Jon Ossoff has made a major vow about the 2028 presidential election.
The 39-year-old Democratic senator from Georgia is running for re-election in the midterms on Nov. 3, leading a campaign that has sparked suggestions he may be building toward a presidential run in two years.
But that speculation was dashed during an Atlanta Press Club debate Tuesday night against his GOP opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, when Ossoff pledged to serve a full six-year term if re-elected.
“Yes, I will,” Ossoff answered when asked if he would pledge to serve a full term. “I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president. I’m running for re-election to the Senate.”
Trump pick Collins has sought to exploit chatter about Ossoff running for the top job, suggesting he’s merely using the race as a springboard to the White House.
“He is running for president. He’s going to be your DSA candidate,” he said in his rebuttal on Tuesday.
Ossoff is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the progressive socialist organization.
Elsewhere in the heated debate, Ossoff ripped into Collins over what he described as “widely documented and completely disqualifying ties to white nationalism and neo-Nazi ideology,” and said Collins was “an example of the Washington establishment.”
He also asked Collins is he considered himself a “white nationalist.”
The Washington Post reports that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has featured in the campaign and previously shared white nationalist imagery online.
He blamed Jews for “porn” and “killing JFK,” the death of Charlie Kirk, 9/11, and said “There’s nothing wrong with White Nationalism,” in an online comments section.
Meanwhile, two members of his team, Joshua Mote and Michael Boggus, have links to American Patriots USA, which was started by former KKK member Chester Doles.
“I condemn any sort of hate speech,” Collins said in the debate Tuesday. “Antisemitism, hate of any kind. It’s abhorrent.”
Both men ripped into their family connections to wealth and power, with Ossoff saying that “Congress is full of congressmen’s sons who are only in Congress because their daddies were congressmen, just like Mike Collins, who are perfectly happy to send other people’s children to die in war.”
He was referring to Collins’ father, Mac Collins, who until 2005 represented Georgia in the House for six years.
Collins hit back, saying the only gift he got from his parents “is the opportunity to go to work,” adding “Jon Ossoff, the only thing he knows about work is working the ATM machine, getting his granddaddy’s money out of it.”
Elsewhere in Tuesday’s debate, the candidates locked horns over child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Collins said that billionaire and major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, who had meetings with Epstein, had paid for some of Ossoff’s ads.
Hoffman has previously said he was “never a client of Epstein’s and never had any engagement with him other than fundraising for MIT.”
Ossoff then hit back with a barb about the disgraced financier of his own.
“Mike, who on your team advised you to raise the Epstein files? You voted to cover up the evidence,” Ossoff said, referring to Collins’ initially voting against releasing the files before later supporting the release. “You should explain that vote to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims right now.”
The race in Georgia has caught the nation’s attention and is regarded as a key battleground in deciding who wins the Senate.
Though Ossoff is the incumbent, the race remains close in a state that Donald Trump won by two points in 2024. Keeping tight seats is a top priority for Democrats in their bid to take control of the upper chamber come November.
Ossoff has wielded major clout with his fundraising, amassing a $98 million war chest by June 30, blowing Collins’ $7.4 million in the same timeframe out of the water.
