Days after Democrats’ midterm election victory, a weekend poll at the progressive Crooked Con conference placed Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff at the top of attendees’ preferred candidates for the 2028 presidential race. If chosen to lead the party, he would be the first Jew to lead it as the official presidential nominee. Ossoff won 38% support, significantly ahead of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who got 17%, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who received 14%.
3+The unofficial conference poll results highlighted a profound shift in sentiment among the liberal and progressive wing, which is looking to move beyond the figures who led the party in recent years. In second place was New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with seventeen percent support, followed by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg with fourteen percent.
All other candidates settled for particularly low single-digit numbers: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro each got four percent; Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Maryland Governor Wes Moore received three percent, while California Governor Gavin Newsom got just over two percent.
3+Harris’s collapse at the conference is striking given that in broad national polls published ahead of 2028 she still maintains a lead with close to twenty-two percent support, followed by Newsom, while Ossoff stands only in fifth place.
Ossoff’s surge among the progressive base in the conference stems largely from his impressive performance in the midterm Senate elections, where he confidently defeated his Republican opponent, Congressman Mike Collins, in a state considered one of the party’s most central and difficult battlegrounds.
3+His rhetorical skills and success in holding a seat in a state that previously leaned right have made him a focal point for many on the left. Despite his soaring chances, Ossoff made clear he has no interest whatsoever in running for president in 2028, and committed to serving a full six-year term in the Senate.
Moreover, despite the enthusiasm he generated at the progressive conference, Ossoff is not among the radical wing of his party: he has previously expressed clear opposition to the radical left’s flagship programs, including comprehensive government health insurance, the Green New Deal, calls to abolish the federal immigration and enforcement agency, and even opposed expanding the number of Supreme Court justices.
The Crooked Con conference poll results present a particularly mixed and sensitive picture for Jerusalem looking ahead to the 2028 presidential race. On one hand, Jon Ossoff’s sweeping victory and Kamala Harris’s collapse among liberal base activists have—at least for now—halted the rise of the most pronounced radical left representatives, led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who finished second.
3+Ossoff, a Jewish senator with family ties in Israel who is careful to sharply condemn the Hamas terror organization, holds relatively moderate intra-party positions and refuses to identify with the party’s most extreme currents. On the other hand, Ossoff’s rise does not signal a return to traditional, unqualified support for Israel: in recent years and in the last Senate election campaign, Ossoff led a tough line and showed willingness to restrict specific weapons shipments to the IDF, sharply criticized the conduct of fighting in Gaza, and claimed violations of international law, but stopped short of falsely accusing the Jewish state of committing a genocide in Gaza. The ‘Gaza genocide’ lie has become a running theme among Democrat hardliners and their supporters.
The overwhelming support he received proves that even when the Democratic Party base doesn’t choose the openly anti-Israel progressive wing, it gives priority to leadership that demands strict conditions on security aid, opposes right-wing policy in Israel, and adopts a far more critical approach than that of the veteran Democratic establishment.