President Donald Trump’s endorsement was put on the line Tuesday in a Georgia Republican Senate runoff that will decide who gets the party’s nomination to face Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November. Mike Collins, who won the May 19 primary with 40% of the vote, faced former football coach Derek Dooley, who finished second with 30%.
The race mattered beyond Georgia because Tuesday also kicked off major general election campaigns for Senate and governor in the state, turning a runoff into a test of Trump’s hold on Republican voters. It also arrived as voters headed to the polls in Oklahoma and the District of Columbia, while Alabama and Georgia held runoff elections where no candidate cleared a majority on May 19.
Trump moved first. In the early hours of Sunday, he backed Collins, a GOP representative, in the runoff. Kemp then spent the primary pushing Dooley, appearing with him on the campaign trail and in campaign ads. On Monday, the governor said he had been “very clear with the president of why I thought we needed a political outsider in this race,” adding that “the best political outsider was Derek Dooley to beat Jon Ossoff.” He also said, “And obviously he disagreed with that. And the voters are going to weigh in tomorrow to settle that score.”
That split gave the runoff a sharper edge than a routine nomination fight. Collins campaigned as “a conservative workhorse” in a runoff debate and pointed to his role as the author of the Laken Riley Act, the first bill Trump signed into law in his second term. Dooley, meanwhile, had Kemp behind him from the start, a signal that Georgia Republicans were not lined up neatly behind the president’s pick even as Trump remained the party’s most powerful voice.
Collins also entered the runoff under pressure from a recent internal dispute. He recently fired Brandon Phillips from both his campaign and his congressional office after Phillips became central to a House Ethics Committee probe involving allegations that Collins paid him for campaign work and employed Phillips’ girlfriend, who did not do work for the office. Collins has called those allegations “bogus.”
The same Tuesday that Georgia Republicans chose between Collins and Dooley, voters in California’s 14th Congressional District weighed in on a special primary election to replace former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, with the possibility of a special general election in August if no one won a majority of the all-party vote. But in Georgia, the stakes were more immediate: the runoff winner will step straight into a November race that is expected to shape the fight for the Senate. How much Trump’s endorsement still counts after this round will be measured by a single result.
