Trump endorses Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia GOP Senate runoff, setting up clash with Kemp-backed rival

President Donald Trump broke his silence on Georgia’s Republican U.S. Senate runoff Saturday night, endorsing Rep. Mike Collins over Derek Dooley just days before voters head to the polls. The late-breaking move draws a sharp line between Trump’s MAGA coalition and the establishment wing rallied behind outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp, and it sets the stage for what may be the most consequential Senate primary fight of the 2026 midterm cycle.

The runoff, scheduled for Tuesday, will determine which Republican faces first-term Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November. Georgia is one of a handful of states that will likely decide whether the GOP holds its slim Senate majority, and the intra-party battle over the nomination has been anything but quiet.

Trump had stayed neutral through the crowded primary and into the runoff campaign. That changed Saturday night, when he posted his endorsement on social media, as Fox News reported.

“It is my Great Honor to endorse ‘MAGA’ Mike Collins, a Highly Respected Congressman who has been with me from the very beginning. Mike is strongly supported by the most Highly Respected MAGA Patriots in Georgia and beyond, and many Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate, He is a WARRIOR and WINNER!”

Trump also addressed Collins’s opponent directly, and dismissively. “I don’t know Derek Dooley, and neither does anyone else, but he seems like a nice person,” he wrote.

Two candidates, two wings of the party

Collins, the son of late Rep. Mac Collins, represents Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, which stretches between Atlanta and Augusta. He has spent the campaign showcasing his MAGA credentials and his alignment with Trump’s agenda. Newsmax reported that Collins told supporters, “Everybody knows that I do best with the MAGA base.”

Dooley, a lawyer and former University of Tennessee football coach, is the son of legendary University of Georgia head coach Vince Dooley. He has leaned into his outsider image, casting Collins as a political insider. But his strongest asset may be his alliance with Kemp, who has regularly appeared alongside Dooley on the campaign trail. Georgia first lady Marty Kemp has joined them as well.

The Kemp-Trump dynamic gives this race an extra charge. The governor and the president have clashed repeatedly since the 2020 election, and their competing endorsements in this runoff amount to a proxy fight over the direction of Georgia’s Republican Party. The Washington Times noted that Trump framed the race as a major test of his influence in the state.

Collins led Dooley by roughly 10 percentage points in the first round of voting, the Washington Examiner reported, but neither candidate topped 50 percent in last month’s crowded primary field, which also included Rep. Buddy Carter, forcing the two into a head-to-head runoff.

Mud on both sides

The runoff has not been a clean affair. Collins faced a House Ethics Committee inquiry over allegations that his congressional office paid an intern who had a romantic relationship with his chief of staff and allegedly did not perform any work. Collins denied wrongdoing. He kept the staffer on his Senate campaign even after the inquiry was launched, then fired the staffer after a social media post made on behalf of the campaign mocked the wife of a Dooley campaign advisor. Collins called the post “despicable and unauthorized.”

That episode, in which the post reportedly targeted a woman who had accused Matt Lauer of rape, injected an ugly sideshow into the final stretch. Collins apologized, and the post was deleted, but the damage to the campaign’s tone was done.

Dooley has faced his own problems. Over the past week, he was reportedly accused of involvement in a “pay to play” scandal involving his brother Daniel Dooley and the governor. Both Dooley and Kemp denied wrongdoing. Democrats in the Georgia legislature requested an independent investigation, though it remains unclear whether any such probe was opened. Collins also attacked Dooley for living outside Georgia for much of his adult life, a criticism Trump himself echoed. Just The News reported that Trump called Collins “a very successful businessman” and “a fighter for the America First Agenda,” while framing Dooley as insufficiently rooted in the state.

Trump went further in his social media post, stating that Dooley “said that I lost Georgia in 2020”, a remark that, in Trump’s political universe, amounts to disqualification.

The general election looms

Whichever Republican wins Tuesday will face a well-funded opponent. Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, has spent the past year building what Fox News described as a powerful war chest, giving him a major fundraising advantage heading into the general election. In an embedded video segment, Ossoff appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show and called Trump a “symptom of a deeper disease” in American society, rhetoric that will likely animate Republican voters in a state Trump needs to hold.

The Georgia Senate seat is not the only race where Trump’s endorsement power is being tested. His track record in recent weeks has been strong but not spotless. Over the past month, Trump-aligned candidates swept GOP primaries in Indiana, and his picks prevailed in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Texas.

Two weeks ago, however, his endorsement streak hit a wall in Iowa. Trump backed three-term Rep. Randy Feenstra in the GOP gubernatorial race to succeed retiring Gov. Kim Reynolds, but businessman and farmer Zach Lahn, backed by Turning Point USA, the powerful conservative organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk, narrowly edged Feenstra in a result that surprised many.

Last week, Trump got back in the win column. His endorsed candidate in South Carolina, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished first in a crowded gubernatorial primary field and clinched one of the two tickets in the nomination race. And Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally who also carried the president’s endorsement, won a majority of the vote in the Republican Senate primary against five challengers, including conservative businessman Mark Lynch, who had criticized Graham over his support for the war in Iran, and avoided a runoff entirely.

In Georgia, Trump also endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in the GOP gubernatorial primary, where Jones is battling billionaire businessman Rick Jackson. That race adds another layer to the Trump-versus-Kemp dynamic playing out across the state’s Republican ballot.

What Tuesday means

The Collins-Dooley runoff is more than a personnel decision. It is a test of whether Trump’s endorsement can tip a competitive race in a state where his relationship with the sitting governor remains strained. It is also a preview of how MAGA loyalty will be measured in Senate races across the country this fall.

Collins enters Tuesday with Trump’s backing, a first-round lead, and a congressional record to run on. Dooley has Kemp’s political network, an outsider brand, and the Dooley family name, still potent in Georgia football country. Both men carry baggage from a bruising runoff that has featured ethics complaints, scandal allegations, and a fired staffer.

The broader stakes are plain. Georgia remains a battleground where elections are decided on tight margins, and the 2020 contest still casts a long shadow over the state’s Republican politics. A federal judge’s recent ruling on 2020 election ballots from Fulton County is a reminder of how raw those wounds remain.

Breitbart noted that the endorsement renews tensions between Trump and Kemp over loyalty, electability, and the 2020 Georgia election, tensions that have simmered for years and now threaten to shape who Republicans nominate for one of the most important Senate seats on the 2026 map.

Ossoff, meanwhile, is watching from the sidelines with a full bank account and a clear lane. While Republicans have spent the past year fighting each other, the Democrat they need to beat has been raising money and running unopposed. That is the price of a messy primary, and it is the voters, not the consultants, who will pay it in November.

Republicans in Georgia have one job on Tuesday: pick the candidate who can win in the fall. Trump has made his choice. Now it is up to the voters to decide whether loyalty to the movement or loyalty to the governor matters more, and whether either faction can unite fast enough to take on Ossoff before his fundraising advantage becomes insurmountable.