Jon Ossoff won Georgia by 18 points and overtook Newsom for 2028. Behind Vance, the Republican race is reopening.

Jon Ossoff was the only Democratic senator defending a seat in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024. He won it by 18 points, 59% to 41% over Republican congressman Mike Collins, and topped a Democratic sweep of Georgia: Keisha Lance Bottoms took the governorship, Democrats are projected to win every statewide office on the ballot, and the party is set to control the state House for the first time in 22 years. "I think it's safe to say that we are a blue state," Bottoms said on ABC's "This Week" on 8 November.

That result has done something no amount of early campaigning could. As of 9 November, traders put the chance that the 39-year-old Ossoff wins the 2028 Democratic nomination at 26%, up 12 points in a week and ahead of every rival. A year ago he barely featured in lists of contenders. In an October debate he said he had "zero interest" in running. Republicans, meanwhile, are arguing about why they lost, and the argument is reopening a field that looked settled.

A Georgia senator leapfrogs the field

Ossoff ran on affordability and healthcare, attacked Trump's tariffs and called for an end to the Iran war. On election night he said voters had rejected a "lame duck" president.

Traders now rank him clearly ahead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, flat at 17%, although an AtlasIntel poll of Democratic voters taken days before the election had the two less than a point apart.

The biggest loser is Gavin Newsom. Traders give the California governor a 6.6% chance of the nomination, down 8.9 points in a week and 4.1 in the past day, less than half his level before polling day. California's results did not obviously hurt him: voters rejected the billionaire tax he opposed and backed Proposition 42, a ban on new taxes on personal wealth that he endorsed. Two days after the election, he announced he would commute all of California's roughly 550 death sentences, a move the California District Attorneys Association condemned. How much of his fall reflects that, rather than money simply moving to Ossoff, is impossible to separate.

A general election that looks closer than the party numbers

The more striking reading is for November 2028. Traders give Ossoff a 17% chance of winning the presidency, up 7 points in a week and level with JD Vance at 18%. Yet Vance is more likely to be his party's nominee, at 32%, than Ossoff is to be his, at 26%. Read together, the prices imply traders see Ossoff as the stronger general-election candidate if both reach the ballot.

At the party level the picture is less close: traders give Democrats a 68% chance of winning the White House, up only 2 points in a week. A sweep worth at least 54 Senate seats and around 256 House seats, by CBS News projections, barely moved that price. What changed was traders' view of who leads the party.

Republicans reopen the question of who comes after Trump

On the Republican side the recriminations are public. Vance posted on election night that "the reason we lost is the war" with Iran. Trump, in a Truth Social post on 8 November, said the country "took a giant step back in History with the results of the last Election", and promised Republicans would be back. In a "60 Minutes" interview aired the same night, he conceded part of the case against his own immigration policy. Asked whether deportations went too far, he said: "I think it might be too tough, yeah," adding, "And I think ultimately that hurt me."

Vance remains the favourite for the nomination at 32%, but that is down 3.5 points in a week. Marco Rubio is steady at 21%. The mover is Ron DeSantis, at 15%, up from about 4% a week ago.

The Florida governor has positioned himself as the critic in the room. Before the election he called the Iran war a "big, big drag" on Republicans. Afterwards he called the result "close to an extinction-level event for Republicans, in many parts of the country", and argued that Florida, where Republicans held the governorship and a Senate seat by narrower margins than two years ago, "was able to hold the line". On 2028 he said: "Maybe someday. I don't know about '28. Maybe later."

Why the market could be wrong

Front-runners this far out rarely hold. Ossoff has not said he will run, and one landslide in one state is no test of a national primary electorate. A 26% chance still means roughly three in four that someone else is nominated. The strongest case for Vance is that midterm defeats for a president's party are the norm, not a verdict on his successor, and that a sitting vice-president starts any primary with an organisation no rival can match. DeSantis has not committed to running.

Ossoff did not run for president on 3 November. The result made him a contender anyway.