Once vulnerable, Jon Ossoff seeks a commanding win over Mike Collins
CARTERSVILLE — It was part pep talk, part therapy session.
Not long after Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins finished a sunny stump speech on his U.S. Senate bid, the focus of a Bartow County GOP gathering turned to the more unsettling subject of slumping conservative turnout.
State Rep. Matthew Gambill urged activists to get their friends and families to the polls, insisting Republicans could still win “if you do your job.” State Rep. Mitchell Scoggins implored the crowd not to lose confidence.
“Remember this: Georgia is not a blue state or a purple state,” he said. “If we just go vote, we’re solid red.”
With Election Day on Tuesday, the U.S. Senate race has taken a turn few imagined when the campaign began.
Ossoff has gone from the nation’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbent to a rising national party figure drawing serious talk of a 2028 presidential bid.
Collins is struggling to convince fellow Republicans that he has a chance, telling voters Ossoff has only national ambitions on his mind.
“All he cares about is using us as a platform,” Collins said of Ossoff, who has firmly rejected such 2028 talk. “My gosh, come Nov. 3, I’ll tell y’all one thing: The people of the state of Georgia are going to reject that guy, and we’re going to send him back to wherever he came from.”
His fight is growing increasingly lonely.
National GOP groups long ago shifted money once earmarked for defeating Ossoff to other races. Many of Collins’ own party leaders do not bring up his name. When Republican Rick Jackson holds rallies around the state in his bid for governor, Collins isn’t just absent from the stage. He’s not mentioned at all.
Donors have largely stayed away, too. Ossoff reported roughly $26 million in the bank heading into the final stretch. Collins barely had $1 million.
Yet Ossoff isn’t easing up. He doesn’t just want to beat Collins. He wants to rout him.
The Democrat wants to score a victory so thorough it will boost nominee for governor Keisha Lance Bottoms and other Democrats in tighter statewide races, strengthen his party’s foothold in Georgia and cement his own national standing.
His closing message is an unsparing indictment of his opponent, who is facing a House Ethics Committee probe and an avalanche of revelations about white nationalists in his inner circle.
“Mike Collins is a known bigot under federal investigation for the illegal misuse of tax dollars, surrounded at work and at home by white nationalists and neo-Nazis, and unfit for any elected office in the United States,” Ossoff said at a Wednesday rally.
Collins has dismissed the ethics probe as a “nothing burger” and condemned antisemitism.
A race transformed
The campaign began in the shadow of Trump’s 2024 victory, dominated by two towering Georgia figures.
The first was Ossoff, who moved quickly to build a massive reelection operation, overhaul the state Democratic Party and raise the money to survive another brutal election cycle.
The other was Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican who had defeated Stacey Abrams twice and was universally considered the GOP’s most formidable potential challenger.
But Kemp instead recruited former football coach Derek Dooley, wagering that a political outsider could appeal to independents and moderate voters who might otherwise back Ossoff.
The governor spent months warning Republicans that Collins, a combative MAGA loyalist bogged down by a history of controversies, couldn’t defeat Ossoff in a general election.
But Republican primary voters had other ideas.
Buoyed by Trump’s endorsement, Collins defeated Dooley in a June runoff and delivered a stinging setback to Kemp and his political operation.
Now Kemp is spending the campaign’s closing days crisscrossing Georgia with Jackson, paying little heed to the Senate contest.
Collins has staked his closing argument on a gamble that unwavering loyalty to Trump will energize enough Republicans who don’t often vote in midterm elections to eke out a victory in this one.
He proudly calls himself “MAGA Mike,” falsely insists Trump “won” the 2020 election and has embraced every part of the president’s agenda, from the war against Iran that most Georgians oppose to sweeping tariffs that Democrats blame for higher prices.
Ossoff has worked to turn that loyalty into a liability. He routinely accuses Collins of a “pathetic childlike devotion to Donald Trump” and tells crowds he “sold out our state” as a rubber stamp for the president.
Unable to match Ossoff’s sprawling campaign operation or keep pace with the onslaught of Democratic ads, Collins is instead keeping a grueling campaign schedule in the race’s closing days.
He’s crisscrossing the state appearing mostly at local GOP meetings and civic gatherings rather than staging rallies of his own, telling voters he’s “outworking” his opponent with multiple stops a day.
In Cartersville, he urged Republican activists gathered at a local college for their monthly meeting not to be discouraged by his daunting double-digit deficit in some polls. He insists the race is far closer.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “this thing is neck and neck.”
