Three Moments From Last Night’s Ossoff-Collins Debate
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) and Rep. Mike Collins (R) held their second debate in the Georgia Senate race Tuesday, and many of the themes of the first reemerged. Ossoff turned over the many ways in which, even within the context of today’s Republican Party, Collins’ radicalism is on the surface. Collins struggled to return a blow, or to distance himself from the unpopular president.
Who won in 2020?
One of the moderators, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein, noted that Collins said Trump “won” the 2020 election as recently as June. Does he still beleive that?
Collins dodged, saying that “Joe Biden went into office” before pivoting to criticizing his presidency.
Ten minutes later, Ossoff returned to the question. “You didn’t answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”
“They know my views on that,” Collins replied. “There was a lot of doubt in that election.”
Fifteen minutes after that, Ossoff returned to it a third time. “You still haven’t answered tonight whether you believe Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election,” he said. “Here’s your third chance. Did Donald Trump really win the 2020 election? You want to answer, Mike?”
“I have said numerous times that Joe Biden was the president in 2021,” Collins said.
“Not what I asked,” Ossoff replied.
OSSOFF: You didn't answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?MIKE COLLINS: You know, the 2020 election. Everybody has seen my views on thatOSSOFF: What are they?COLLINS: There was a lot of doubt in that election OSSOFF: I didn't hear an answer
What’s up with all the white nationalists around Collins?
Collins’ white nationalism problem was again a theme of this debate.
Moderator Faith Jessie of Atlanta news station 11 Alive reminded Collins of Ossoff’s line last week — that he had “hired half the Third Reich” — and asked for his response. “Are you a white nationalist?” Jessie asked. “And what do you say to Black Georgians who question whether you will represent them equally?”
“I condemn any sort a hate speech,” he said. “Antisemitism, hate of any kind. It’s abhorrent. And I’ve fired people when things happen, fired them,” he added, a possible reference to his former chief of staff, who bragged of his efforts trying to get a Holocaust denier out of prison.
He then went on to suggest a link between people who feel “forgotten” and rising antisemitism. “We do have a problem with antisemitism and war and hate around the world,” he said. “These young people feel like they’ve forgotten and they’re just lashing out. And this hate speech has got to stop and we’ve got to educate them.”
Mike Collins makes apologies for white nationalists like his son in law: "These people feel like they've been forgotten. And they're just lashing out."
Ossoff asked Collins about a joke he repeatedly made online, suggesting immigrants to the U.S. be tossed from helicopters — an allusion to extrajudicial killings carried out by right-wing Latin American dictators, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, a meme that the very online right loves to invoke.
“Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters,” Ossoff said. “I’d like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?”
Collins did not answer the question and pivoted to talking about the Laken Riley Act and border enforcement.
OSSOFF: Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters. I'd like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?MIKE COLLINS: *changes topic*
CASTLE ROCK, CO – JUNE 26: Former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters speaks during the first day of the Rocky Mountain Voice Freedom Festival on Friday, June 26, 2026, at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock, Colo. (Photo by Timothy Hurst/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
The election-denying former Colorado county Clerk Tina Peters, who met with Trump earlier this month, has been pushing an idea that the 2026 midterms will need instant “manual verification.” She’s got a whole website where she lays out “the Tina Plan,” though in fairly opaque language.
In an interview that has been floating around since September but that I first saw surfaced by Newsweek, her lawyer, Trump’s longtime friend Peter Ticktin, makes plain what she’s talking about: “Her idea is grab, get control over the ballots as soon as the machines spit them through and then do a recount,” he told a right-wing podcaster.
He went on to explain that, if Trump does not trust the results of a future election, he “is not going to relinquish control again.”
“It’s better if we’re going to have a civil war of any sort that it be martial law with our side in control of the armaments,” Ticktin outrageously declared.
That this is (likely) all big talk, and illegal, does not make it any less wild that these ideas may have been presented in the Oval Office when Peters recently met with Trump. Peters has also reportedly met with the DOJ and Department of Commerce.
As polls show Republicans doing poorly in safely red states, the party is looking toward blue states in which its candidates might have a chance. One such state is Minnesota, where Senate candidate Michele Tafoya (R), a former sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, is polling well. And so I can only guess it is with the election in mind that President Trump is trying to stir up some racial tension, going so far as to encouraging Minnesotans to “fight back” against their Somali immigrant neighbors.
The state has been “taken over by Somali Immigrants” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”
He want on to attack Governor Tim Walz (D) as “an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved” before concluding “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”
The attacks rest on the same panic about fraud investigations in the state that prompted last winter’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, leaving two American citizens dead. Republicans have returned to those talking points after an 18-year-old American citizen born to Somali immigrant parents was arrested earlier this week after allegedly plotting an attack on the Mall of America with an assault rifle, inspired by ISIS. It’s unclear how realistic his plan was. Tafoya, the Republican Senate candidate, has leaned hard on the details of that arrest, while also describing voter concerns about “crime” and supposed “Somali gangs.”
Elsewhere, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who represents a red seat northwest of Minneapolis, offered the idea that his constituents were facing “enemy combatants.”
“This is another one that you’re going to hear at the ballot box,” he said on Fox Business. “Democrats […] are not talking about it, they are not offering solutions, and they are not holding these fraudsters or these criminal gangsters — which I would argue are enemy combatants, more than anything — they’re not holding them accountable.”
Trump’s comments are reminiscent of the 2024 smear campaign JD Vance employed against Haitian immigrants in Ohio, seizing on an issue that, as TPM reported at the time, neo-Nazi groups including Blood Tribe and Patriot Front had sought to push to the fore. It’s tempting to predict this rhetoric will backfire in the midterms, but it’s hard to say whether that was the case in 2024: after grotesquely and falsely accusing Haitians of eating pets, Trump and Vance won all seven battleground states and won Ohio by 11 points.
I can imagine, however, that Minnesotans, at this point, are getting tired of this.
Trump Tries Last-Minute Gambit to Pay off Americans
A series of actions by the Republican-led Congress and the Trump administration have dealt significant blows to health care in America — specifically, to Obamacare and Medicaid which, in turn, support rural hospitals.
As a solution, the White House has unveiled two schemes to send Americans small checks — one for $90 to Medicare Part B enrollees and the other for $500 to Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace enrollees who do not receive premium assistance.
That first initiative seriously stretches the law, experts told TPM’s Emine Yücel, describing it to her as a “legally dubious” interpretation of how the executive branch may use the pool of funding it’s tapping into.
This all became an issue in last night’s debate between Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson. Emine reports:
Tabs
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) tore into Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) in last night’s Georgia Senate debate, deploying such lines as, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” Read Layla A. Jones’ recap for TPM here.
ICE agents shot a man in New York City multiple times Thursday while he was in his car. According to New York officials, a five-year-old child was in the back seat.
The Trump administration will livestream the killing by firing squad of the Fort Hood shooter, the first U.S. military execution since 1961. Pete Hegseth is super excited about it.
Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) failed to answer a question about who won the 2020 election, said tariffs were making trade fair for Georgia manufacturers, and attempted to elicit sympathy for his own family when asked to condemn the white nationalist views held by his son-in-law during the first Georgia-wide U.S. Senate debate on Thursday night.
For more than a year, journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had been trying — and largely failing — to raise awareness about the very strange story of Donald Trump and his aide Natalie Harp. Shortly after the 2024 election, the New York Times journalists published a profile of the lithe blonde in her early 30s, complete with photos of her gazing at Trump adoringly, explaining how she left him love letters with language like, “You are all that matters to me.” On Aug. 16, Haberman was still trying to raise the issue during an appearance on MS NOW, describing Harp as Trump’s “human binky.”
But in the end, it was Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who woke up much of the public to this disturbing relationship by mentioning Harp on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” the senator said of Trump, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The defensive reaction from the White House was so over-the-top that it backfired, drawing more attention to the relationship.
But a mystery remained. Haberman, Swan and many others had been talking about Harp, but it wasn’t until Ossoff said something that the White House truly lost their minds.
The reaction likely had little to do with Ossoff’s comments, as elegantly as they were constructed. No, this recoil was more about the messenger than the message. At 39, Ossoff isn’t just young. He is strikingly handsome. The boyish good looks of his early career have matured into something closer to the old-fashioned allure of a 1960s-era movie star, such as Gregory Peck or Warren Beatty. Broad-chested, with great hair and a winning smile, Ossoff has a cool demeanor, good sense of humor and moral seriousness in a proportion that’s rare in politics — and that hasn’t really been seen since Barack Obama. Ossoff, in other words, can get it.
I’m talking about votes.
Put another way, Ossoff is everything the 80-year-old president wishes he were, but isn’t. Harp’s presence is a touchy, daily reminder to both Trump and his staff of the president’s thick catalog failings as a human being. Having a young, handsome, talented man mock Trump for his emotional support aide had to have stung with a special precision. No one needs to tell the president or his staff that Ossoff feels just fine about himself — and doesn’t need a full-time emotional support aide to follow him around, praising his every move.
Considering how much the White House communications staff is extremely online, they are also likely to know that Ossoff has become quite the thirst trap, even among young women and gay men who otherwise aren’t especially political on social media. As Grace Panetta of The 19th recently explained, the senator is a reliable, if unwitting, model for light-hearted crush content, much like what creators generate in tribute to movie stars like Timothée Chalamet or Tom Holland.
“Take a scroll through Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll see fan edit-style videos of Ossoff at campaign rallies and in Senate hearings,” Panetta wrote. Women jokingly call out Ossoff’s “slutty Atticus Finch cosplay” or predict that Ossoff will be “a hot president in my lifetime.” It’s reached the point where a reporter from TMZ asked Ossoff if he has “BDE,” which is not short for Big Dictionary Energy, despite the senator very much seeming like he’d be a fan of Oxford’s quintessential publication.
Ossoff’s sex appeal doesn’t just offer a striking contrast with Trump’s oversized suits and comical combover. He’s also very different than men in the Republican ranks who are closer to his own age and, like himself, are widely seen as potential 2028 presidential candidates. At 42, Vice President JD Vance is also the subject a lot of online content. But most of it portrays him in a comically unflattering manner, with tiny dead eyes, oversized cheeks and a maniacal grin. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, isn’t mocked for his looks, but he is often portrayed as a sad sack, a man too slow-witted and spineless to be much use beyond his role as Trump’s patsy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 46, is blessed with good looks that even three breakfast gin-and-tonics can’t take away. But with the help of Colin Jost on “Saturday Night Live,” he is mostly viewed like an overgrown frat boy crushing beer cans on his forehead. None come even close to the dreamboat treatment Ossoff receives.
This disparate treatment is especially amusing because the MAGA movement has insisted for years that they are bringing back a more virile masculinity — supposedly to cure all the allegedly poisonous feminism inflicted upon America by those WNBA-loving Democrats. No doubt there are some people impressed by all the workout videos posted by MAGA leaders, though that audience probably doesn’t have much crossover with people who get second dates. But what all the chest-thumping and push-up contests of the right really communicates is overcompensation rather than reclaiming some “lost” masculinity.
Beneath the right’s meltdown over Ossoff’s relatively tame comment about Harp was a molten layer of male insecurity. Steven Cheung, the volatile White House communications director, tweeted, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman David Ingle called the senator a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” Both unwisely lobbed these insults from X accounts featuring photos of themselves. The handy comparison left the observer to contemplate how, with MAGA, it’s typically true that every accusation is itself a confession. Similarly, Trump compared Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman, a reference to a film that is older than the senator and only served to underscore how old and out of touch the president is.
MAGA’s belief that masculinity is on the decline is more a reflection of their personal fears and resentments than an accurate picture of the world. Men who can just act normal continue to do fine, or as much as one can in this economy. As with many of the thirst-trap Democrats that are rising stars, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a large part of Ossoff’s charm is that he possesses an easy masculinity, one comfortable with women’s equality. MAGA influencers may deny it, but men who actually like and respect women tend to be more attractive to women and gay men.
Being chill with women’s power projects confidence. Insecure men are the ones who demand that women are forced into subservient roles, just so men can feel bigger. It speaks to an internal belief that they can’t win without cheating. That’s loser energy, not the Big Dictionary Energy being given off by Ossoff and this new crop of young, vigorous Democratic men.
Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia is running one of the most competitive 2026 campaigns as he seeks a second term. He’s emerged as a breakout star communicator and has been floated as a 2028 presidential contender. And a lot of people on the internet think he’s really hot.
As the midterms approach, the 39-year-old Democrat may be the most thirsted-after Senate candidate on the internet. Take a scroll through Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll see fan edit-style videos of Ossoff at campaign rallies and in Senate hearings. “I’m sick of acting like Jon Ossoff isn’t hot,” says one TikToker. Another refers to him wearing glasses as his “slutty Atticus Finch cosplay,” a reference to actor Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
Amaris Hayes, a 31-year-old Florida-based creator, posted a video comparing Ossoff to Fitzgerald Grant, the fictional president played by Tony Goldwyn in the Shonda Rhimes-created political drama “Scandal.”
“I’m so glad that I’m going to be able to experience a hot president in my lifetime,” she said in the video.
“Democrats on the internet can be too serious,” said Monica Venzke, a Democratic communications professional whose “passion project” is running Boyfriends We Deserve, which leans into thirst to boost Democratic candidates on social media. “It is objectively fun to have a little internet crush, and let that person be the senior senator from Georgia.”
And while those who work in campaigns often say the internet isn’t real life, thirst edits have broken containment as Ossoff’s national profile has grown. In July, one of TMZ’s Washington, D.C.-based correspondents asked Ossoff how he felt about people online saying he has “BDE.”
“Oh, my brother. Only an Aussie would ask me that,” a bemused Ossoff responded with a smile to TMZ reporter Charlie Cotton, who is Australian.
Looks and physical attractiveness have influenced American politics since the widespread adoption of television, and Ossoff isn’t the first or the only political candidate the internet has thirsted over. But Democrats, out of power and frustrated with their party leadership, have especially gravitated toward him as they seek sharp communicators and a younger generation of leaders.
Ossoff has so far avoided being labeled either a moderate or a progressive and hasn’t been a political firebrand. But this year, he’s gained attention and virality for his sharply worded criticisms of Republicans, a sustained focus on corruption in his political messaging and his intense questioning of Trump administration officials in Senate hearings.
“I think yes, he is an attractive younger man, but I think it’s also the fact that there is an attempt to listen to his constituents that I feel like we haven’t had in my lifetime,” Hayes said.
Content creators and Democratic strategists also told The 19th that thirst content, when done right, can be a gateway into real political engagement. It’s a way for Democrats to make up ground on the social media platforms where a larger-than-ever share of Americans are getting their news — turf that Republicans dominated in the 2024 election, many Democrats argue.
“I do think it’s a way to get the internet back, and also a way to make being a Democrat cool again, make it manly to be a Democrat,” Venzke said.
“Republicans are having fun on the internet, and it’s working for them,” she argued. “Let us have fun. If the girls and the gays want to look at Jon Ossoff and be like, ‘Wow, he looks so good in those pants,’ let us. It benefits him, and we’re all having fun.”
In many ways, the Ossoff thirst content is a natural evolution of the fandom communities around TV shows and musical artists that flourished on websites like Tumblr in the aughts and 2010s — now adapted for the vertical-video-dominated, infinite-scroll era of the internet, where political campaigns are competing for the increasingly scarce resource of voters’ attention.
“I think that the renewed attention on Senator Ossoff has served as a reminder to the Democratic Party, hopefully, that voters can’t be treated like a captive audience,” said Sophia Gomelsky, a Democratic campaign strategist and activist who last year posted an edit of Ossoff clips to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Tears,” a decidedly thirsty song.
“Very similarly to how the music industry runs on the enthusiasm of fans and their attention, politicians actually have to compete and energize voters around their visions and their policies,” she added.
While more candidates and advocacy groups are formally partnering with influencers and content creators, organic thirst and fan content function as a more natural on-ramp to engagement than a traditional television ad making an explicit appeal to vote for or against a candidate.
“It’s not really my role to show you that you should vote for Jon Ossoff, that’s Jon Ossoff’s role,” Venzke said. “I’m gonna show you Jon Ossoff. And then once he has your attention, it’s his job to close the deal.”
One of the first people to tap into the power of thirst as a gateway to political engagement is Qondi Ntini, a Washington, D.C.-based organizer and founder of Thirst for Democracy who dubbed Ossoff “Senator My Boo” and his fellow Georgian Sen. Raphael Warnock “Senator Bae” when they were both running for the Senate in 2020.
Ntini, who has spent years organizing and fundraising for Democratic candidates, has this year expanded into making physical merch. She found Georgia-based print shops to make pink “Senator My Boo” buttons and has been working with local Democratic activists and volunteers to distribute them at Ossoff’s rallies, including one he held Sunday in Athens. Her hope is that they help Democrats in a purple state find each other and feel not alone.
“If they can kind of identify each other, wear the buttons or hand them out to the community, it’s kind of a signal,” she said. “Like we are not standing by ourselves, we are a legion, basically.”
She doesn’t, however, want those engaged by thirst content to stop there.
“What I would want to caution people against is thinking that the thirst or the engagement is the end — that’s been my reservation with it,” she said. “I mean, I’ve been doing this thirst thing for six years, but it is tied to action, otherwise, what’s the point? Engagement is cute, but it doesn’t move people.”
Ossoff (like most politicians) hasn’t directly engaged with or reposted the thirst videos, and his campaign didn’t respond to a request for a comment for this article. But his campaign has deployed a strategy of putting out high-quality livestreams and videos from his rallies from multiple camera angles, including a profile shot some refer to as “the Obama angle,” that is prime material for clips and edits.
“The way that folks like myself have content to make thirst trap edits is because it’s out there,” Venzke said, adding that thirst content is “free earned media” for candidates.
At a rally in August, Ossoff took a shot at how Trump “wants to build the ballroom and travel with Natalie,” which struck a nerve with the White House and sparked a multi-day news cycle about Trump’s ever-present personal aide, Natalie Harp.
Marie Soledad, a California-based content creator, got interested in Ossoff in part through seeing thirst edits of him on social media. She’s a member of the Chorus network, a nonprofit incubator program of liberal creators who were discussing and planning Ossoff-related content in the wake of the “Natalie” comments.
“The vibe is Jon Ossoff is sexy, sex sells, we need votes. Why not talk about this?,” she said. “It’s fun. It’s a fun way to get people civically engaged.”
There can, however, be a fine line between thirst and objectification, and some videos about Ossoff on social media verge into decidedly not-safe-for-work territory: “Someone said he walks like it’s heavy,” read the text of one TikTok video. “Some people are upset that I said Jon Ossoff could talk you through it,” said another creator. (We’ll leave those up to reader interpretation).
Soledad wanted to capitalize on the attention on Ossoff without crossing that line. So she wrote and published a piece of Y/N or “Your Name” fanfiction (which was not formally part of her work with Chorus) about a “completely fictional” millennial Democratic senator from Georgia running for reelection in 2026 named “John Getsuoff.”
For creators like Soledad, thirst content is also a way to engage with sex and sexuality in a positive way at a time when states including Georgia have passed bans on abortion, Trump was elected to a second term after being found liable of sexual abuse and the release of files connected to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has kept sex abuse at the forefront of the national conversation.
“I think it’s awesome that we have sexy Democrats who are allowing people to feel sex-positive in a respectful — sometimes people aren’t, but I try to be — respectful way, right?,” she said. “I think the Democratic Party shouldn’t shy away from it.”
If anything, Democrats are leaning in: the official TikTok account of the Democratic National Committee has posted thirst-esque edits of Ossoff and other millennial candidates including Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed — along with lots of nostalgia content of former President Barack Obama. Headquarters, formerly known as Kamala HQ on X, posted a side-by-side composite of Ossoff and El-Sayed last month with the caption: “There are 69 days until midterm election day.”
Ossoff’s looks have also drawn GOP attacks. Both his Republican opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, and a top national Republican super PAC have aired attack ads against Ossoff, hitting him over his spending on professional hair and makeup services. Ossoff has called the ads “deceptive” for using AI-generated imagery depicting him getting various beauty treatments in a salon.
Some Democrats have floated Ossoff as a 2028 presidential candidate, though he’s said he isn’t running. Venzke said that while there are “bigger fish to fry” in the next presidential election, she’s already seeing multiple prospective contenders leaning into looks.
Politicians, she said, shouldn’t be afraid to invest in their appearances — and embrace the thirst content.
“My actual advice is let influencers do their thing,” Venske said. “Trust them. Don’t, for lack of a better word, be a prude about it.”
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