Re-elected to the Georgia Senate this week, Jon Ossoff’s grandparents hailed from Brisbane and Melbourne. The 39-year-old is now a frontrunner to be the Democratic candidate in the 2028 Presidential election.
When Jon Ossoff was sworn in as a U.S. Congressman in January 2021, the 33-year-old became the Senate’s youngest member. This week, Ossoff secured a second term, advancing the straight-talking, charismatic Atlanta-born politician’s chances of becoming the next Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency.
While he has denied he is interested in the top job, prediction market Kalshi is reporting that not only is Ossoff the favourite to win the Democratic nomination, but also that current data projects the boundary-pushing senator will win the Presidential election in 2028.
In the U.S., much of the reporting around Ossoff highlights his father’s European immigrant roots, but the senator’s identity also stretches across the Pacific to Australia.
Ossoff’s maternal heritage traces to Sydney, where his mother, Heather Fenton, was born and raised. At 23, Fenton immigrated to the U.S. and eventually married publisher Richard Ossoff. The couple raised their only son, Jon, in Georgia.
“My nana was from Brisbane,” Ossoff told a media outlet in July of this year. “My grandfather, or granddad, was from Footscray.”
The U.S. Senator has visited Australia multiple times, according to reports, and once held an Australian passport, though it has since lapsed.
“There is a laid-back culture in Australia,” Ossoff told a reporter when asked about his mother’s homeland. “We get a little bit wound up sometimes over here.”
The senator describes his immigrant mum, the first in her family to graduate from university, as an accomplished advocate for the advancement of American women.
Ossoff’s maternal political legacy
Within a decade of leaving Australia, Fenton was working as a partner at a career consulting firm in Atlanta. She took on an International Business Fellowship at the London Business School in 1988 and then started a management consulting firm.
After retiring from The Fenton Group, the Sydney-born executive became a member of the Australia-American Chamber of Commerce and moved into the political realm.
Fenton was honoured as a Trailblazer in 2024 for her work co-founding the NewPowerPAC, a group working to bring more women into politics in Georgia. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as working as a community activist and advocate from 2000 to now.
“The brilliant & unstoppable Heather Fenton came to America as an immigrant when she was 23. She’s been getting up to Good Trouble ever since!” Ossoff wrote on social media in 2020.
Despite his international ties, Ossoff remains grounded in Georgia. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Dr Alisha Kramer, an obstetrician-gynaecologist, and their two children.
Before entering politics, Ossoff graduated from Georgetown and completed a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. He was CEO of production company Insight TWI overseeing investigative stories on Uganda, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, until his congressional run in 2020.
In addition to breaking age barriers in the U.S. Senate, Ossoff also became the first Jewish senator elected by Georgia. His father, Richard Ossoff’s grandparents emigrated from Lithuania in the early 20th century.
“A century later, their great-grandson was elected to the US Senate,” Ossoff tweeted on inauguration day in 2021.
“Today, as I was sworn in, I held in my jacket pocket copies of the ships’ manifests recorded at Ellis Island when my great-grandfather Israel arrived in 1911 and my great-grandmother Annie arrived in 1913.”
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