The Republican case against him boiled down to his not living in the district he sought to represent and an assertion that he would be a pawn of Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader.
Other than being born to rich parents, Jon Ossoff has never accomplished a single thing in his life, said Corry Bliss, who ran a Republican super PAC that spent millions attacking Mr. Ossoff in the 2017 race.
But Mr. Ossoff received a critical endorsement from Mr. Lewis, and he proved to be an adept fund-raiser who quickly built connections with key constituencies. Progressives rallied to him as a way to express their outrage at the Trump administration. In the runoff, Mr. Ossoff got 48 percent of the vote, losing to Karen Handel.
In the 2020 Senate race, Mr. Ossoff is running as a mainstream Democrat, expressing sympathy for but not aligning himself with the partys most liberal figures. He has stayed on message, hammering Mr. Perdue over his finances, and perhaps more important, he has not made any major mistakes on the campaign trail or in interviews.
There has been very little reliable public polling of the two Georgia Senate runoff elections, but few doubt that Mr. Ossoff is facing an uphill climb. Georgia has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2000 and hasnt elected any Democrat to statewide office since 2006. And Republicans have traditionally had an advantage in Georgia runoffs because the Democratic electorate includes people who vote more infrequently.
In the last Georgia Senate runoff, three weeks after the November 2008 election, voter turnout sank to 2.1 million from 3.7 million.
Georgia Democrats say much of that calculus has changed in 2020, as Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 race for governor, has built a permanent progressive campaign infrastructure in the state. Already, more than two million Georgians have voted in the 2020 Senate runoffs.read more
Jon Ossoff Got Some Breaks in Politics. And He Made a Few of His Own.
