Jon Ossoff came to Savannah over the weekend to deliver “a report from our nation’s capital.” And the news, he said, isn’t good.
“Donald Trump wants the whole country to fear,” the 38-year-old Democratic U.S. senator from Atlanta told hundreds of supporters gathered at the Kehoe Iron Works building on a sweltering, mid-summer afternoon.
“I’ve heard it from people at every level, including people with power, people with status, people with resources. They come to my office, and they tell me they’re afraid to say anything. They’re afraid of retribution, investigation, destruction, vengeance from their own government.”
Ossoff’s visit to Savannah comes as he steps up campaigning ahead of what is expected to be one of the most crucial — and most expensive — election races in the nation next year. At stake could be control of the U.S. Senate.
Ossoff has already raised over $15 million for his campaign this year, as he prepares to take on a spate of Republican challengers. During his visit to the coast, he also attended a fundraiser at a private home in the Hostess City.
Finding a message?
In his 26-minute speech, Ossoff lambasted the GOP’s recently passed tax-and spending bill, which is expected to balloon federal debt by at least $3 trillion. He decried provisions that will make cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while lowering taxes for the wealthiest Americans — moves that Ossoff said contradict Republican claims to be the party of the working class.
Those remarks by Ossoff on Saturday suggest that he and other Democrats might have already found their main message for next year’s midterm elections.
Again and again on Saturday, he returned to what he said was the betrayal of working-class Americans by the president, as exemplified by what Trump and his supporters have dubbed the “big, beautiful bill.”
“Donald Trump said he was going to fight for working-class Americans. What he really meant was he was going to take away your health care to cut taxes for the rich,” Ossoff said.
Ossoff, who narrowly flipped his seat alongside Rev. Raphael Warnock in 2020, is viewed as the most vulnerable Democratic senator up for reelection in 2026. Although Democrats won Georgia in 2020, the Peach State returned to its Republican roots in 2024, and Ossoff’s GOP election challengers, including Coastal Georgia Congressman Earl “Buddy” Carter, see the state as too Republican to have two Democrats in Washington.
Promises kept, broken
But Ossoff appears to believe that healthcare is a winning issue for him and other Democrats.
He said Saturday that Republicans are “destroying” Medicaid, which in Georgia covers 40 percent of children, nearly 50 percent of all births and about 70 percent of nursing home residents. While on the subject of healthcare, Ossoff narrowed in on the high costs of ambulance rides and the lack of healthcare infrastructure in rural areas, problems that have been exacerbated since Trump took office, he said.
Following Trump’s signing of the mammoth tax-and-spending bill in a ceremony on the White House lawn on July 4, the White House led a chorus of Republicans in the slogan, “Promises made, promises kept.”
In his remarks, Ossoff sought to turn that boast on its head, listing off Trump’s “broken promises,” ranging from his vow to end wars in Ukraine and Gaza to his assurance that he’d release sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list.”
“Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?” Ossoff quipped.
That message resonated with Ossoff’s sympathetic audience on Saturday.
“Everything in the big new bill is just a crime, and I know Senator Ossoff opposed that big time,” Carol Young, who came to the rally from Pooler, said.
“Our federal government is gutting everything, like the Weather Service and FEMA and health care, and I’m terrified of just everything they’re going to do.”
As to why Trump and the GOP have backed a bill that eliminates what many Americans consider essential government services?
In a message that is likely to resound in campaigning for next year’s midterm elections, Ossoff said it was to give wealthy donors a tax break. Starting with Trump, the corruption driving American politics, he said, is the worst in the Western world.
“He’s a crook, and he wants to be a king,” he said. But, “Georgia will bow to no king.”
Lily Belle Poling is a rising junior at Yale. She is a summer 2025 intern at The Current GA with support from the Ida B. Wells Society in collaboration with the Nonprofit Newsroom Internship Program created by The Scripps Howard Fund and the Institute for Nonprofit News.
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