JonOssoff.com: Damaging to Jon Ossoff Campaign?


Jon Ossoff is a Democratic Party politician running for United States Senate in one of two run-off elections in the state of Georgia. Mr. Ossoff uses the short ElectJon.com domain name for his campaign website. This is a solid call to action domain name for his campaign, but I do not believe it is the ideal domain name for him. I believe the matching JonOssoff.com domain name would be better. Unfortunately, someone beat Mr. Ossoff to the punch, and even more unfortunate for his campaign, it is being used against him by a rival political organization:

If you visit JonOssoff.com, as someone might do to learn more about Mr. Ossoff, the website is filled with negative information about Mr. Ossoff and his political record. On the bottom of the website, there is a note that says, “PAID FOR BY NRSC. NOT AUTHORIZED BY ANY CANDIDATE OR CANDIDATE’S COMMITTEE. WWW.NRSC.ORG.” NRSC stands for National Republican Senatorial Committee, an “organization solely devoted to strengthening the Republican Senate Majority and electing Republicans to the United States Senate.”

The Whois record for JonOssoff.com is private, so it is unclear who actually owns the domain name. The domain name was created in February of 2017, and its Whois record has been private since then.

According to a Wikipedia entry for Mr. Ossoff, this is his second time running for US Senate in Georgia – “Ossoff announced his candidacy for this special election on January 5, 2017.” Considering the domain name seems to have been available for Mr. Ossoff to register when he ran for office in the 2017 special election, it seems like a good lesson for other politicians and people in the public eye to consider. If there is an opportunity to buy a first and last name .com domain name – take it. Once someone else has it, they can pretty much use it how they wish, particularly if their usage is protected by their First Amendment rights.

In the 2017 special election, Mr. Ossoff lost by around 10,000 votes (nearly 4% of the vote). While the loss was almost certainly unrelated to not having the JonOssoff.com domain name, not owning it certainly did him no favors.

All things considered, ElectJon.com is a pretty decent domain name for Mr. Ossoff. However, having to compete against his full name .com domain name in an election is not great and could be damaging to his campaign. In addition, because a domain name is so inexpensive, not registering JonOssoff.com in 2017 could have negative implications for future elections as well.

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Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

8 COMMENTS

  1. Maybe it will teach Politicians, CEO’s and many others that you just don’t need A domain, you need a stockpile of strategiclly defensive AND Offensive domains.

    Time sensitive. Should have been done 20 years ago.

    But got to love it when they screw up!

    This one was HUGE!

    • Ha! I’m in my moving truck to Georgia at this very moment . . . so I can vote . . . to be sure he doesn’t win the race.

      Trump’s worse than a lying, dishonest, self-centered buffoon, but what we don’t need is for one party to control all three branches of the gov.

      When change would be bad . . . gridlock is good.

      Very good.

      • I hope you haven’t been only watching those “main stream media”. It’s Biden who has been lying, not Trump.

        Biden wrongfully claimed that Trump has no detailed plan of vaccine rollout. Then on 6th, HHS Secretary Alex Azar debunked that claim of Biden’s and also said “that’s just nonsense”.

        It’s time for you to subscribe to some truthful news channels such as Newsmax, NTD, Sky News Australia, etc.

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