Happy Friday and welcome back to another edition of Wake Up To Politics.
This morning, I have a mailbag issue for you, where I’ll be going deep on two great questions that were sent in by readers:
What is the strategy behind Jon Ossoff’s recent viral dig at Donald Trump?
After a string of outspent candidates have won Democratic primaries, does money really matter in American politics?
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Let’s dive in…
Q: Sen. Jon Ossoff has raised the stakes with sharply outspoken public criticism of Donald Trump. Gavin Newsom has done it more quietly in social media for considerably longer. Sen. Mark Kelly added his own tart comments in the past week as well. When Trump does it, it’s called firing up his base. Is this an orchestrated strategy turning up of the tone as the midterms approach and do you think it will fire up Democrats and perhaps Independents for this fall’s election?
Ossoff caused quite the firestorm this week when saying, at a rally on Saturday, that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” and simply “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
With Natalie?
That was a reference to Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant and close aide who was among the handful of officials who joined him on a secret flight out of Turkey last month, while Cabinet secretaries like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent remained on a decoy flight (the one that everyone thought Trump was on, but that he didn’t take due to an apparent threat from Iran).
Facing re-election in Georgia, Ossoff — a former documentarian — hasn’t been running a campaign so much as a content creation studio. Per Politico’s Jonathan Martin, Ossoff’s rallies are carefully staged to achieve maximum virality; before each one, his team “tips off a handful of progressive video clippers,” who are responsible for injecting his punchiest moments into Democratic social media feeds. To extend the wave of attention, he then generally appears on MS NOW “a few days after one of the weekend rallies, which ensures TV coverage of the clips and a cable news hit that itself can be clipped for the days ahead,” Martin wrote in June.
Sure enough, as of this writing, Ossoff’s “Natalie” comment has drawn 6.1 million views on X from a post by @Acyn and 10.9 million from a post by Aaron Rupar, two of the top “progressive video clippers” who spend their days finding (or, in this case, being directed towards) short-form videos to set the left-of-center Internet on fire. Then, like clockwork, there Ossoff was on MS NOW on Monday and Wednesday.
The remark had its intended effect. It’s not as though there had been no reporting about the uber-loyal Harp before Ossoff’s comment: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in the New York Times in 2024 that Harp was Trump’s main information conduit (known as his “human printer”) and that she had unnerved some Trump aides with a series of fawning letters she sent to the president. (“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one letter. “I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work,’” she wrote in another.) Then, Haberman and Swan reported in their recent book that Trump had described Harp as his only aide who loved him as much as his wife and children. (“All of you will go off and make money. She’ll never leave me,” he would tell aides, referring to Harp.)
But Harp was still relatively little-known until this week, when Ossoff’s comment — as well as the fierce White House pushback — led every news outlet on the planet to run with more Harp stories, from CNN interviewing her estranged brother to the Daily Beast obtaining her full letters to the president.
So, yes, this was very much orchestrated: to get attention, to get under Trump’s skin, to shine a spotlight on a story that was sure to make him uncomfortable. (No, no evidence has emerged to support the speculation that there is anything untoward about Trump’s relationship with Harp.)
What will be its electoral effect?
The questioner asked if comments like this might help fire up Independents. Probably not. Trump, of course, mounts these sorts of personal attacks all the time, but polls routinely show that it is among his least favorable qualities in the eyes of the electorate, especially Independent voters.
If anything, this sort of rhetoric can backfire electorally: one study earlier this year found that candidates lose roughly 2.5-3 percent of the vote for every standard deviation increase of character attacks they mount.
But those comments from Trump do fire up the Republican base, as the questioner said, and Ossoff’s remark is designed to do the same on the Democratic side. The goal isn’t votes, per se: in fact, many Independent voters in Georgia will probably never hear about this firestorm.
Yes, Google searches for Harp’s name have exploded over the past few days, but I would be willing to bet that these searches have mostly come from people who are fairly politically engaged, enough to tune into MS NOW or to watch news content on their social media feeds. I would guess that, nationally, Natalie Harp’s name ID is still probably very low.
But Ossoff’s goal with the comment was to reach exactly this slice of voters, since these are the voters who donate to political campaigns: small-dollar contributions to Ossoff’s campaign are sure to skyrocket after his viral moment. (Indeed, Ossoff was the top fundraiser on the donation platform ActBlue this week, although he has been high on that list this entire year.)
Then again, Ossoff doesn’t really need the money. As of June 30, he had raised $98 million this cycle, compared to just $7 million for his Republican rival Mike Collins. But these sorts of voters are also the type who vote in presidential primaries, and this might be Ossoff’s true goal.
Early 2028 primary polls show that the best way for a Democrat to increase their stock is to be seen as the candidate fighting most aggressively with Trump. The questioner mentioned Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, both of whom have been beneficiaries of this phenomenon. In the chart below, see how Newsom peaked last summer when he started trolling Trump on social media, while Kelly surged in November after Trump called for his execution:
Some of that energy is already starting to flow to Ossoff.
In March, when Saint Anselm College polled the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary field, Ossoff drew exactly 0%. By June, he had ticked up to 2%. When the university released a poll this week, conducted on Monday and Tuesday (right at the peak of Ossoff-Harp-mania), where was the Georgia senator? 12%, a 10-point increased that landed him tied (with Kelly) for third place.
Ossoff’s made-for-virality comment wasn’t designed to reach Georgia swing voters, many of whom probably didn’t see it and may not have even liked it. Or even Georgia Democrats, who are already lined up behind him. (96% said in a recent Fox poll that they planned to vote for Ossoff, while 86% said they are motivated to vote in November.) Instead, voters in the 2028 Democratic primary were likely his intended audience.
Mission accomplished, it appears.
Q: I would appreciate your take on the role of money in US political races these days. Some days I seem to get dozens of requests from political candidates across the country for contributions so obviously some still think money is critical. However, Nixon’s recent win in the Florida Senate primary race in spite of being heavily outspent and Peltola turning down Kamala Harris’s contribution seem counterintuitive. Are these examples just outliers or is something different going on in American political campaigning these days?
This is not just your imagination.