either Rubio or Harris at the start of those races: 2.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, dead last among all included candidates. Several Democrats I spoke with questioned whether Ossoff could rise to frontrunner status without a sturdier base of support from one corner of the party or another.

“We’re seeing that play out in the Michigan Senate race,” Democratic pollster Adam Carlson said, referring to recently dropped-out Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow, a state legislator who became a rising star earlier after a speech on trans rights went viral. “McMorrow [was] kind of in the middle between [Haley] Stevens and [Abdul] El-Sayed, trying to be a little something to everybody.”

In particular, McMorrow got trapped on Israel: She angered the left by criticizing El-Sayed for campaigning with Hasan Piker in an interview, while failing to win them over by labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide.” Meanwhile, Stevens consolidated centrist support and drew in outside spending from pro-Israel groups. Ossoff has yet to face this level of sustained scrutiny on the topic, and it’s an open question whether left-wing influencers will be as willing to celebrate his partial support for their positions if there’s a rival candidate, perhaps Ocasio-Cortez, who goes significantly further.

Ossoff’s media strategy, while generally effective, might also mask upcoming challenges during a crowded primary. In our current attention economy, people build rabid fandoms by fostering parasocial connections — often by convincing fans that what they’re seeing on screen is the “authentic” version of the person. That’s harder to do when you eschew unscripted content for polished speech clips.

“He doesn’t do longform [interviews], he doesn’t do off-the-cuff, he doesn’t do the omnipresent attention,” one Democratic strategist told me. “He’s gotta get the reps in, because he’s going to need that skill set to run for president.”

Again, prior candidates are instructive: Harris famously struggled in interviews; Rubio was wrecked by an overly scripted debate performance. Ossoff will have to prove he can operate in settings where he has less control and can handle follow-up questions that are designed to pinpoint the narrow differences between candidates.

To be clear: Ossoff’s strategy isn’t doomed to fail. Barack Obama quite famously managed to be everything-to-everyone in his 2008 campaign: appealing to the left on the Iraq war while attacking Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan from the right, all while delivering a message about bridging old partisan divides. Some have suggested Ossoff’s early criticism of Israel might play a similar role to Obama’s early war opposition, potentially allowing him to reassure the left on a key litmus test while courting the middle on substantive policy debates.

“He seems like someone who plays to win — not someone who plays not to lose,” Kerr said.

Ossoff may, or may not, emerge as a 2028 force. But the hype surrounding his campaign, even before it exists, has clearly exposed that the Democratic primary is unsettled: the current polling frontrunners are weak, and both voters and the party elite seem to be actively searching for alternatives.

It’s a bit like where the GOP was in 2016: plenty of credible contenders, but no one who clearly stood out as a consensus favorite. And that race ended with a nominee who had seemed to most, at the outset, like an impossibility.