Donald Trump’s last-minute endorsement of Mike Collins is being put to the test Tuesday in Georgia’s Republican Senate runoff, where voters will choose between Collins and former football coach Derek Dooley. The winner will take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November, giving the race an immediate role in the fight for control of the Senate.
Collins finished first in the May 19 primary with 40% of the vote, while Dooley got 30% and forced the runoff. Trump moved early Sunday to back Collins, even as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has publicly lined up behind Dooley, saying he was “very clear with the president” that the state needed “a political outsider” and that Dooley was the best one to beat Ossoff.
The Georgia race is opening the main phase of the state’s general election campaign on the same day voters are also heading to the polls in Oklahoma, the District of Columbia, Alabama and California. In Georgia, the Senate contest is only part of the picture: the Republican governor’s nomination is also headed into the general election phase after a runoff, with Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones facing billionaire businessman Rick Jackson.
For Collins, the runoff is a test of whether his appeal as a Trump ally can outweigh Kemp’s support for Dooley. Collins has framed himself as “a conservative workhorse” and repeatedly pointed to the Laken Riley Act, the first bill Trump signed into law in his second term. Dooley’s campaign has tried to answer that by presenting him as a Republican outsider who would “work with President Trump and always put Georgia first.”
The race also carries a sharper edge because Kemp and Trump are not on the same side. Kemp campaigned with Dooley throughout the primary, appeared in his ads and said Monday that Trump “obviously” disagreed with his choice, adding that the voters would “weigh in tomorrow to settle that score.” That leaves Tuesday’s runoff as a direct measure of which endorsement matters more in a race that Republicans need to win if they want a clearer path to the Senate seat now held by Ossoff.
Collins enters the runoff with the higher primary vote total, but Dooley has the benefit of Kemp’s backing and a campaign built around the argument that Georgia needs a fresh face rather than a partisan loyalist. Trump’s endorsement is the biggest outside force in the contest, yet the runoff will tell whether that is enough in a state where both men are trying to claim the same lane of Republican voters.
In Georgia, the question is no longer who can make the louder case about loyalty to Trump. It is whether the former president’s late endorsement or Kemp’s home-state push for Dooley is the stronger force when the ballots are counted Tuesday.
