Georgia Senate split screen: Ossoff rallies a crowd as Collins counters nearby
ATHENS — A month before Georgians begin casting ballots, the state’s U.S. Senate race played out Sunday in an unusual split screen.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff joined gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms for a fiery rally before more than 1,400 supporters in Athens and urged them to harness “whole ballot energy” unity.
At the same time, Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins held a low-key event at a nearby hospital, where he joined a top Trump administration official to tout new federal healthcare spending.
The dueling events captured two very different arguments about the state of the race a month before the Oct. 13 early voting period begins.
Armed with an enormous fundraising advantage and persistent polling leads, Ossoff has moved into a new phase of his case against Collins.
After months focused on controversies surrounding the Republican and his political orbit, the Democrat increasingly wants voters to see a rival campaign that is falling apart in real time.
The shift was clear before Ossoff even took the stage at the Georgia Theatre, a storied downtown venue that served as an apt setting for a senator whose carefully choreographed rallies and viral clips have fueled 2028 speculation.
The backgrounder his campaign distributed to the dozens of reporters was titled: “Mike Collins’ collapsing campaign.”
Ossoff eagerly embraced the theme, deriding Collins as a “crumbling little bigot” presiding over “the sad spectacle of this collapsing campaign.”
He pointed to a string of GOP endorsements to make his case, including GOP mayors Julie Smith of Tifton and Scott James Matheson of Valdosta, as evidence of split-ticket support.
“The reason is Mike Collins is a known bigot under federal investigation for the illegal misuse of tax dollars, widely known for his poor character and low integrity, and unfit for any elected office in the United States,” he said.
He also tied the race to the economic fallout from President Donald Trump’s decision to send the U.S. to war with Iran, as diesel prices top $6 a gallon and the cost of some household goods rise.
“Last week the broken old man threw a two-day party in Texas while it costs more than ever to fill up your truck to stock your fridge and to power your home,” Ossoff said, mocking Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas last week.
“He promised to lower prices on day one, and he also promised peace,” the Democrat added. “Instead, the draft-dodging commander in chief builds a monument to himself while plunging us deeper into a war he doesn’t know how to end or how to win.”
The GOP case
Collins’ counterprogramming amounted to a rejection of that entire premise.
At the hospital event, where he was joined by Dr. Mehmet Oz of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Collins focused on roughly $219 million in new federal funding for Georgia healthcare through a Trump-backed tax-and-spending law.
The money is part of a broader $50 billion federal initiative aimed at strengthening rural health systems. Collins cast it as a lifeline for smaller communities.
“If you don’t have healthcare and you don’t have hospitals in the rural areas,” Collins said, “then you don’t attract businesses, and you don’t have a vitality for your town.”
He also brushed aside Ossoff’s portrayal of a campaign in decline, predicting voters would abandon the Democrat once they recognized the two rivals were “polar opposites.”
“At the end of the day, I know where they’re going to come down on Nov. 3,” he said. “They’re going to reject Jon Ossoff, and I’m going to be the next U.S. senator for the state of Georgia.”
Ossoff and other Democrats counter that Georgia’s refusal to fully expand Medicaid has left hundreds of thousands without coverage and prompted dozens of hospitals to shutter or cut services.
The rally also gave Bottoms a high-profile stage to sharpen her attacks on Republican Rick Jackson, particularly over the healthcare executive’s $1 billion no-bid contract with the state.
Bottoms demanded that Jackson disclose “every single investment” he holds, each nonprofit he controls and every contract he has with the state.
“And while you’re at it, Slick Rick, pledge to divest in every data center project that you are involved in,” she added.
Jackson’s campaign countered with a mobile billboard roaming the streets of Athens that featured a pair of his most recent ads and a new website targeting her term as Atlanta mayor.
“Keisha will never be able to escape her disastrous record as mayor. It will always follow her around and haunt her,” said Jackson spokesperson Garrison Douglas.
Trouble spot?
The warning signs in the Senate race about Collins aren’t coming only from Democrats.
When Senate Republican leaders gathered with donors during the party’s convention in Dallas last week, Politico reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune walked through races in Alaska, Maine and Michigan. Georgia didn’t come up.
The spending picture also worries Republicans.
National GOP groups vowed to pour roughly $60 million into the race, but far less has materialized so far. An Axios analysis of September advertising showed Republicans outspending Democrats in every competitive Senate race but Georgia’s. And Georgia wasn’t among the roughly $25 million in new ad buys announced this week by the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC.
“Even the SLF knows the GA Senate race is over and Ossoff is going to trounce Collins,” said Debbie Dooley, a longtime Republican activist and Collins critic. “They are spending money in races they can impact, not wasting money on Mike Collins.”
Collins and his allies have urged local donors and national groups not to write off the race, and they’ve pointed to new outside spending from a Trump-aligned super PAC that has reserved more than $2 million.
At his event Sunday, Collins cast the November choice as one of the starkest political contrasts in the nation.
“I mean, don’t take my word for anything. Look at our voting records,” Collins said. “Look at how we grew up, and look at how we are so different in who we are and our backgrounds.”
Ossoff was happy to make that contrast, too. Near the end of his nearly hourlong speech, he cast the election as a generational test of competing ideas about the nation’s future.
“This is what small men like Donald Trump and Mike Collins will never understand: that our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas and our aspirations and our care for one another.”