Jon Ossoff stands firm on affordability in the face of GOP attacks

In the days leading up to the Nov. 8 agreement eight moderate Senate Democrats made with Republicans to end the government shutdown after 40 days of party unity, much speculation centered on one senator in particular. According to the Wall Street Journal, Senate Republicans saw Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, who is widely acknowledged as the most vulnerable Senate Democrat up for reelection in 2026, as among the most likely to fold. 

Rumors on social media about his possible capitulation chilled Democrats, including one of Ossoff’s own constituents, Teresa Acosta of Dunwoody, Georgia, who has depended on Affordable Care Act subsidies to provide health care coverage for her family. Democrats were united: No reopening the government without extending the tax credits. She didn’t want her senator to cave.

As it turned out, Acosta and Democrats had nothing to fear. When the deal was announced to a tsunami of vitriol from the Democratic rank-and-file, who were angry that all the eight senators had extracted from Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., was a word-of-mouth promise to allow a vote on extending subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, Ossoff’s name was nowhere to be found.

In retrospect, that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The senator had long telegraphed, even before it became Democrats’ rallying cry for the length of the shutdown, that health care subsidies were his red line. Then again, Democrats are famous for having red lines — and for allowing Republicans to breach them, time and again, with little to no consequence. 

But this one was real. During the ramp-up to the passage of President Donald Trump’s beloved One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, Ossoff offered an amendment to extend those very ACA tax credits. “Instead of adding trillions to the debt in tax cuts for the rich while destroying Medicaid and renewable energy, I propose we help our constituents afford health insurance,” he said in remarks on the Senate floor. “If we allow Affordable Care Act benefits to expire — as this bill would — more than a million Georgians will pay more for health insurance next year… A vote against this amendment is a vote to gut the Affordable Care Act and raise health insurance premiums.”

Senate Republicans blocked the amendment and passed the bill.

In remarks and events throughout the summer, Ossoff continued to sound the alarm, including during a rousing speech in Savannah where he said, “It turns out that when Donald Trump said he was gonna fight for working-class Americans, what he really meant was he was gonna take away your health care to cut taxes for the rich.”

Even with rhetoric and actions like these, as the Senate’s most endangered Democrat, it would have been easy for Ossoff to join his colleagues in folding and to justify it, as they did, that the shutdown was simply too painful for his constituents and the American people. He refused.

One can make an argument that such a move would have made electoral sense. Unlike the eight senators, all of whom are either not up for reelection in 2026 or are retiring, Ossoff is facing a tight race in a state that Joe Biden narrowly carried in 2020 and Kamala Harris lost four years later. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter has rated it as a toss-up.

Despite the fact that it has two Democratic senators, including Rev. Raphael Warnock, Georgia remains a state that is only recently emerging as purple. There’s still a lot of red, particularly in its rural areas, and Ossoff could well have benefited from being seen as moving to the center and banking some moderate and bipartisan credibility with GOP voters — 20% of whom, according to a surprising finding in a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, strongly or somewhat approve of the senator’s job performance.

But at what cost? Caving on the ACA subsidies would have infuriated his Democratic base — and could have even netted him a primary challenger from the left. More importantly, it would have painted Ossoff as yet another inauthentic Democrat, willing to talk a big game about health care and affordability and being on the side of the working class, while selling them out when the going got tough. 

For Ossoff, the vote against ending the shutdown had another major upside: It simply reflected what he believed. In a statement to Salon, the senator pointed to the bleak reality facing his constituents. “Premiums are set to double for 1.4 million Georgians and nearly half a million Georgians could lose health insurance altogether,” he said. “With health care votes ahead, the question is whether Republicans in Congress will join us to prevent catastrophic increases in health insurance premiums.”

One of those Georgians is Acosta, a 49-year-old single mother of three teenagers, one of whom has Type 1 diabetes and requires daily medication. According to Acosta, her family’s premiums are set to skyrocket by 620% — or around $450 a month — in 2026 after the subsidies expire. “It’s not something I can afford,” she said.

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After she lost her job at a nonprofit due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Acosta started a catering business that sustained her family. “It was my passion,” she explained. With the help of the subsidies, Acosta was able to shift her family from Medicaid to the ACA, a move that “basically saved us from pretty bad circumstances.”

That changed when Trump’s so-called “big beautiful bill” passed. A former Republican who left the party in 2015 due its rightward swing and embrace of Trump, Acosta said she knew she needed to prepare for the spike in premiums. Already feeling financial pressure in her catering business due to increasing food costs, which she attributed to the president’s erratic tariffs, she decided to close the doors. 

“I cried packing every single box,” Acosta said. “It was devastating…You hear the words ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ and that became a reality for me. It wasn’t just words on an old piece of paper. It was something I was actually achieving, and that’s been taken away.”

Acosta recently found a part-time job working for a food bank and hopes to move into a full-time job in the new year. But even those plans are precarious and dependent on the nonprofit’s funding.

Ossoff’s stand on the ACA “meant the world to me,” she said. Acosta pointed to what she called the senator’s “dedication” during the shutdown in holding the line against Republicans and “speaking out.”

But with the Senate campaign already heating up in the wake of this month’s off-year elections, the GOP is already hammering Ossoff for his shutdown stand. “Jon Ossoff voted 15 times to shut down the government,” said Nick Puglia, who serves as regional press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Georgians won’t forget that Ossoff made needy families go hungry, forced essential workers to work without pay, and ripped paychecks away from service members all to give free healthcare to illegals.”

On Nov. 10, Rep. Mike Collins, a candidate in the GOP primary, released an outrageous deepfake digital ad using Ossoff’s official Senate portrait. Through artificial intelligence technology, the senator comes to life and boasts about keeping the government shut down. “They say it’ll hurt farmers but I wouldn’t know, I’ve only seen a farm on Instagram,” the fake Ossoff says. “And SNAP recipients? Don’t think they’re at my New York and California fundraisers, so who cares?”

When it was released, the ad garnered widespread criticism, including from Eric Von Haessler, a conservative talk radio host in Atlanta who is no fan of Ossoff. Collins, Von Haessler said, was “dirtbag number one.” The congressman was unashamed; his campaign doubled down and said it was “embrac[ing] the future of digital campaigning.”

“Instead of trying to deceive voters with deepfake videos, low-integrity Congressman Mike Collins should explain why he supports doubling Georgians’ health insurance premiums,” said Democratic Party of Georgia senior communications adviser Devon Cruz. Ossoff, who has long raised concerns about deepfakes, has pledged to not resort to such tricks.

Instead, it’s clear he’s comfortable letting his record — and his stand against Republican cruelty — speak for itself.