All Eyes on Ossoff

GONZO

The odds-on favorite to be our next President

By Toby Smollett · November 6, 2026 · 19 min read

In the Confederate cemetery, litter blew between headstones. Magnolia leaves crunched underfoot. I was searching for the grave of my 3rd great-grandfather’s first cousin, Dabney, a schoolteacher who commanded Company E of the 37th Georgia Infantry. Sherman, besieging Atlanta, knew that if he cut off the railroads at Jonesboro, Hood could not hold the city. Hardee’s lieutenants botched the charge to save the tracks, and Company E faced heavy fire as the line advanced. Dabney was killed at 35. The next day, Atlanta fell. Sherman occupied Atlanta for two and a half months before burning the city to the ground.

Cousin Dabney ended up in a mass grave, but has a headstone. I bowed my head and asked him: what do you make of modern Georgia? Will Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff win the Democratic nomination for US president in 2028? You know, your party, Cousin Dabney, the Democrats. I divined no answers. There was only the wind, and hip-hop blaring from a Lincoln.

Three miles north, a few thousand Atlantans—mainly black suburbanites with a smattering of white Boomers—formed a line snaking across the asphalt mall parking lot in Morrow, Georgia. Morrow is an I-75-bisected dystopia of franchises and warehouses, where my great-aunt and uncle once raised cattle.

In a few hours, the mall’s arena would fill for a Democratic rally featuring former President Barack Obama, presidential protégé Senator Jon Ossoff, and the woman running to be the first black woman governor in American history, Keisha Lance Bottoms. Both Ossoff and Bottoms won their elections on Tuesday. Neither race was even close. Post-midterm, he has been anointed the savior of the Republic. Every major prediction market says this man will be not only Democratic nominee but the President of the United States in just two years.

There was a commotion in the line: the enemy was sighted. A yellow prop plane circled loudly, dragging a banner with an American flag and a MAGA label.

“BOOOOOOOO!” shouted everyone.

“I hope that plane runs out of gas,” said Alana, the woman next to me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It might crash into us.”

In the line, “Vote Your Ossoff” shirts were as common as drunk kids at Waffle House. “Vote Your Bottoms and Ossoff” was the inclusive iteration. One cycle, one state, two Democratic candidates whose names conjured ass—a blessing upon the donkey party.

All this in the curvaceous fonts you can imagine. A “Read Banned Books” shirt. A “‘Nah’ —Rosa Parks” shirt. A Millennial woman in a “Capitalism is a death cult” crop top featuring the head of a crow. Is it true that crows are a symbol of death, just as graphic T-shirts are a symbol of capitalism? A new brand of overstimulating liberal AI slop. A gray shirt emblazoned with a White House decorated as a Cheesecake Factory, in reference to Obama’s jab at Trump’s tacky aesthetics. They weren’t cheap. I steeled myself for an afternoon of Shopify radical chic beneath an unforgiving sun.

I was even more confused by the black T-shirt featuring a green cartoon frog. Was that Pepe the Frog, the alt-right ghost of the 2010s, raising a lit match with the phrase “RESIST”? Had Smokey the Bear consented to be sold alongside a firebug?

A ginger Millennial inquired about the coral-pink “Immigrants Make America Great” pin featuring little monarch butterflies.

“It’s because monarch butterflies are immigrants,” the merch slinger explained.

I chatted with Jasmine, a butch lesbian, about the time I saw Obama in 2007. Volunteers were going around with water. There’d been shouts of “MEDIC!”

“This is worse than standing in line to see the Pope,” one woman said.

On the other side of security, the arena filled with the sonorous ecstasy of “Blow the Whistle” by Too $hort. Volunteers directed me to the nosebleeds. I sat down among a dozen twenty-somethings wearing Ground Game Georgia shirts, the one next to me was a portly ginger. A man named Prentice told me in a thick country accent he was a paid organizer. His friend Maria passed out Chick-fil-A.

The speeches began, a parade of once little girls who could not have imagined such big dreams, and tastefully bald preachers who knew the Lord worked through puns and rhymes. The Democratic nominee for Georgia Attorney General, Tanya Miller, opened with affordability, one of the consistent themes of the night, alongside corruption, health care, and spiritual malaise.

“Keisha signs!” a woman a few rows below yelled at the woman passing out signs. “Keisha! Can we get a Keisha!”

“She’s coming with the Keishas,” her friend said, trying to calm her.

“Can we get some Keishas!” she said, undeterred. “Don’t run out!”

No one was listening to the speech. There was a slight lag on the Jumbotron.

The next contestant was the Rev. Dr. Judge Penny Brown Reynolds, the Secretary of State nominee. Another inspiring little girl in awe of her own destiny, here to serve. “Where you start doesn’t have to determine where you finish.”

“Does she always bring this energy?” Prentice whispered.

“Every. Single. Event,” Maria said.

“Voting is an act of self-love and an act of self-respect!” the Rev. Dr. Judge Penny Brown Reynolds declared from the stage.

Brown Reynolds was a rising star, but not everyone on the Georgia Democratic slate was so inspiring. Absent from the speaker lineup, for example, was the lackluster Commissioner of Agriculture nominee Katherine Juhan-Arnold, who has been raked over the coals on X for declaring “we have the budget to allocate funds for our black farmers” and for only allegedly farming two acres, on someone else’s property, for three years.

The blue wave swept in Juhan-Arnold, and the revolution of the underqualified was swept under the rug.

The next contestant in the tent revival was the Lt. Gov. nominee, Josh McLaurin, bald and bearded. He filled time with nostalgic anecdotes about watching Obama speeches on repeat at the University of Georgia. He got a “Yes We Can” chant started and critiqued “foreign adventurism,” the Iran war fought by Indiana Jones.

When he declared triumphantly, “And we will elect the first black woman governor!” Prentice stood up and shook his sign.

I felt my own twinge of nostalgia for the days I cared about “firsts.”

“When I say Keisha, you say Bottoms,” the DJ intoned. “Keisha!”

“Bottoms!”

“Keisha!”

“Bottoms!”

The next pastor to speak took the hokey cake. “Georgia is a peach state, but if we don’t elect them, we’re gonna be in the pits.”

Incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of MLK’s old Ebenezer Baptist Church, walked out to an electric crowd. Even I recognized him, squinting. Middle age had treated him well since he was elected alongside Ossoff in the 2021 runoff; he could have been mistaken for a stylish finance guy.

“This is so much more than an election,” he bellowed. “This is a moral moment here in America.”

“Yes!” the crowd said.

“This is about the rulers of the darkness of this world!”

Wait what?

He mentioned a prayer breakfast with Republicans in Washington not long after they had kicked people off healthcare.

“They knelt down to pray while taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. What kind of religion is that? I don’t know who they were praying to because the Jesus I know said I was hungry and they fed me.”

“Yessir!”

His voice rose with a terrible rumble: “I was sick and they visited me!”

“Mm-hm!”

“I was a stranger and they WELCOMED me!”

“Yes, they did!”

“Inasmuch as you’ve done unto the LEAST of these, you’ve done to me!”

Eight thousand souls erupted with rapturous applause.

Such religious fervor was at the core of the midterms. Not only was 2026 the year of prairie populism, when Democrats shed wokeness for kitchen table issues and surged in lily-white states, it also marked the return of the Christian Left. There will be three ministers and one seminarian in the Senate in 2027; three-fourths of these ‘Pastor Senators’ will be Democrats. Tell that to someone in 2005!

“Those who have stolen our doctors have now doctored the maps,” Warnock continued, reaching deep into the spirit realm then returning to the shallowness of puns. Kanye West is also known for doing this.

“I like that one,” Maria whispered.

“I wrote a letter to my five-year-old girl,” Warnock said. Little girls, since Fearless Girl and Greta Thunberg, have become the central mascot of The Regime.

The letter was about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“I wrote she is the first Supreme Court Justice who looks like you with hair like yours!”

I couldn’t applaud for my least favorite Justice. I was getting cantankerous before this man of the Lord.

I imagined Justices sitting with their heads beneath dryer domes.

It was now ten minutes before the event was scheduled to end. None of the headliners had spoken; people were getting antsy as the marching band banged out a fourth song. Spotlights danced over the nothingness, distracting us like goldfish.

“Let’s go!” someone screamed.

We welcomed surprise guest Janelle Monáe. The sound mixing was atrocious; the a cappella was worse, and she was dressed like one of Santa’s elves, but a dominatrix. Mid-routine, she gave a heartfelt little speech.

“I want every American to be able to afford gas,” Monáe said. “Even though I don’t have a gas car!”

She continued showing her California. “I’m a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community,” she said. “Unhoused people, I want them protected!”

To her Elfinatrix outfit, she affixed a shawl-like white coat, as if Cruella de Vil had created bespoke drip from trash bags, then decided to become a rabbi.

“Are we gonna get overtime if this goes on?” Prentice asked.

“I would have ordered more chicken sandwiches,” Maria said.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, candidate for governor, delivered rhetorical canned soup. It would have been better if it had been written by an AI, and significantly better if it had been delivered by one.

“Georgia,” she declared. “A state where everyone has the opportunity to make their dreams come true.”

I was immediately bored of her sing-song rhymes, although I was intrigued that she described Georgia as the home of Jimmy Carter and Coretta Scott King. Was MLK canceled on the left now because of his lechery, his lust for white broads?

Bottoms spoke of affording to put food on the table, of seniors aging in place with dignity, of Medicaid expansion—followed by “Isn’t that what we all want?” delivered with stilted syllables like a robot. That was better than her folksy Southern accent, which kept coming and going with the wind.

“I believe in a woman’s right to make decisions!” she said, cut off by applause.

As she pummeled her opponent “Slick Rick” Jackson for doing “whatever his big daddy Donald Trump tells him to do,” the odd phrases continued to pile up. “We’re going to exercise whole ballot energy,” she said, as if she were a hot yoga instructor. “Together we can move mountains and conquer billionaire giants.”

She wrapped up with the de rigueur inspiring image. As a little black child, she would drive by the Governor’s Mansion and think, “I want to go in there one day.”

“Yes you can!” the crowd began to chant. “Yes you can! Yes you can!”

After watching the political equivalent of a high school quarterback, Senator Jon Ossoff came into the arena like Tom Brady. He was cranky and high-test, wearing a grimace and refusing to mince words. Black voters prefer their white boys a little angry, and one can only imagine the dream concoction of hormones, peptides, and amphetamines the Official Doctors of the Democratic Party can dream up.

He bellowed a litany of the “Useless Draft Dodger Commander in Chief’s” sins, from transforming the government “into a tool for one man’s vengeance” to “prison camps for immigrants full of children.” He said the administration was “the most corrupt administration of all time and everybody knows it… They lied us into the war and spent most of the year covering up for the world’s most famous pedophile!”

“Lock him up!” the crowd chanted. “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

It was one of many instances, like the exhortation to make the election “too big to rig,” of appropriating statements from the other side in a bizarre mimetic boomerang.

“On day four of the war, the President declared victory.”

The crowd chuckled.

“On day eleven he said the war is very complete.”

The crowd growled.

“On day thirteen he said we won!”

“He’s a little sassy today!” Maria whispered.

Ossoff’s perfectly executed edgy white boy routine is the key to his rising star. A lab-grown perfect Dem: The Mild Mannered White Guy Pushed Beyond His Tolerance By the Injustice of Racism. He’s their most effective attack dog because he’s disciplined, but unafraid of the jugular. He slices like a katana. It also helps that he has muscles.

He can wonk-out like Hillary, then lick the ice cream like old Joe in South Carolina. A straight Buttigieg. A Chalamet who lifts. A Josh Shapiro who never volunteered for the IDF. A white Obama.

He’s also a non-GMO Gavin Newsom. It may be that Ossoff steals the Tall Handsome White Guy Slot from right under Gavin's perfectly moisturized nose. Ossoff is younger, hotter, and shrewder than Newsom, and he doesn't connect with Black voters by bragging about his low SAT score.

Ossoff is also Jewish. Some say just Jewish enough. Others say just slightly too much. The patrilineal kind (his mother is Anglo-Australian) that can’t be accused of antisemitism but isn’t slavishly loyal to Israel. He walks a magic line.

Ossoff alternated between cold attacks on the administration and warm pivots to bipartisanship. He told a story about bringing dialysis equipment to a hospital in Tifton. He delivered rebuke and compassion with steady masculine vril. By God, a woke chad! The only man who can bridge the two shadows of the American soul.

Ossoff’s strength might be that he can be anyone to everyone. A Swede Levov. The kind of nerdy rich suburban non-coastal Jew who passes as a quiet baseball-loving gentile. Your friend who helps you win trivia at a bar in the Sun Belt. He’s offering firm handshakes at the Methodist church, eating red velvet cake off Styrofoam at the cookout, and apprehensively sipping cocktails poolside in LA with studio execs.

Black Obama could turn any Achilles’ heel into a strength—the revelation that Obama’s pastor said 9/11 was “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” was the moment Obama beat Clinton, because Obama turned it into a grandiose speech about race in America. He declared that he could no more disown his problematic black pastor “than I can disown my white grandmother,” who he claimed had also uttered stereotypes. The speech was heralded as a reconciliatory step towards healing America's racial wounds.

Ossoff has the opportunity to impress the nation—or at least the same suburban voters who lapped up Obama's Faulkner-quoting speech—by transcending his Jewishness, and fearlessly addressing Gaza while reconciling his genes and stated religion. Must not all Americans similarly reconcile our lineages with our duty to the Dream!? He’s the only politician in the United States with half a chance of using Jewishness to his advantage.

But there’s something about him that makes you want a fact-checker around. Some of his rhetorical examples, like “You report your black mold to the landlord but the ambulance ride for your daughter’s asthma attack is followed by a 3k bill,” seemed tacky.

Ossoff also made hay out of the racist memes posted by his opponent’s ex-staffers, but Ossoff’s claim that Mike Collins was “surrounded by white nationalists and neo-Nazis” could also have been phrased as “an intern Collins barely knew later posted some very weird fascism-themed gay thirst traps.” Ossoff seemed susceptible to the lefty tendency for self-righteous hysteria. A politically effective tendency!

“Georgia will bow to no king!” Ossoff exclaimed.

Ossoff closed by speaking of his daughters, how they’ll learn about microplastics and the dying butterflies—immigrants, if you recall—and ask him, “Daddy, did you do anything?” Did none of the candidates coordinate? Or did they decide together to keep evoking innocent little girls in a coordinated rhetorical blitz?

I left feeling like he’d be the next President, and like this was the start of his campaign.

U2 played as the black Obama took the stage. He was in a cheery mood, and so was his crowd. He didn’t look older to me, didn’t look less skinny, and I was quickly reminded of how folksy he was. He had a limberness and lightness; maybe a sense of humor and levity that Ossoff lacked. Obama trotted out phrases like “so sick and tired of being sick and tired,” which I had long forgotten but which were buried deep in my Aaron-Sorkin-fucked brain.

“After two years of chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence, you get to say enough is enough and we’re voting for change here in Georgia!”

He spoke of Trump’s broken promises about bringing down prices and avoiding foreign wars. I noticed his speech was not using as high a vocabulary level as Ossoff’s, which was not how I remembered Obama. He was playing The Reasonable Guy Next Door, and playing it well, saying that “the current President chose to make a series of bad decisions,” starting with the war.

He criticized Hegseth’s focus on jawlines and testosterone, saying, “These are not serious people,” quoting Logan Roy from HBO’s Succession.

“Now, let’s be honest,” he said, “does anybody really think—”

“No!” someone shouted.

Everyone chuckled.

“—this guy spends much time thinking about issues that are important to you? He’s very focused on home renovations. The President of the United States is spending time supergluing gold ornaments to the Oval Office. He is literally doing arts and crafts.”

“God, I miss him,” Prentice whispered.

Ironically, this vision of a gold-festooned Trump White House had first been created by Obama’s staff in the slideshow at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where Obama humiliated Trump for birtherism, inspiring Trump to run for president in the first place.

Obama proceeded to make amends for his Cheesecake Factory joke. He claimed that since he had daughters, he had often been there.

“They organized a whole government response to that joke,” he said. “The Secretary of the Treasury, they told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory. Explaining how he ordered the delicious French dip cheeseburger. This is what I mean when I say they are not serious people.”

The cheesecake schtick was going on too long. He had said “Cheesecake Factory” maybe a dozen times. People were starting to trickle out to beat the traffic.

Indeed, Obama was so hung up on the Cheesecake Factory it appeared as if he’d run out of steam for any other topic. Then, as if remembering he’d forgotten, he began to discuss corruption.

“I’m old enough to remember when people were upset when the president wore a tan suit,” Obama said, referring to the time Republicans had a conniption over one of his fashion choices.

“I wore it for you!” said Prentice, rising next to me in his tan suit. The other organizers cheered, but we were too far in the nosebleeds for Obama to hear.

Obama addressed criticisms of the Dems. He reminded everyone that he got flak for his immigration stances. “You may have heard that the woke police were gonna make everybody eat tofu,” he said, “that the Democrats are crazy.” He said Democrats weren’t for crazy, but for common sense, which wasn’t tax cuts for trillionaires and a war with Iran.

Obama was not going to gaslight me about the Great Awokening. It was not just a time when some of us worried we’d have to eat tofu. He prioritized race rather than merit for air traffic control hires, pushed for racial suspension equity in schools, and lowered standards to convict the accused on college campuses.

Obama and Ossoff avoided any talk of Open Borders and COVID. Many Democrats support a sort of anticolonial revolution, wanting whitey gone or at least on his knees, and are otherwise happy to dismiss reality, pulling the shroud over the eyes of the “No Kings” boomers who have no clue what they are signing away.

Obama’s voice turned at the end to a soft pleading. People were shifting in their seats as his language became more abstract.

“It’s about values… we need to discover what’s best in us. I’m tired of the anger. I want friendship and neighborliness and joy.”

The crowd cheered, then raced out in a somewhat unneighborly way to beat the traffic. The field organizers had shuffled out just before the applause because they had a Teams call.

I entered the sea of car alarms. Were people using their clickers to search for their cars, or was everyone being robbed? A white Millennial woman in a tan suit jacket and light-wash jeans danced to the nearest alarm as she walked forward with her friends, snapping her fingers and shaking her hips. Perhaps she felt the blue tsunami coming.

I felt no such elation. I considered spending the night in Morrow, so I could visit Cousin Dabney’s cemetery in the morning, but I couldn’t bear to face him again. My ancestors settled Georgia, laid the street grids of its cities. Dabney gave his life. He would not recognize the global metropolis that now dominates their state. He would certainly mourn what it has become.

I was about to drive down 75 South well over the speed limit. I wanted to get the hell out of my ancestral land.