Sorry, liberals. Jon Ossoff isn’t running for president.

Despite his insistence, the Ossoff-for-president chorus has only grown louder online with each campaign rally.

After an event in Augusta earlier this year, Washington pundits compared him to another young, up-and-coming Democratic senator who had a way with words: Barack Obama.

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein glowingly described Ossoff’s familiar, stop-and-go cadence as “calming, but also piercing.” Publisher Sarah Longwell praised him for attacking President Donald Trump directly with lines like, “He’s a crook and everybody knows it.”

And she said he has other assets working for him, too. “His dimple is working, that shirt is tight across his chest. He is as handsome as …” You get the picture.

Credit: Sarah Peacock for the AJC

Credit: Sarah Peacock for the AJC

More calls for “Ossoff 2028” came this week after he appeared with former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms at the Tabernacle on Sunday, where Ossoff’s lines were uploaded to Instagram faster than you can say “Turn on MS NOW.”

But the intensifying presidential predictions about Ossoff’s future on the national stage miss a few key facts.

First is the reality that Ossoff still has a seriously competitive U.S. Senate race to win in Georgia this year. Although Republicans are still fighting among themselves over who will face him, remember that U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock ran a near-perfect race in 2022 and finished a single point ahead of Republican Herschel Walker on Election Day.

Warnock eventually beat Walker by three points in a runoff, but that was after months of disastrous headlines for Walker, including revelations of three never-discussed children, two alleged abortions, a history of domestic abuse and a stump speech that occasionally veered into a debate with himself about the relative strength of werewolves vs. vampires.

Ossoff won’t get so lucky. Whether his opponent is U.S. Rep. Mike Collins or former football coach Derek Dooley, Ossoff’s team knows he’ll have an epic fight on his hands in a state that Trump won in 2024 and remains dominated by Republicans statewide.

A second reason to pump the brakes is actually reasons No. 2, 3 and 4 — namely, the senator’s wife, Alisha, an OB-GYN, and their two young daughters, who are 4 and, as of Saturday, 1.

While nearly all politicians say they want to spend more time with their families, Ossoff’s office blocks out “family time” for the boss and means it. He notably took an extended paternity leave last year when his second daughter was born over the grumblings of some Democrats in Washington. So don’t expect flights from Atlanta to Des Moines to “test the waters” any time soon.

The incredible irony of the national Ossoff swoon, especially the online piece of it, is that it comes after the 39-year-old freshman spent the first two-thirds of his Senate career wholly avoiding both the national spotlight and social media in all forms.

By the time I went to see him in Washington a year-and-a-half into the job, he had deleted all social media apps from his phone and only reinstalls them to post a single message before deleting them again.

“The endless distraction and antagonism of those social media platforms, and the way they deplete our attention spans, I think, are all hostile to good work,” he told me then.

Instead of jumping into national debates in his early years, Ossoff did the low-profile work of securing funds for small-town water systems or extensions of community airport runways. And if you were looking for him on television in those years, you’d be much more likely to find him talking to Chuck Williams on WRBL News 3 in Columbus than Jen Psaki in Washington.

Of course, now that he’s in-cycle and on the stump, much of that has changed. But not all of it. While Ossoff’s viral speeches may be key to his national visibility and fundraising, it will be the relationships he’s cultivated around the state over the five years before this that will make the difference between a one-point victory or a one-point loss in November.

The Democrat is strategic enough to know that. And he’s disciplined enough to follow the path he’s laid for himself entirely inside state lines.

The good news for Democrats around the country is they may eventually have not one but two Georgia Democrats to choose from for president someday between Ossoff and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock.

In a twist for same-state senators from the same party, Ossoff and Warnock actually like each other. When they campaigned as a tag team in 2020 and 2021, Warnock liked to call Ossoff his “brother from another mother.”

Warnock could even call Ossoff his vice president someday. Just not in 2028.