00:00John Ossoff needs more than viral videos to help him flip a Senate seat in Georgia,
00:05a tough battleground state. But voters I talked to in Georgia seem to think he has it.
00:11I come from a very rural town and there's not a lot of health care opportunities,
00:15especially for like veterans and older people. I'm here because he's supporting
00:21everybody, the entire state. Ossoff is the only Democratic senator defending a seat in a state
00:26Trump won in 2024. Yet he is leading in the polls and dominating in fundraising. Here in Athens,
00:32Georgia, the home district of Ossoff's Republican rival, the senator recently spoke to a crowd with
00:38a speech that was loaded with his signature barbs. See, while the world earns and you pay more for
00:44everything, your tax dollars become the royal family's wealth. Because it pays to be a Trump.
00:53Especially when the whole world knows daddy's a crow.
00:57But Ossoff is good at the offscreen parts of his job, too. Several voters I spoke with
01:04mentioned his work providing disaster assistance, helping farmers and advocating for rural hospitals.
01:11My family's been lifelong Democrats, especially when Senator Ossoff launched his investigation
01:14into the state of foster care in Georgia, rallying behind the senator and all of his sort of efforts
01:19that go beyond the issues that are innately political and helping people, standing up for
01:24people that don't have a voice, like foster kids, like people in South Georgia because health care is
01:29getting cut. Athens is a blue city in a rural red sea. But Georgia is also becoming a bit of
01:35a national
01:35bellwether. People I spoke to here said they want a Congress that pays attention to their concerns
01:41and does its job. These are times when people are trying to figure out whether politicians
01:48actually even care about us. Right? So that is a real Achilles heel for Mike Collins to be the
01:55poster child. He has told us he doesn't care about his constituents. He cares about Trump and
02:00getting a higher office. In decades of covering politics, I've rarely seen simply helping constituents
02:06like Ossoff does get this much attention. Politicians today are conditioned to just focus on grabbing
02:14headlines more than on developing the skills to do the job. But Ossoff has managed to do both.
02:21It's a powerful combination and it could not only be Ossoff's path to reelection, but the answer
02:27Washington needs to get results.
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