Will fury (and heaps of Democratic cash) be enough to get Jon Ossoff, 30-year-old political neophyte, elected to Newt Gingrich’s old seat this spring?
In all senses, the sun was shining on Jon Ossoff. It was early in the evening on a Sunday in late March, and the suddenly very visible 30-year-old Democratic candidate in the first competitive special congressional election of the Trump era was riding shotgun in a sooty-black Chrysler Sebring, hunched over a paper plate of cheese and crackers, while a member of his staff steered toward the next fund-raiser through the hills of suburban Atlanta. The back of the car was piled high with half a dozen Nike shoe boxes, a stuffed owl, and a reporter. Between bites, Ossoff stared ahead at the road, indulging in long pauses as he considered what to say about his new life as the luckiest young man in American politics. “There’s nothing that I would love more than a freewheeling conversation about political philosophy,” he said. “But I’m cautious because, as you know, the knives are out right now.”
That is not exactly how things appeared to most observers of this breakneck two-month campaign to fill the House seat vacated by Tom Price, the new secretary of Health and Human Services. Outside of the Sebring motorcade, Ossoff looks like the poster boy of the resistance, the grassroots opposition to both President Donald Trump and the wave of nationalism that installed him in office. He is a relative neophyte running 20 points ahead of a divided Republican field in a congressional district that hasn’t been blue since Jimmy Carter, also a Georgian, was president; an anonymous congressional aide turned documentary-film producer made into a national political figure mostly by love from readers of the Daily Kos; a pleasant, generic hipster-technocrat vessel into which an entire nation of angry Democrats has poured its electoral hopes (not to mention its millions of dollars — literally millions, a wild haul for a first-time nobody in a two-month race).
This story is from the April 3-16, 2017 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the April 3-16, 2017 edition of New York magazine.
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