Rep.Mike Collins has won the Republican Senate runoff in Georgia, NBC News projects, setting up a race against Democratic Sen.
Jon Ossoff in one of the most competitive and important campaigns in the country.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Collins’ primary victory over former college football coach Derek Dooley is also a win for President Donald Trump, who endorsed the two-term congressman just a few days before Tuesday’s runoff election.Dooley, meanwhile, had been endorsed by Republican Gov.
Brian Kemp, who campaigned heavily for his candidate and argued the GOP needed a political outsider to defeat Ossoff.Collins and Dooley met in the runoff after no candidate won a majority of the primary vote on May 19.
As Republicans continued to battle for the nomination, Ossoff has been gearing up for a hotly contested race.He is the only Democratic senator running for re-election in a state Trump carried in 2024, and Georgia is a must-win state for Democrats, who are trying for a net gain of four seats to take over the Senate.
First elected to the House in 2022, Collins has pitched himself as a staunch Trump ally, saying in a recent debate that he is a “conservative work horse.” And he has already started to lay out his case against Ossoff, who was elected to the Senate in a runoff following the 2020 election.Ossoff “doesn’t represent us, he doesn’t reflect our state and represent the people or our values,” Collins said at a rally in Cumming, Georgia, on the eve of the primary runoff.He went on to say that Ossoff “has never had a real job in his life” and “is bought and paid for by those crazy folks in California and nut jobs in New York.”The senator has also begun to make his case against Collins, saying at a recent rally that Collins is “a congressman who’s only a congressman because his daddy was a congressman.” Collins has been a vocal Trump supporter, often noting o...