Jon Ossoff

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.

With his victory, Ossoff became the youngest member of the Senate elected since Don Nickles in 1980 as well as the first Jewish member of the Senate from Georgia, the first Jewish senator from the Deep South since Benjamin F. Jonas of Louisiana, who was elected in 1878, the first senator born in the 1980s, and the first millennial United States senator.

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 intown Atlanta.

Ossoff was raised Jewish and, due to his mother being a gentile, formally converted to the religion prior to his bar mitzvah.

His ancestors fled pogroms in the early 20th century, and he noted in an interview that he grew up among Holocaust survivor relatives and detailed how this greatly influenced him and his worldviews.

He previously held dual Australian citizenship through his mother.

He attended The Paideia School, an independent school in Atlanta.

While in high school, he interned for civil rights leader and U.S. representative John Lewis.

Thomas Jonathan Ossoff (born February 16, 1987) is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Georgia since 2021.

A member of the Democratic Party, Ossoff was previously a documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist.

Ossoff was born on February 16, 1987, in Atlanta, Georgia.

He was raised in Northlake, an unincorporated community.

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 co-founded NewPower PAC, an organization that works to elect women to local office across Georgia.

Warnock and Ossoff are the first Democrats to represent Georgia in the United States Senate since Zell Miller in 2005.

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.

In 2009, Ossoff graduated from Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service with a Bachelor of Science degree.

He attended classes taught by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren.

The two races attracted significant national attention and spending, as they decided which party would control the Senate in the 117th Congress.

Warnock and Ossoff's victories helped the Democrats attain a 50–50 split in the Senate, which made an effective majority due to the tie-breaking vote of the Vice President, Kamala Harris.

He took office on the same day as the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, ultimately becoming the senior senator from Georgia.

He earned a Master of Science degree in international political economy from the London School of Economics in 2013.

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.

Born in Atlanta to a Jewish father and an Australian mother, Ossoff was the Democratic nominee in the 2017 special election for Georgia's 6th congressional district, which had long been considered a Republican stronghold.

The special election proved competitive.

It generated national attention, and became the most expensive House election in U.S. history.

Ossoff narrowly lost the race to former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel.

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.

Ossoff quickly emerged as the most viable Democratic candidate out of a large field of candidates.

He was endorsed by congressmen Hank Johnson and John Lewis, and state House Democratic leader Stacey Abrams.

He also received public support from U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Ossoff raised over $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".

In 2020, Ossoff won the Democratic nomination for the 2020 U.S. Senate election in Georgia to run against then-incumbent Republican senator David Perdue.

Neither candidate reached the 50 percent threshold on the November 3 general election, triggering a runoff election on January 5, 2021, which Ossoff won.

Ossoff serves alongside fellow Democrat Raphael Warnock, who defeated incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler in the 2020 Senate special election runoff, also on January 5, 2021.