ATLANTA (AP) – As a teenager, Jon Ossoff was inspired by the pivotal role John Lewis played in the fight for racial equality when the civil rights icon was in his early twenties.
He was impressed with Lewis’ life, he told The Associated Press in December, in particular how someone “so young” had gained such a prominent position as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
At the age of 33, the millennial Democrat will take on his own leadership mantle after being one of two candidates to assist the party in sweeping the pivotal U.S. Senate elections in Georgia, a victory that will take Democrats’ control over the room sealed. Ossoff defeated Republican David Perdue in the second round held Tuesday after neither he nor Perdue got 50% of the vote in November.
This is Ossoff’s first election to public office and he will be the youngest member of the Senate. But he has never let youth and inexperience hinder his ambitions.
In 2017, at the age of 29, he ran for Congress in Georgia in a race that was closely watched as an early referendum on President Donald Trump.
Although he lost, he shattered fundraising records and made the match competitive in a once reliable Republican district. He took a tougher approach for his Senate campaign. His platform was unabashedly liberal, calling for a $ 15 minimum wage, a government health plan “public option” and a new voting right to restore federal oversight of state election laws.
He also launched a fierce attack on Perdue while shaking off his opponent’s exaggerated claim that he was pursuing a “radical socialist agenda.” During an October debate, he called the 71-year-old former company leader ‘a conman’ who used the COVID-19 pandemic to protect his stock portfolio while downplaying the seriousness of the virus. Perdue insisted the charges were false.
Ossoff is smart, has a “good heart” and will do his best to be a good senator, said Sarah Riggs Amico, a fellow Democrat who ran for lieutenant governor in Georgia in 2018 and challenged Ossoff in the United States. primary senate.
“The reality is that government functions better when people from a wide variety of backgrounds come to the table,” she said.
Voter Kaitlynn Poborsky, 28, said she chose Ossoff because she is looking for change and a senator who is passionate about tackling the coronavirus and climate change. She wasn’t concerned about his age.
“I think we need young people,” she said outside a polling station in downtown Atlanta on Tuesday. “People in office are too old.”
Ossoff said his first race taught him the importance of grassroots campaign and to ignore “the paint by number, nonsense in the garden variety the GOP throws at me”.
“I don’t pay any attention to it, and I really don’t care what they say,” he told the AP last month. His campaign turned down an interview request on Wednesday.
Ossoff grew up in a wealthy Atlanta family and was sixteen when he read Lewis’ memoirs about the civil rights movement “Walking With the Wind.” He wrote a letter to Lewis and Lewis offered him a summer job.
Lewis referred him to Hank Johnson, an Atlanta-area attorney who ran for Congress in 2006. A graduate of Georgetown University, Ossoff became the fourth member of Johnson’s campaign staff. Lewis would continue to be a mentor.
Ossoff spent five years with Johnson’s staff in Washington. In 2013, after Ossoff inherited money from his late grandfather, he invested in a small London film production company. Insight TWI finances research documentaries and sells them to broadcasters, including the BBC. Ossoff is the company’s CEO.
In a victory speech early Wednesday, Ossoff said he would follow Lewis’s lead. The Georgia Democrat died last year after serving in Congress for more than three decades.
“This campaign was about health and jobs and justice for the people of the state, for all the people of the state,” he said. “And they will be my guiding principles when I serve this state in the United States Senate.”
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Associated Press journalist Haleluya Hadero contributed to this report.