Georgia Republicans scramble to pick a candidate to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff

ACWORTH, Ga. (AP) — Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, who wants to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November, happily calls himself a warrior for President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement.

Although it’s a sensible calling card for anyone vying for a Republican nomination these days, even some of his supporters have a few concerns ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

Gary Waldrep, a local party committee chairman, asked Collins at a recent campaign stop how he was going to win over at least a few of the “middle-of-the-road” voters who may have been turned off by Trump.

The question reflected Republican anxiety about the party’s chances in Georgia, where Democrats have demonstrated strength in recent U.S. Senate elections and Ossoff is no longer considered as easy of a target as he once was.

“I watch the polls just like everybody else,” Waldrep said. “I know it’s going to be close.”

Collins is competing for the Republican nomination with Rep. Buddy Carter and Derek Dooley, a lawyer and former college football coach who is backed by outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump has not endorsed a candidate, raising the likelihood of a June 16 runoff that would burn more time and money before the party can focus on defeating Ossoff.

If Ossoff loses, Democrats have almost no chance of winning a Senate majority. He’s the only senator from his party running for reelection in a state that Trump won two years ago.

A familiar Republican challenge

Trump carried Georgia in two out of his three campaigns. Republicans control the Atlanta statehouse. But in the last six years, Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock have won a combined three Senate contests, each time defeating a Republican who pledged fealty to Trump.

For this year’s campaign, Kemp rebuffed Senate Republican leaders’ encouragement to challenge Ossoff and declined to endorse either Collins or Carter. Instead, he recruited Dooley, a childhood family friend who is the son of legendary coach Vince Dooley, and tried to convince Georgia Republicans to take a chance on the first-time candidate.

“My goal is here is to win our Senate seat back,” Kemp said Friday as he introduced Dooley at a gun store in Douglasville. “We need a political outsider to do that.”

Dooley, 57, said in a recent interview that there are few if any policy differences among the candidates, “and so electability is everything.” And in his television advertising, he attempts to split the difference between Trump’s base and the broader electorate.

“I’m gonna work with President Trump, but for you,” he tells voters in one spot.

An unapologetic MAGA congressman

Collins, 58, is a two-term House member who owns a trucking company and boasts of a “grassroots operation out there pounding the pavement across this state.”

The second-term House member has the advantage of representing a district east of Atlanta, putting him in the media market of the state’s population center. And he sponsored the Lakin Riley Act, named for a Georgia nursing student killed by a man who was also charged for being in the U.S. illegally. The law, signed by Trump last year, requires that immigrants accused of a range of crimes be held without bond.

“I have proven that I can deliver for the state of Georgia,” Collins said in Acworth. “I can even do it with bipartisan legislation. And I never compromise my conservative values.”

Collins also has a brash social media presence has both boosted his identity as a firebrand in Trump’s mold and drawn criticism. Among his most controversial posts was sharing a video in 2024 of University of Mississippi students, nearly all of them white males, taunting a Black woman.

“Ole Miss taking care of business,” Collins wrote.

One congressman tries to buck history

Carter is in his sixth term but represents a Savannah-based district, a less populous corner of Georgia that’s rarely a launching pad for statewide campaigns. He’s pulled back on advertising in the closing weeks before the primary, suggesting that he’s lacking adequate financial support.

The 68-year-old pharmacist has targeted a House ethics investigation into whether Collins abused taxpayer funds by hiring the girlfriend of his former chief of staff — now his campaign adviser — for work that the woman allegedly did not perform.

“If taxpayers can’t trust you to properly steward their money, how can they trust you to be a U.S. senator?” Carter asked Collins in a recent debate.

“Buddy,” Collins shot back, “I can tell through the voice that you know how the polling is going out there.”

Dooley is from ‘a whole different world’

Dooley, meanwhile, is attempting to vault over his more experienced competitors.

“I come from a whole different world than they come from,” he said. “Both of those guys represent everything that I’m running against. I want to change how Washington does its business, and I want people up there for the right reasons.”

Kemp ran through a list of first-term Republican senators who did not hold elected office before, including Ohio’s Bernie Moreno, Montana’s Tim Sheehy and Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick.

“If you look around the country where Republicans have been successful beating Democratic incumbents, it has been political outsiders that have been victorious,” Kemp said.

The point, Dooley said, is that “you’ve got to have somebody that’s going to stay on offense” without having a record to defend.

“It comes down to who can beat Jon Ossoff,” he said.

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Barrow reported from Douglasville and Atlanta.

But Trump has withheld an endorsement in the primary and Collins hasn’t been able to raise anything like the cash Ossoff is raking in. Through April 29, Collins had raised $3 million from contributors and kicked in $650,000 of his own money. Ossoff has raised more than $57 million and had $31 million in cash on hand in April.

That’s left an opening for other candidates, with Carter and Dooley hoping to force Collins to June 16 runoff.