Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff for President?

Huh?

Thomas Jonathan Ossoff?

Ask Democrats what they think about political future these days and they’ll likely give the same answer: He needs to win reelection in November first.

But as the party searches for younger leaders and a wide-open race for the Democratic nomination begins to take shape, the chatter about Ossoff joining the 2028 field has grown louder.

“I will tell you just looking at him on the stump he has a certain energy and freshness about him,” Democratic strategist Anthony Coley said. “What’s so amazing about Jon Ossoff is that he’s standing firm on his values in a purple state and that’s what people appreciate. … He’s creating a buzz that the country — and certainly the party — is craving right now.”

“All of that bodes well for him if he decides to turn his attention to a presidential race in 2028,” Coley said.

Ossoff’s campaign videos have been going viral in recent weeks, including one where he talks about how U.S. taxpayers are funding a $1.6 billion mining project in Kazakhstan “while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for healthcare.”

This week, The New York Times’s opinion page ran a piece titled, “Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President.”

“If you were cooking up an ideal 2028 candidate in a lab, he … would look a lot like Ossoff,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in the Times’s opinion piece. “He’s a southerner from a reddish state with a history of wooing Black voters. And he’s a Jewish critic of Israel who, as much as anyone in politics today, has the potential to bridge the Democratic Party’s agonizing divide over Zionism.”

Ossoff, who is one of Republicans’ top political targets in the November midterm elections, told The Hill on Thursday that he has no interest in running for president.

“I am not running for president in 2028, and I have no interest in running for president in 2028,” he said.

Such denials of presidential ambition are to be expected among officeholders more than two years out from a presidential election, especially if they are embroiled in a tough reelection race…..

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image…Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff (center) greets supporters before speaking at a rally at Liberty Plaza after he filed paperwork to run for his 2026 reelection campaign on March 2, 2026. (Jason Getz/AJC)