by Craig Nelson, The Current
June 27, 2026
There was no mistaking the message that incumbent U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms were seeking to drive home at a rally on Saturday in Savannah, not only to the thousand or so supporters gathered in a hall on a sweltering day in late June but to voters across the state.
Signs reading “United for Georgia” were everywhere, eclipsing the “Ossoff for Senate” and “Bottoms for Governor” placards. The two Democrats that top their party’s ticket this fall embraced at rally’s end and held their clasped hands high before the adoring crowd. The meaning of the gestures was plain: They have decided they cannot win in November without the public support of the other.
The rally, held at the Metal Building at Trustees’ Garden, was an hourlong, made-for-social-media event and a dose of electioneering in 2026. Campaign videographers circled around the speaker’s rostrum. Producers in earphones coached the sign-waving crowd directly behind the podium, which served as a colorful backdrop for the videos and soundbites that would be posted before day’s end.
‘Slick Rick’
For Ossoff and Bottoms, it was their first joint rally since state Republicans chose their candidates for U.S. Senate and governor in the primary runoffs earlier this month. With their opponents decided — Mike Collins in Ossoff’s case and Rick Jackson’s in Bottoms’ — the verbal knives were unleashed.
Bottoms recounted the economic hardships of her youth and the sacrifices made by her “can’t never could” mother to boost her up the ladder of educational, professional and political success — a narrative she apparently hopes will offset Jackson’s “foster-care-to-billionaire” saga.
“Slick Rick,” she claimed, has built his healthcare empire on $1 billion in no-bid, state contracts and mocked him for promising if elected to be Donald Trump “with a southern accent.”
“Rick Jackson has been making a profit off the people of Georgia. His fortune is filled in part with your tax dollars,” she said.
‘Toys out the stroller’
His shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows in his trademark style, Ossoff set biography aside. He opted instead for what has become a staple of his campaign speeches: commentary on news out of the Trump administration that mimics the skewering the president receives on late-night television (“Now, Savannah, I don’t know if you saw the mess in Washington last week . . .”)
Trump, Ossoff said, “was so humiliated in [the Strait of] Hormuz, he threw his toys out the stroller and refused to sign the affordable housing bill. That’s after he gave some felon donor a no-bid contract for the reflecting pool, and it filled up with algae, which for some reason required the deployment of the National Guard.”
He went on to bash Trump for sending his son-in-law “prince” Jared Kushner to “cosplay” as a negotiator in the Middle East “despite zero qualifications” and inspiring a so-called color revolution in Albania over his plans to build a luxury resort there.
It wasn’t all satire. In his measured, sometimes plodding, cadence, Ossoff’s a scold, too.
He called Collins as a “bigot congressman” and election denier (“To this day, Mike Collins defends that violent attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.”)
And as Collins’ Republican primary opponents predicted, criticized him for failing to fire “degenerate political staffer” Brandon Phillips after multiple offenses until finally doing so in May after Philipps posted a tweet mocking a rape victim.
‘Mutually beneficial’
What the partnership between Ossoff and Bottoms means in practical terms isn’t clear. Neither candidate has indicated how many joint rallies are planned as the general election unfolds.
However it evolves, the alliance is “mutually beneficial,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University.
In a state where Republicans slightly outnumber Democrats, voter turnout is crucial, not only in Democratic areas of the state but in Republican-dominated areas of the state, too, Gillespie noted.
“While Senator Ossoff is popular in his own right among Black Democrats, being able to run alongside an African American woman candidate also does give him some cache” in the effort to turn out that vote, she said.
Bottoms, for her part, may benefit from Ossoff’s campaign war chest, Gillespie said.
The former Atlanta mayor who, as of April 30, had $62,000 in cash on hand, faces a general election opponent in Jackson who spent at least $107 million dollars in the primary. As of April 29, Ossoff reported more than $32.5 million in cash on hand, according to his submissions to the Federal Election Commission.
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