November 5, 2024

Jon Ossoff, who just won a key Senate seat in Georgia, is the youngest Democratic senator elected since Joe Biden in 1973

Senate #Senate

  • The Democrat Jon Ossoff has won his Georgia Senate runoff election against the Republican Sen. David Perdue, according to Decision Desk HQ and Insider.
  • This makes Ossoff, 33, the youngest Democratic senator-elect since President-elect Joe Biden in 1973.
  • Biden, now 78, won his first Senate seat in Delaware at the age of 30.
  • Ossoff is also the first millennial to be elected to the Senate. Previously, the youngest incumbent senator was the Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, 41.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
  • Jon Ossoff has become the youngest Democratic Party candidate to be elected as a US senator since President-elect Joe Biden in 1973.

    Early Wednesday morning, Ossoff, who is 33, unseated incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue in the second of two runoff elections in Georgia, according to Decision Desk HQ and Insider.

    Ossoff is also the first millennial to be elected to the Senate. Currently, the youngest sitting senator is the Republican Josh Hawley, who is 41.

    Ossoff previously worked as a US House staffer and is the CEO of an investigative-documentary company.

    A series of Ossoff’s old tweets unearthed by Slate, with subjects ranging from Grand Theft Auto to Lil Jon, attest to his credentials as a child of the internet age.

    “N00b 4 lyfe,” Ossoff tweeted in April 2014. The year before, he tweeted: “Shouldn’t autocorrect know ‘crunkest’ is a word?”

    The last time a Democratic candidate as young as Ossoff had won a Senate seat was in 1973, when a 30-year-old Joe Biden defeated the Republican Sen. J. Caleb Boggs to represent Delaware. Biden, now 78, will be inaugurated as the president of the United States on January 20.

    But the youngest-ever person elected to the Senate was John Henry Eaton, who was 28 years old when he was elected to represent Tennessee in November 1818.

    The minimum age to be elected as a US senator is 30, according the US Constitution, but officials apparently forgot to ask Eaton how old he was. 

    Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two Democratic candidates in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections, in Stonecrest, Georgia, on December 28, 2020. Paras Griffin/Getty Images

    Runoff elections were called in Georgia after none of the candidates in both Senate races secured more than 50% of the vote after voting in the November 3, 2020, general election — the threshold for victory in the state.

    The Rev. Raphael Warnock, the other Democrat running for a Senate seat in Georgia, defeated Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler on Wednesday, according to Decision Desk HQ and Insider’s projections.

    Warnock is the first Black man to be elected as a Georgia senator, and his victory brought an end to the 24-year losing streak for Democratic Party senate candidates in the state.

    In a Tuesday night speech — where he all but declared victory —  Warnock paid special thanks to his mother, Verlene.

    “The other day, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,” Warnock said.

    Wins for Warnock and Ossoff mean that the Democratic Party now controls both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

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