Trump stays neutral as Georgia GOP runoff nears for Ossoff challenge
Trump has not picked a side in Georgia’s GOP Senate runoff, leaving Mike Collins and Derek Dooley to fight for the Republican lane against Jon Ossoff.
Donald Trump is staying neutral for now in a Georgia Republican Senate runoff that will test how much sway his name still carries in a battleground state. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley are battling for the chance to challenge Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, with early voting set to begin June 8 and the runoff scheduled for June 16.
The contest has become more than a fight for a nomination. It is a measure of which kind of Republican Georgia voters want to send against Ossoff: a candidate closely identified with Trump’s politics or one acceptable to the party’s establishment wing, including Gov. Brian Kemp, who backed Dooley. The winner will face Ossoff in November, when Republicans see Georgia as one of their best pickup opportunities on the 2026 map.
Collins, a member of Congress, and Dooley, a former football coach, advanced from a five-way GOP primary on May 19 after no candidate reached 50 percent. That forced a runoff and extended a bitter intraparty fight that has exposed the party’s competing loyalties. Trump has not yet endorsed either man, leaving both to compete for the mantle of his movement without an explicit presidential seal of approval.
Ossoff has tried to make that split the center of the race. He has attacked both Collins and Dooley as Trump loyalists and called them “Trump puppets,” a line aimed at framing the eventual Republican nominee as a direct extension of the former president rather than a broadly appealing statewide candidate. That messaging reflects the calculation facing Georgia Democrats: if the Republican nominee is too closely tied to Trump, Ossoff can cast the race as a referendum on the former president in a state Trump won in 2024.
Georgia’s scale makes the runoff unusually consequential. The state’s voting-age population was estimated at 7.8 million in 2024, a reminder of the size of the electorate that will decide whether Republicans can turn Trump’s 2024 victory there into a Senate gain. The race is being watched not just for who survives the runoff, but for what Georgia Republicans want most in a nominee: loyalty to Trump, acceptance from Kemp’s wing, or enough of both to beat Ossoff in November.
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