Ossoff raised more than $109 million as Collins sought Republican support
Georgia voters are deciding Tuesday whether to return Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate against Republican Rep. Mike Collins. Ossoff, 39, is seeking reelection in a battleground state, and his campaign has been framed by relentless criticism of President Donald Trump and of Trump’s choice of Collins as the Republican nominee. Collins won Trump’s backing during a drawn-out Republican primary earlier this year, but the party soon lost hope that he could defeat Ossoff, who was originally believed to be the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in any Senate race this year.
Collins already faced the challenge of restitching the Republican coalition. Senate leaders wanted outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to run for the seat. Kemp declined and instead recruited and backed former football coach Derek Dooley. Collins defeated Dooley in a June runoff, but only after Kemp spent weeks telling Republican voters that Collins could not win in November. Kemp did not endorse Collins until September.
Republican organizations shifted money away from Georgia in recent months, while Ossoff raised more than $109 million to lead all Senate candidates nationally. Ossoff’s fundraising outpaced Collins’s by more than 10-to-1, and the senator’s sweeping rhetoric and attacks on Trump garnered national attention and fueled that effort.
Ossoff has repeatedly tagged Collins as a “bigot” who “brought dishonor to our state,” in part for having aides and a son-in-law who have met with white supremacists and circulated white nationalist propaganda online. Ossoff has also said Collins was elected to Congress while echoing the president’s 2020 election lies, and has described Collins’s loyalty to Trump as a “pathetic, childlike devotion to Donald Trump.” When asked, Collins publicly condemned white supremacy and antisemitism and said he had fired the former staffers. The controversy dogged him enough that he abruptly walked away from one campaign news conference when pressed about it.
Ossoff built his reelection pitch as a fight against broad political corruption, focusing on Trump and the first family’s dramatic increase in wealth since the president’s return to the White House. He has tagged Trump “a failed president” profiting from the Oval Office and exacerbating distrust in government. “It’s not just the money that’s corrupted our politics,” Ossoff said. “It is a moral corruption, the cynical indifference of powerful people.” Trump won Georgia in the 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns, and his loss there in 2020 has long been central to his false claims about voter fraud.
Collins has emphasized his private-sector experience as the owner of a trucking company started by his father, who was also a congressman. He has defended his support for Trump’s agenda, including the Iran war, tariffs and Republicans’ tax legislation, and he insists Ossoff is the extremist in the contest. He blames Ossoff for lax border security and inflation. “My opponent is a radical, and he has left our state less safe, more expensive, and worse off,” Collins said. “I’ll deliver. I’ll fight for our state, not against it.”
Both men have touted their work on Capitol Hill, but their pitches differ. Collins leans heavily on his sponsorship of the Laken Riley Act, the 2025 law requiring that immigrants who are in the country illegally be detained when accused of certain crimes. It is named for a Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley, who was killed in 2024 by a Venezuelan man in the U.S. illegally. Ossoff points to his Senate work helping constituents, from hurricane relief and infrastructure projects to assisting local governments and individual citizens trying to navigate federal programs, and he has received endorsements from several local Republican officials.
Ossoff described the race as part of a broader political wave. “A wave is building,” he told supporters ahead of Election Day, “the kind of wave that comes once a generation when people have been pushed too far, and they decide all together, all at once, to say enough is enough.”
If Ossoff wins, the result would intensify chatter that he may run for the White House in 2028, even though he has denied interest and dismisses the speculation. He has told Georgia voters they can send a national message. Victory, he said, would mean “we elected those who understood the moment and had the will to meet it.”