NBC News: “Jon Ossoff is ending the Trump era the same way he began it: as a young Democrat unexpectedly at the center of the political universe. He lost his first run for office in June 2017, but the stakes then were largely symbolic. This time, some say, the fate of the country, and even the world, hangs in the balance on what will be the last election of the Trump era. No pressure. ‘Jon ended up running an incredibly expensive and highly publicized race four years ago,’ said Atlanta City Council member Matt Westmoreland, a Democrat. ‘And now he’s found himself in a race with even higher stakes and more money because control of the Senate is at stake.'”
“In the unsettled early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Ossoff, then 30, captured progressive hearts — and dollars — in a special election to flip Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat, which became the most expensive House race in history and the first real bellwether of the political trends that would come to define the era. Now, he’s running for the Senate in one of two January runoffs in Georgia that will ‘determine the direction of our country for the next 50 to 100 years,’ according to his Republican opponent, Sen. David Perdue. If Democrats win both seats, they’ll end the Trump era by giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tiebreaking vote in the Senate. It would also be vindication for Ossoff, whose loss in the House race set off a familiar circular firing squad among Democrats. Some in the party wondered whether they had wasted precious money on the seemingly hopeless cause of winning one House seat in a heavily Republican district.”