Since the 2020 election and the 2021 Senate runoffs, Georgia has become the state where Republican hopes go to get complicated. Between questionable candidate choices, bitter intraparty fights like the 2020 election certification feud, and the contentious relationship between President Trump and Gov. Brian Kemp, Georgia Republicans have made a nasty habit of turning winnable races into national postmortems. Tuesday’s Republican Senate runoff is shaping up to be the latest installment in the party’s six-year Georgia problem.
Republican voters are choosing at the polls between Rep. Mike Collins, nicknamed “MAGA Mike” by the president, and Derek Dooley, an outright political newcomer. Collins received Trump’s endorsement in the election at the 11th hour on June 14, while Dooley is backed by outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp.
Kemp, who was once viewed as the best chance at ousting Sen. Jon Ossoff, declined to run in 2025 but endorsed Dooley as the best candidate for the task.
Recent history has shown that infighting, weak candidates, and grievances have cost Georgia Republicans winnable races…
Collins and Dooley have continued the time-honored traditions of campaign nastiness in the primary and runoff. Dooley has portrayed Collins as scandal-plagued because of ethics investigations into alleged misuse of taxpayer money, while the Collins campaign has attacked Dooley for not voting in the 2016 and 2020 elections. While President Trump and Gov. Kemp publicly patched over their volatile feud in 2024, rifts still show in the candidates they choose to back. The winner will face a steep battle against Ossoff and will have to unite the party quickly before November.
Ossoff’s seat is widely viewed as one of the most vulnerable due to being the only Senate Democrat up for reelection in a state Trump carried in 2024. The Democrat, though, comes with a massive cash advantage, having raised $60 million while his challengers have each raised less than $5 million.
Recent history has shown that infighting, weak candidates, and grievances have cost Georgia Republicans winnable races in favorable electoral environments before. In 2021, Republicans disastrously lost both Senate runoffs and gave Democrats control of the Senate. In 2022, the Herschel Walker campaign debacle squandered favorable conditions in his Senate loss to Raphael Warnock. By contrast, Kemp’s 2022 victory over a Trump-backed primary challenger and then Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams proved that Georgia was still winnable for Republicans with a credible candidate and a united party.
The national implications are important, too. Republicans already control the Senate, yes, but that majority is far from untouchable. Toppling Ossoff would help protect the GOP’s hold on the chamber and give the party more breathing room in a Senate where a few defections can stall nominations or major legislation. It would also see one of the few remaining footholds in Trump-won territory back in GOP hands. Both implications would make it easier to pass meaningful policy legislation in the back-nine of President Trump’s last term.
The Republican problem in Georgia is not that the state has somehow become a Democratic fortress, but that it is a real battleground, and real battlegrounds will punish sloppiness and bad habits. Winning in Georgia requires earning suburban voters and rural turnout, inspiring confidence from donors, and nominating candidates who don’t give Democrats an easy target.
The nominee that emerges after Tuesday’s runoff between Collins and Dooley will have to do more than win a primary argument over who best represents the party’s base. He will have to prove that he can beat Ossoff in the tangibles of elections: fundraising, turnout, and voter contact.
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