Jon Ossoff, Democrats’ most vulnerable senator, sharpens Trump criticism in a state Trump won

It’s a key part of the Democratic strategy in both the House and the Senate, where the party will have to win four seats to retake the chamber. Few if any states are as important to that mission as Georgia, where Ossoff is the lone Democratic senator running for re-election in a state won by Trump.

The Georgia incumbent’s message comes as Democrats work to recover from record-low ratings for the party and engage a voter base eager to hear the party’s plan to counter Trump.

“I want more visibility. I want them to speak and say this is not what we want and this is how we’re going to make changes,” said Stacey Michael, a Savannah resident and a veteran. “Don’t leave us blindly wondering.”

Georgia’s role as a political bellwether has sharpened in recent years, with the deeply polarized state voting for the winner of the last three presidential elections and helping determine control of the Senate after 2020 and 2022. The Southern battleground served as a beacon for Democrats during and immediately after Trump’s first term. They lauded victories there as proof that Trump turned off moderate voters and that Democrats were surging in a state with a decadeslong history of supporting Republican candidates.

Now, the party will look to Ossoff to determine if Democrats’ run of wins in federal races before Trump’s 2024 showing was, as Republicans argue, an anomaly fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic — or whether Georgia is a truly purple battleground.

Winning another term would require Ossoff to reverse the trends that powered Trump’s victory last year: higher turnout among Republican voters, marginal shifts rightward in Democratic strongholds and waning enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies. One Georgia-based political scientist said Ossoff’s re-election, while possible, will be an uphill battle.

“Georgia is still more competitive than it was in the mid-2000s but the fundamentals of the state still privilege Republicans,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University.

And Ossoff voters agree that he’ll have to make an effective appeal to the state’s Republican constituency to win.

“We got to get better at winning elections and getting the message out and compromising on the issues that we’re arguing about amongst ourselves. We’ve got to really get better at that,” said Savannah resident William Heard, a retired schoolteacher.

The demographic shifts powering Georgia’s battleground status

Georgia’s competitiveness, Gillespie said, stems from its demographic mix. Black people make up roughly a third of the overall population, according to census data. But unlike neighboring Southern states with large Black populations, Georgia, over the last decade, has also seen significant increases in its Latino and Asian American populations, other groups historically more likely to support Democratic candidates — though Republicans made inroads with each of those groups in 2024.

And while most Black voters again supported Democratic candidates in 2024, they did not turn out at the same rate as white Georgians, according to analysis by the Brennan Center.

Meanwhile, three of the four largest counties in metro Atlanta, Democrats’ most important source of votes in the state, shifted rightward last year.

A New York Times analysis of election data shows that while Democrats did gain in some of the outer suburbs, Fulton County, the home of Atlanta and Georgia’s most populous county, saw a 1.5-point shift toward Trump compared to 2020. Gwinnett County, the state’s second largest, saw a slightly larger shift toward the right, while DeKalb County, the fourth-biggest county, saw a nearly 3-point move.

Behind that shift was an effort by the Republican chairs of the metro Atlanta counties to reactivate what they described as a quiet Republican constituency in the overwhelmingly blue region. In coordination with the Trump campaign, the county chairs used data analytics to target low-propensity conservative voters in the region with door-knocks, digital ads and high-profile surrogates, like current FBI Director Kash Patel and Lara Trump.