Thomas Jonathan Ossoff ( OSS-off; born February 16, 1987) is an American politician who has served as the senior United States senator from Georgia since 2021. He is the youngest incumbent U.S. senator, and a member of the Democratic Party.
Previously, Ossoff worked as a national security staffer and legislative assistant for U.S. representative Hank Johnson. Afterward, he was managing director of an investigative documentary production company. He first ran for Congress in a 2017 special election, narrowly losing a seat that had long been considered a Republican stronghold.
Ossoff was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2021, defeating Republican incumbent David Perdue in a runoff. Ossoff was elected alongside Raphael Warnock on the same day, which was critical in securing a 50–50 Senate majority for Democrats, with vice president Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote. Ossoff is the youngest person elected to the Senate since 1980, the first senator born in the 1980s, and the first millennial United States senator. Alongside Warnock, he is one of only two Democrats to represent Georgia in the United States Senate since Zell Miller left office in 2005.
Ossoff was born on February 16, 1987, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was raised in Northlake, an unincorporated community northeast of Atlanta. Ossoff's mother, Heather Fenton, is an Australian immigrant who was born and raised in Sydney and immigrated to the United States at the age of 23. She worked as a management consultant and co-founded NewPower PAC, an organization that works to elect women to local office across Georgia. His father, Richard Ossoff, who is of Russian Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish descent, is an attorney who owns Strafford Publications, a specialist publishing company, and who was active in the 1980s fight against the Presidential Parkway planned for Atlanta. His mother is not Jewish and Ossoff did not formally convert to the religion until prior to his bar mitzvah. His paternal ancestors fled pogroms in the early twentieth century, and he noted in an interview that he grew up among Holocaust survivor relatives and detailed how this strongly influenced him and his worldviews. He previously held dual Australian citizenship through his mother.
He attended The Paideia School, a private school in Atlanta. While in high school, he interned for civil rights leader and U.S. representative John Lewis. Ossoff is a 2009 graduate of Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service with a Bachelor of Science degree in culture and politics. He earned a master of science degree in international political economy from the London School of Economics in 2013.
After receiving a recommendation from John Lewis, Ossoff worked as a national security staffer and legislative assistant for foreign affairs and defense policy for U.S. representative Hank Johnson from 2007 to 2012. From 2013 to 2021, Ossoff was the managing director and chief executive officer of Insight: The World Investigates (TWI), a London-based investigative television production company that works with reporters to create documentaries about corruption in foreign countries. The firm produced BBC investigations about ISIS war crimes and death squads in East Africa. Ossoff was involved in producing a documentary about the staging of a play in Sierra Leone. Ossoff had previously received an inheritance of an unknown amount from his grandfather, a former co-owner of a Massachusetts leather factory, of which he used $250,000 to co-fund Insight: TWI alongside company founder and former BBC reporter Ron McCullagh, who first met Ossoff when he was 16 years old during a family vacation to France and with whom he kept in contact afterward.
After learning that Republican Tom Price of Georgia's 6th congressional district had been appointed secretary of health and human services by president-elect Donald Trump, Ossoff announced his candidacy for the special election on January 5, 2017. He was endorsed by congressmen Hank Johnson and John Lewis, and by state House Democratic leader Stacey Abrams. He also received public support from U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Ossoff raised more than $8.3 million by early April of that year.
According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ossoff "transformed what was expected to be a quiet battle for a long-safe Republican seat into a proxy fight over Trump, the health care overhaul, and the partisan struggle for suburbia". When he entered the race, the Cook Partisan Voting Index rated Georgia's 6th congressional district at R+14; the district was not considered competitive, and had been represented in Congress by Republicans since 1978. Less than two months before Ossoff's announcement, Price had been re-elected in a landslide, with 62 percent of the vote.
Ossoff grew up in what is now the 6th district, where his family still resides, although as of the election, he lived approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) outside the district's boundaries in the neighboring 4th district. He said he only lived in the 4th temporarily so that his girlfriend, now wife, who was then an Emory University medical student, could walk to work. Members of the House are only required to live in the state they represent. The two became engaged during the campaign.
On April 18, 2017, no candidate received 50 percent of the vote in the blanket primary. Ossoff led with about 48.1 percent of the vote, Republican candidate Karen Handel received 19.8 percent, while the remainder of votes were scattered for 16 other candidates. Ossoff won all but 1 percent of the Democratic vote, while the Republican vote was heavily split. Republicans collectively won 51.2 percent of the overall vote. Because no candidate secured an absolute majority, the two leading candidates, Ossoff and Handel, competed in a runoff election on June 20, 2017.
Ossoff broke national fundraising records for a U.S. House candidate. In total, his campaign raised more than $23 million, two-thirds of which was contributed by small-dollar donors nationwide. Combined spending by the campaigns and outside groups on their behalf added up to more than $55 million, which was the most expensive House election in U.S. history. During the campaign, Republican strategy focused on connecting him to Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi, regarded as a polarizing and unpopular figure by Republicans; Ossoff declined to say whether he would, if elected, support Pelosi for Speaker.
In the June 20 runoff, Handel defeated Ossoff by 9,282 votes. According to Atlanta Magazine, "while his percentage of the total vote remained steady from April to now, Ossoff garnered 32,220 more votes in those three months, a 34 percent increase ... Ossoff and his allies might have scooped up nearly every Democrat vote there was to get—and it still wasn't enough to overcome the GOP's numerical advantage." The New York Times reported that he "produced probably the strongest Democratic turnout in an off-year election in at least a decade", "brought a surprising number of irregular young and nonwhite voters to the polls", and nearly doubled youth turnout in the 6th district from the 2014 midterm election. However, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "surging Democratic turnout wasn't enough to overcome heavy GOP voting in a district where Republicans far outnumber Democrats". Following reports of the election results, Frank Bruni, in an op-ed for The New York Times, characterized the race as "demoralizing for Democrats". This was as close as a Democrat had come to winning this district since it assumed its current configuration as a northern suburban district in 1992; Democratic challengers had won more than 40 percent of the vote only twice before.
On February 23, 2018, Ossoff announced he would not seek the seat in the election in 2018; the seat was won by Democrat Lucy McBath in November 2018.
Ossoff ran in the Democratic primary election to unseat then-incumbent Republican senator David Perdue in the 2020 Senate election in Georgia. On June 10, Ossoff advanced to the general election by winning 53 percent of the vote. In July 2020, Perdue's campaign ran a Facebook advertisement in which Ossoff's nose was digitally altered to be larger, which Ossoff criticized as "one of the most classic anti-Semitic tropes". Perdue's campaign said that Perdue had not seen the image and that the widening and elongation of his nose was done by a vendor. The Perdue campaign pulled the advertisement.