Jon Ossoff won a second term representing Georgia in the U.S. Senate, and prediction market Kalshi now has him as the favorite to win the 2028 presidential election, as reported by Forbes Australia. Ossoff, 39, became the Senate’s youngest member at 33 when he was sworn in in January 2021.
Ossoff beat Republican Mike Collins by 18 points, and the day after the election, Kalshi’s 2028 market gave him a 20 percent chance of winning the presidency, ahead of Vice President JD Vance at 16 percent, per the Daily Beast. Ossoff has denied any interest in running for president.
Much of the U.S. coverage of Ossoff’s background focuses on his father’s European immigrant roots, but his mother, Heather Fenton, was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. Fenton immigrated to the U.S. at 23, later marrying publisher Richard Ossoff and raising their only son, Jon, in Georgia.
His family tree reaches all the way to Australia
Ossoff has openly talked about his Australian connections, telling a media outlet in July, “My nana was from Brisbane.” He added, “My grandfather, or granddad, was from Footscray.”
He has reportedly visited Australia multiple times and once held an Australian passport, which has since lapsed. When asked about his mother’s homeland, he said, “There is a laid-back culture in Australia. We get a little bit wound up sometimes over here.”
Fenton was the first in her family to graduate from university, and within a decade of leaving Australia, she was a partner at a career consulting firm in Atlanta. She took an International Business Fellowship at the London Business School in 1988 before starting her own management consulting firm, The Fenton Group.
After retiring, Fenton joined the Australia-American Chamber of Commerce and moved into politics. She was honored as a Trailblazer in 2024 for co-founding NewPowerPAC, a group dedicated to bringing more women into politics in Georgia. Ossoff wrote about his mother on social media in 2020, “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, who pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Iran at a Senate hearing in July, lives in Atlanta with his wife, Dr. Alisha Kramer, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and their two children. He graduated from Georgetown, earned a master’s degree at the London School of Economics, and served as CEO of Insight TWI, a production company overseeing investigative stories in places like Uganda, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, until his 2020 Senate run.
Ossoff is also the first Jewish senator elected by Georgia. His father’s grandparents emigrated from Lithuania in the early 20th century, and on his inauguration day in 2021, Ossoff wrote, “A century later, their great-grandson was elected to the US Senate.”
“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,” he wrote, per the Forward.
Published: Nov 7, 2026 10:30 am