When Jon Ossoff was the C.E.O. of the Emmy-winning production company
Insight TWI, which has made documentaries exposing judiciary corruption
in Ghana and war crimes in Iraq, among other subjects, he had a simple
mantra for the company’s approach: “Name, shame, and jail.” That’s the
motto of a Ghanaian journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who worked on the
documentary about judicial corruption; Ossoff cited it in an interview,
last September, with the newsletter for Atlanta’s Paideia School, his
alma mater. This was, of course, before Donald Trump was elected
President—and before Trump selected Tom Price, the congressman from
Georgia’s Sixth District, where Ossoff grew up, to be the Secretary of Health
and Human Services. In January, Ossoff, who’s thirty, jumped into the
race,
which has been called a referendum on the early days of Trump’s
Presidency. His first fund-raising pitch was “Make Trump Furious.” But,
when he talks about the President now, he’s more measured than some of
his fellow-Democrats. In an incendiary time, Ossoff has striven to be
nonflammable.

I spoke to Ossoff on Friday, as he headed to a rally for
millennials. A recent
poll has him leading his Republican opponent, Karen Handel, a former Georgia
secretary of state who has failed in prior bids to become governor and a
state senator, by less than two points. Handel has had
Trump,
along with Vice-President Mike
Pence and Speaker of the House Paul
Ryan,
give local speeches on her behalf. (Trump told her, “You’d better
win.”)
But the many moderate Republicans in the district—which encompasses the
mostly wealthy and mostly white suburbs north of Atlanta, and which
opted for Marco Rubio in the Republican Presidential primary last year—aren’t
necessarily true believers in Trump or Handel. Even so, Ossoff tends to
bite his tongue a bit when speaking about the President. In our
conversation, he referred to “the atmosphere of chaos and scandal and
disarray in Washington,” but he declined to use the word “impeach”—“I
don’t think we’re there yet,” he said—and told me that he hoped to avoid
provoking “extreme partisanship.” In April, when “Hardball” ’s Chris
Matthews pressed him to
characterize Trump, Ossoff finally allowed, after much baiting, “I don’t
have great personal admiration for the man.” He would go no further.

This approach—and Ossoff’s more moderate policy positions, such as his
disinclination to raise taxes on the wealthy or to move toward single-payer
health care—has led some to wonder whether, as a recent article in The
New Republic put it, he is a “moderate Republican” or a “serious
progressive dressed up as a
centrist.”
In that same appearance on “Hardball,” last April, Matthews asked
Ossoff, “Are you a
moderate or a progressive? Which word would you prefer?” “I try to shy
away from labels and focus on the issues,” Ossoff replied. Matthews
pressed him: “Give me a label.” “I’m pragmatic,” Ossoff said.

Ossoff stuck to those talking points when we spoke. I asked, for
instance, if he fit in the Hillary Clinton or the Bernie Sanders wing of
the Democratic Party. (Sanders has endorsed Ossoff, but would not call
him a
“progressive.”)
“There’s unprecedented unity in the Sixth District,” Ossoff responded,
“and we’ve built a coalition that includes Democrats, independents, and
Republicans who are committed to politics and focussed on improving
quality of life, rather than partisan intrigue.” After I repeated the
question, he went on, “Voters here want to see a federal government that
wastes less money, that sets the right priorities—like higher education,
infrastructure, high-tech research, to grow metro Atlanta’s
economy—that’s working to make health care more accessible and affordable
and that isn’t getting drawn into the partisan swamp. That’s focussed on
results and responsibility.”

Ossoff told me that the economy and access to health care are the two
issues that voters in the Georgia Sixth care most about, and the two
issues that would be his main focus in Congress. He said that he is
willing to work with Trump to get things done, if it would help his
constituents. “If the White House presses forward an infrastructure
bill, for example, that can deliver real results for Georgia, then I’ll
work with the White House on that,” he told me. “I don’t care about the
party or the personality attached to it. I just care whether it’s right
for folks in Georgia’s Sixth District.”

This has been Ossoff’s pitch for months now. Nonetheless, Handel’s
television ads have tried to connect him to tie-dyed San Francisco
liberals, Nancy Pelosi,
Al Jazeera and Osama bin
Laden, and even, in an
ad from the conservative group Principled PAC—which Handel has since
disavowed—“the
unhinged leftists cheering last week’s shooting” at the Republican
congressional baseball practice. (“I’ll tell you what: I think the
shooting is going to win this election for us,” Brad Carver, the head of
the G.O.P. in the neighboring Eleventh District, said on Saturday,
after a Handel
rally in Chamblee, Georgia.) Ossoff’s attack ads have repeatedly called Handel
a “career politician,” targeting her use of tax dollars for personal
spending while she was the secretary of state—a luxury vehicle, air travel, fancy
desk chairs—and her “unforgivable”
tenure as the
vice-president of a breast-cancer charity, in which, the ad states, she
“cut off funding for Planned Parenthood cancer screenings.” (Polls show
that Ossoff has the majority of female support in the Sixth, while
Handel is backed by more of the district’s male voters.)

Interestingly, Ossoff’s campaign has not put out any television ads
focussed on a perhaps garbled comment that Handel made at a recent
debate. “This is an
example of a fundamental difference between a liberal and a
conservative,” Handel said, in an exchange about the minimum wage. “I do
not support a livable wage.” Presumably, she meant that she did not
support raising the minimum hourly pay to a “living wage.” (Ossoff had
said that “the minimum wage should be a living wage.”) The national
press made hay out of the gaffe, but Ossoff didn’t pounce. When I asked
him why not, he told me, “I think her comment speaks for itself.”

Both candidates have received a great deal of support, financial and
otherwise, from outside the district. Handel has enjoyed the in-person
and Twitter-mediated support of Trump, whose proven double edge she’s willing to endure. Ossoff,
meanwhile, has raised a record twenty-three million
dollars and recruited twelve thousand volunteers. And he’s been criticized for
having the backing of
Hollywood,
which has included the actress Alyssa Milano driving early voters to the
polls. But, Ossoff insisted to me, he owes supporters outside the Sixth
nothing but appreciation if he gets elected. “Let me just make
absolutely clear,” he said, “that the only folks I will be accountable
to are voters in the Sixth District, and the only test I will apply to a
solution or policy is whether it serves them, period.”

Posing a greater threat to the election than celebrity interference is,
perhaps, the potential for hacking; there has been some concern over the
security of Georgia’s election system, particularly in the wake of
reports that Russia attempted to meddle in the U.S. Presidential
election last year. A recent story from Politico described old and
insecure voting equipment and software that could make the Sixth
District
susceptible.
Ossoff told me that he has “full confidence in the integrity of our
elections in Georgia.” But he has also tried to use these concerns to
his advantage, telling me, “Secretary Handel’s negligent failure to act
when she was responsible for Georgia’s election system, and was warned
about vulnerabilities, is characteristic of a career politician who has
spent her entire career focussed on her next shot at a higher office,
rather than doing the job that people have given her.”

Handel’s spokeswoman, Kate Constantini, called this a “partisan
political attack,” offering a different version of the Secretary’s
record. “She implemented several improvements to enhance the integrity
of Georgia’s elections,” Constantini said in an e-mail, “including
implementing Photo I.D., strengthening the absentee ballot process,
pursuing allegations of voter fraud and irregularities.” Likewise,
Constantini defended Handel on women’s issues. “She has long advocated
increasing the funding for community health care organizations in
Georgia, who are actually on the front-line of the war against women’s
cancer, and will continue to do so in Congress.”

Considering the level of attention given to a race for the
representation of just one of Georgia’s fourteen congressional
districts, does Ossoff think he’ll be able to deliver proportional
results, if he’s elected, I wondered? “One out of four hundred and
thirty-five members of the House is not going to transform the culture
of the institution,” he said, “but we’ve got to start somewhere.”