I’m a Jon Ossoff rally truther

At least in insidery political circles, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff has gotten a lot of buzz recently as a potential 2028 presidential candidate. 

“If you were cooking up an ideal 2028 candidate in a lab, he…would look a lot like Ossoff,” Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote. “The moment he wins in November he becomes a front-runner for 2028,” posted Mehdi Hasan back in February. “Ossoff embodies the sort of articulate, next-generation candidate — straddling the ideological divide and wielding a mix of outsider and insider credentials — that encompasses the model with which Democrats historically win,” wrote POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin.

Much of that hype comes from online videos featuring his perfect delivery of some real zingers in front of cheering crowds at what appear to be massive campaign rallies. He's often standing at a podium with an adoring audience framed behind him, the camera below him, the lighting just right. These videos have racked up millions of views across social media platforms over the past year, and they give off the look and feel of a final get-out-the-vote rally for a presidential campaign.

But what if they aren't real?

On the Nobody Knows Anything podcast last week, I outlined one of my most bizarre and controversial hot takes: that these videos are staged. That’s right, I’m a Jon Ossoff Rally Truther: 

Look, before you DM me a thousand “well actually’s” on X, please know that I'm mostly joking here. 

Obviously the man does various events across Georgia, successfully builds crowds for those events, and has an extremely talented team staging them. But my larger point is that the Ossoff hype machine is a wild example of candidate vibe-manufacturing in the year of our lord 2026. His team seamlessly packages every piece of a campaign, from on-the-ground event production and advance work to digital advertising for crowdbuilding, S-Tier speechwriting, and expert video clipping and editing, all to make Ossoff's candidacy appear larger than real life. You rarely see a team execute this flawlessly, and as a result, the 2028 presidential rumor mill has begun.

POLITICO’s Martin confirmed this is essentially their strategy in a story last week:

“Ossoff about once every six weeks has a weekend rally somewhere around Georgia that draws a thousand or so people. The senator, who I’m told doesn’t have Twitter on his phone, writes his own material. His staff tips off a handful of progressive video clippers, who tune in to the stream and cut Ossoff’s best material. They then post it into the feeds of Democrats, who swoon without even fully knowing why they keep seeing videos of this telegenic and articulate young senator in their “For You” folder or their Instagram Reels.”

They're not only doing this type of rehearsed content play on the campaign trail in Georgia, either. Last week, after President Trump mocked Ossoff with a new nickname, paparazzi outlet TMZ caught the senator for a seemingly impromptu interview outside the U.S. Capitol. If I were a betting man, I would argue that moment was staged too: Ossoff pulled up to the exact spot where the reporter was standing, slowly walked over (without a staffer on hand) while buttoning his jacket, and delivered a perfectly crafted response to the reporter's question.

The whole thing really is a masterclass in political communications, and Ossoff deserves a lot of credit for his discipline. 

To play devil’s advocate, however, the problem with this strategy is that the Perfectly-Optimized, Almost-Robotic Ossoff hasn't proven he can turn the switch off. He almost never seems like he's speaking off the cuff, and he rarely displays any casual human banter on camera. Like Martin noted, he “speaks in paragraphs,” and every clip seemingly lands because his team engineered it to land, which is exactly the issue. When a politician's best moments all arrive pre-planned, voters and the reporters covering them will start to wonder what he sounds like when the advance team isn't carefully picking the camera angle. Eventually, people will get bored. 

Democrats seem to care about ~authenticity~ far more in 2026 than they did during the Obama years or even when Ossoff was first elected. The politicians often breaking through in the second Trump era do so, in part, by seeming unfiltered. Trump joked and rambled for hours on Rogan, Flagrant, and Bussin’ with the Boys and his supporters loved him more for it. Zohran Mamdani built a following on selfie-cam monologues and creator collabs, many of which look like he filmed them between subway stops. Gavin Newsom is hosting his own hour-long podcast every week, and AOC has long been the master of the art of informal Instagram live streams. Younger Democrats may now spend their time watching people like Hasan Piker reacting live for six hours straight, and older Democrats are watching candidates shoot the shit with Tim Miller on the Bulwark (When Ossoff recently appeared with Miller, he seemed like The Bulwark host was giving him a root canal).

The point is, candidates generally compete in the attention war nowadays by going long and somewhat unrehearsed, and Ossoff is currently running a gorgeous but hermetically sealed 2012-era production in the middle of all of it. Currently leading in the polls, he doesn’t have much incentive to change anything — and if that style of politics pays off for him this November, I wouldn't expect anything to change in a presidential campaign either.

Analyzing the podcast charts for Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, here are the top political and political-adjacent shows on each platform, as of June 22, 2026. As always, the partisan color categorization is my (subjective!) call, shoot me an email if you disagree.