Collins trails Ossoff in Georgia Senate race as family and staff controversies surface

Fundraising gap looms large as GOP strategists flag downballot risk

Republican Rep. Mike Collins trails Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff by seven points in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race, according to an August InsiderAdvantage poll that found the incumbent leading 50% to 43%, with 7% undecided. The poll’s margin of error was 3.46 percentage points.

Collins’s campaign launched last year with an early stumble: the official “war room” account on X posted a campaign video that ended with the on-screen slogan “Georiga, Let’s Ride.” From that widely mocked spelling mistake onward, the campaign has faced a string of setbacks that have reshaped what was once considered a competitive race.

“With lackluster fundraising, ongoing scandals with staffers and family,” Collins is “really having difficulty breaking through,” said Jordan Fuchs, a longtime Georgia GOP strategist who worked closely with Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Collins spokesman Meyer Siegfried disputed the characterization, saying Collins has been closing the gap and that recent polls showed him down by single digits. “There are repeated public polls that show the race moving in Mike’s direction, so to report anything otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of reality,” Siegfried said.

Several of the most widely covered headlines have involved people close to the candidate. In July, CNN reported that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, had shared posts promoting antisemitic and white nationalist views, including comments that all Muslims should be deported. According to voter and property records reviewed by the Journal, Scheer lives on property owned by Collins. Collins has said Scheer has no role in his campaign and condemned the comments.

Renewed attention also fell on Preston Parra, a former Collins House intern, who posted images on his X account showing himself posing in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. Parra said in an interview that the photo was out of context and reporters were “missing the whole artistic visionary aspect of it all.” Collins said Parra is not affiliated with his campaign and that such views “are absolutely abhorrent and they don’t represent my values or the values of our country.”

Collins also faces ethics questions. The House Ethics Committee released a report in January from the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Conduct that found “substantial reason to believe” that Collins used congressional resources for unauthorized purposes, alleging that his chief of staff hired an intern for a no-show job. Collins has called the allegations meritless.

Ossoff, who has built a national profile by criticizing President Trump, has publicly criticized Collins over the controversies. “We have a sitting member of Congress and a candidate for the United States Senate with extensive ties to white nationalism and neo-Nazi ideology,” Ossoff said at one press conference.

Ossoff raised roughly 13 times what Collins raised over comparable periods. As of June 30, Ossoff’s campaign had raised about $98 million this term, with $77.3 million since the start of 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Collins has raised $7.4 million since last year. One Nation, a GOP-aligned advocacy group backed by the Senate Leadership Fund, said it planned to spend $15 million targeting Ossoff. Earlier this year, the Senate Leadership Fund pledged to spend $44 million on the race, and One Nation said it had begun airing television advertisements against Ossoff with those committed funds.

Trump waited until two days before a June runoff to endorse Collins over former football coach Derek Dooley, who had been backed by Gov. Brian Kemp. “He is a WARRIOR and WINNER!” Trump declared in a Truth Social post. At a July speech in Marietta, Ga., Trump praised Collins as “certainly one of the most highly respected congressmen, Republican or Democrat, in Washington” and called Ossoff “Pee Wee Herman.” Prominent Republicans, including Kemp, had declined to run against Ossoff in the primary.

In a recent speech in Emerson, Ga., Collins pushed back against Ossoff’s national profile. “Jon Ossoff is about as far from Georgia as you can get. He’s California’s third U.S. senator,” Collins said.

GOP strategists have grown increasingly concerned that a weak showing by Collins could weigh on the rest of the Georgia ticket. One strategist told the Journal that some Republican leaders already consider the Collins campaign lost. Another said GOP leaders worry that a Collins loss of more than six points could drag down other Republican candidates, since most voters cast ballots along party lines.

“There’s a general concern that Collins isn’t the right candidate or running the right campaign to defeat Ossoff,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of Inside Elections, a political analysis and research firm that tracks races across the country.

The concern extends to other races on the November ballot. Polls show the governor’s race tight, with Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms aiming to become the first Democrat elected to the post since 1998. Democrats are also pushing a long-shot effort to take the GOP-led state House of Representatives, which Republicans have controlled since 2005. Collins’s weak showing has sparked alarm among GOP pollsters and strategists that his run could affect contests for offices ranging from attorney general to insurance commissioner.

Collins is the son of the late Mac Collins, a longtime congressman who worked in the trucking industry and died in 2018. Mike Collins followed in his father’s footsteps, working in trucking before winning his House seat in 2022. In a 2022 campaign commercial, Collins falsely claimed Trump had won the 2020 election in Georgia and used a rifle to shoot a trash can labeled “voting machine.”