By Canadian Press

Georgia Republican Mike Collins joins field seeking to challenge Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in 2026

Jul 28, 2025 | 5:26 AM

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia Republican Mike Collins said Monday that he will join the field challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff in the state the GOP has named as their top target to add a Senate seat in 2026.

A second-term member of Congress from a district east of Atlanta, Collins becomes the newest top Republican to get into the primary race. U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter is already running, while state Insurance Commissioner John King dropped out. Also expected to run is former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley.

“Jon Ossoff must go,” Collins said in a July 8 video. “He certainly doesn’t represent the vast majority of Georgians. He certainly doesn’t represent the Georgia values that I cherish so much.

Collins had been mulling a run since Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced in May that he would not run against Ossoff, depriving Republicans of their top choice to challenge a senator who won the 2021 runoff in the wake of the 2020 election. Twin victories by Ossoff and Raphael Warnock gave Democrats control of the U.S. Senate at the time and. It was the first time since 2002 that Georgia had two Democratic senators.

Although Democrats have made Georgia increasingly competitive, Collins is among those who view Ossoff’s election as a fluke and proclaim that the state is still fundamentally conservative.

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“We deserve to have two U.S. senators who are out there fighting for us, and protecting us, not some woke overlords or some far-left-wing California donor base,” Collins said in the video.

The 58-year-old Collins is the son of the late Mac Collins, who was an eight-term congressman who began his political career as a Democrat before becoming a Republican. Mike Collins is a co-owner of a family trucking firm and made a losing bid for Congress in 2014. He reemerged to win a 2022 race for an open seat, portraying himself as an everyman trucker and hard-core Donald Trump acolyte. With a big, booming personality and an edgy social media presence, Collins calls himself a “MAGA workhorse.”

Kemp and Trump have met and said they would try to agree on a preferred candidate. Anyone anointed by both of them would be stamped as the Republican front-runner. Kemp told Collins and others he would support Dooley, but Trump isn’t ready to endorse yet. Collins has portrayed his interest in the Senate as seeking to best serve Trump

“I am going to continue to talk with President Trump and his team just about where we can be the best, beneficial, most help in this mission to make sure we get a Republican in the U.S. Senate from Georgia,” Collins said in the July 8 video.

Collins’ district stretches across 18 counties from the eastern suburbs of Atlanta through Athens. His best-known legislative accomplishment is a law passed this year to require the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to detain undocumented immigrants charged with theft. That was a response to the 2024 murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student who was killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan man who federal officials said entered the U.S. illegally and was allowed to stay while he pursued his immigration case.

The representative portrays himself as someone who can get things done, but he often takes a combative approach on social media. In March 2024 he was criticized for promoting a post from an antisemitic account that attacked a Jewish journalist as a “garbage human.” In February 2024, his account on the social media platform X was temporarily suspended after he suggested that someone who had been arrested by federal authorities should be transported by “Pinochet Air,” a reference to people who were thrown to their deaths from helicopters during the rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

That strategy could help Collins draw attention to wield against Ossoff — the only Democratic Senate incumbent seeking reelection in 2026 who represents a state Trump won. The race has already begun. Ossoff held his second campaign rally July 12 in Savannah. National Republicans have advertised against Ossoff’s opposition to a bill barring schools from allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.

Ossoff raised $21 million in the first six months of this year and had $15.5 million in cash on June 30. But that’s only the beginning. Ossoff and Warnock’s twin Senate victories in 2021 cost more than $900 million combined, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political spending. Warnock’s 2022 reelection over Republican Herschel Walker cost more than $470 million, OpenSecrets found.

Jeff Amy, The Associated Press