Mike Collins is reportedly the next to enter a growing list of Republicans hoping to challenge Jon Ossoff for U.S. Senate in Georgia, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The outlet reported that Collins, a current U.S. Representative, is soliciting endorsements and chatting up allies of President Donald Trump as he prepares to join the race.
Collins has reportedly called several of Trump’s allies and other grassroots activists, according to sources who remained anonymous.
If Collins does enter the GOP Primary race, he will join U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter and Insurance Commissioner John King. Former college football coach Derek Dooley is also a potential entrant.
The race would seem low-hanging fruit for GOP heavyweights in Georgia. Ossoff flipped the seat in 2021 in a Special Election with a narrow win that, paired with Raphael Warnock’s victory in the state’s other Senate seat, handed Democrats control of the Senate at the time.
But Republicans lack a clear front-runner. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was widely expected to run, but ultimately chose not to. Likewise, David Perdue, who lost to Ossoff in 2021, and Kelly Loeffler, who lost to Warnock the same year, have also opted not to join the race.
Collins, if he enters the race, comes with a family name and a MAGA reputation despite initially winning his race in the ruby red Georgia’s 10th Congressional District against a Trump-backed opponent. He’s the son of Mac Collins, who served in the House from 1993 until 2005, initially as a Blue Dog Democrat, but later as a Republican.
Mike Collins has taken a turn much further to the Right, embracing the new Congress where Republicans cross Trump — or party lines — at their own peril. Collins sponsored the first bill Trump signed in his second term, the Laken Riley Act, in response to the young college student’s murder at the hands of an undocumented immigrant. Laken Riley’s death became a rallying cry within the GOP in support of Trump’s hard-line immigration tactics.
Collins, once banned temporarily from X after a post that appeared to advocate for killing immigrants who entered the country illegally, is known for his often controversial social media posts, which have been called at times antisemitic and/or xenophobic, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
It’s the sort of campaign rhetoric that would play well in Collins’ district. Despite Democrats actually having a voter registration advantage, according to the most recent L2 voter data, Republicans consistently dominate there. Collins won re-election to the seat last year with 63% of the vote. He won in 2022 with nearly 65%, while the former occupant of the seat, Republican Jody Hice, won in 2020 with more than 62% of the vote.
But a statewide race in Georgia is different. The state narrowly went for former President Joe Biden in 2020 and then narrowly swung back to Trump in 2024. Kemp, meanwhile, won the state in 2022 much more comfortably as a more moderate Republican. The state’s Lieutenant Governor, Burt Jones, ran more in alignment with Trump that same year, and won his seat by a smaller margin than Kemp.
But Ossoff is considered Democrats’ most vulnerable Senator in the 2026 cycle, and he’s facing a tough re-election battle. Already, Ossoff is positioning Trump as a President who hasn’t delivered on promises — outright breaking them in some cases — and one whose tax and budget package, dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” outs the President as someone not concerned with helping working-class Americans get a leg up.
Ossoff has also latched onto criticism related to Jeffrey Epstein as even some in Trump’s MAGA base begin to question whether the so-called “client list” is being withheld, according to NBC News.
Ossoff is also the only incumbent Democratic Senator up for re-election next year in a state Trump carried in 2024. Still, he has banked more than $15.4 million for the race so far, according to the Journal-Constitution.
In any case, the GOP push to win Ossoff’s seat back to protect, and possibly grow, the narrow Republican majority in the Senate will be one of the most important races of the 2026 cycle, again putting Georgia at the center of U.S. politics.
