Jon Ossoff wins Georgia Senate race over Republican Mike Collins

Rising Democratic star made his re-election campaign a referendum on the Trump administration’s misdeeds

Jon Ossoff, a rising star in the Democratic party who has been cited as a potential presidential contender in 2028, has been re-elected to the Senate in Georgia, defeating Mike Collins, his Republican challenger.

The senator made his re-election campaign a referendum on the Trump administration’s misdeeds, highlighting self-serving stock trades and business deals by the president and others in his orbit, as well as the consequences of the war in Iran and Trump’s trade policies on the pocketbooks of Georgia’s voters.

Ossoff has repeatedly insisted in recent months he has “zero interest” in running for president, even as he delivered a steady stream of viral speeches that took aim at Donald Trump.

“Each day, Donald Trump digs the moral pit deeper,” the senator declared last week, accusing the president of leading “the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it”.

He was speaking at a rally alongside former president Barack Obama, to whom Ossoff has been compared as clips of his speeches – carefully recorded from a low angle – did the rounds on social media.

He raised at least $115.9m for the election cycle, many multiples more than Collins. The re-election was expected, with Ossoff never falling behind Collins in the polls.

Speaking at a Democratic election night event in Georgia on Tuesday evening, Andre Dickens, the Atlanta mayor, said his party cared “about whether you can afford your groceries; whether you can fill up your tank and make it to the weekend. That’s not left or right,” he said. “That’s life.”

Collins ran a campaign focused on immigration enforcement and anti-transgender policies that was badly marred by ties between campaign staff and white nationalists, neo-Nazis and far-right extremists.

Reporters from CNN revealed during the campaigning that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who had worked with his trucking business, advocated white supremacist and Nazi views online. Collins’ former chief of staff, Kip Talley, and other aides had met with white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, who had been asking Collins’ office to intervene on behalf of Charles C Johnson, a Holocaust denier and rightwing activist who was incarcerated on contempt of court charges.

Ossoff had repeatedly hammered Collins on these connections at debates and in campaign advertising.