Senator Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, and Representative Mike Collins, the Republican challenger, faced off Thursday night in the first debate in the battle for Georgia’s Senate seat.
The pressure was on Mr. Collins, who lags in the polls, to show that he is still in the fight to represent a state that President Trump carried in 2024. The two-term congressman’s polling numbers have looked so dismal that some Republicans have shifted resources away from the race.
Mr. Collins held his own against the more polished Mr. Ossoff on Thursday, but the zingers of the night came from the incumbent.
Here are six key moments from the debate in Georgia, where the election outcome on Nov. 3 could help determine control of the Senate.
Tariffs used to be Trump’s favorite word. Now, it’s Ossoff’s.
Mr. Ossoff asked Mr. Collins at least eight times to explain how President Trump’s tariffs have helped Georgians. We counted.
The question was at the core of the incumbent’s strategy to hold Mr. Collins accountable for his voting record over the last year. In addition to tariffs, Mr. Ossoff returned time and again to Mr. Collins’s support for the war in Iran and his vote to pass Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, which included cuts to Medicaid and health insurance premiums.
Mr. Ossoff was clearly trying to portray Mr. Collins as nothing more than a yes man to Mr. Trump who has played a role in a second term that many Georgians are frustrated with.
“Whatever Donald Trump says,” Mr. Ossoff said, “Mike Collins does.”
Collins painted Ossoff as a ‘trust fund kid’ who ‘wants you riding on mass transit.’
In many of the most heated moments of the debate, Mr. Collins returned to one of his favorite attacks against Mr. Ossoff: that he comes from a wealthy family.
Mr. Collins called Mr. Ossoff a “trust fund kid who’s never had a job in his life” and who does not care about gas prices because he “wants you riding on mass transit.”
Mr. Ossoff — whose primary holding is a blind trust worth between $1 million and $5 million, according to his financial disclosures — did not engage with the jabs for most of the debate. But in his closing argument, he returned fire at Mr. Collins for portraying himself as an everyday trucker when in reality he owns a trucking company worth as much as $25 million, according to his financial disclosure report.
Ossoff attacked Collins for hiring aides associated with white nationalists.
In one of the zingers of the night, Mr. Ossoff accused Mr. Collins of hiring “half the Third Reich,” referring to the Republican congressman’s history of hiring aides who have espoused white nationalist and antisemitic views.
In another attack line that immediately circulated on social media, the Democrat also slammed Mr. Collins for reposting a video in 2024 of white male students taunting and jeering at a female Black student with racist and profane remarks.
“If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery,” Mr. Ossoff said, “Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”
Over the summer, a former intern and contractor for Mr. Collins’s leadership PAC posted a picture of himself on social media dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes, the Washington Post reported. Collins’s son-in-law has a track record of sharing Nazi imagery. And, according to a report in The Daily Beast on Thursday, two people who worked with his campaign were members of a group founded by a former member of the Klan.
A spokesman for Mr. Collins said the two people were unpaid volunteers, and the campaign did not know of their past associations.
Onstage, Mr. Collins did not directly deny the allegations. He said he has “condemned racism, antisemitism, hate.”
Invoking Abdul El-Sayed, Collins casts Ossoff as anti-Israel.
To confront one of the most charged issues of this election cycle, Mr. Collins brought up a Senate candidate hundreds of miles away from the one standing next to him: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan.
Mr. Collins said that Mr. Ossoff supports Dr. El-Sayed, whom he characterized as a Democrat who “hates Israel” and “loves Iran.”
Asked whether Israel is “guilty of committing genocide” in Gaza, Mr. Ossoff said it’s a question for the International Criminal Court, and accused Mr. Collins of wanting to “sanction and defund” the court.
Mr. Ossoff, who is Jewish, also said that he “cares deeply” about the security of Israeli people, “some of whom are members of my family,” and about “innocent Palestinian life.”
The 2020 election still resonates in Georgia.
Mr. Ossoff turned a question about whether the federal government should set voting rules into an attack on Mr. Collins and Mr. Trump for what he described as being “obsessed with overturning the 2020 election.”
The issue is resonant in Georgia, which became the focal point for election denial in 2020, when Mr. Trump called the Republican secretary of state and asked him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
Mr. Collins countered by trying to tar Mr. Ossoff for opposing federal voter identification legislation, known as the SAVE America Act, which would impose stricter voter ID rules and require proof of citizenship to vote.
“People will go vote when they have confidence in our elections,” Mr. Collins said.
And the elephant in the room: Ossoff for president?
It was none other than Mr. Collins who brought up speculation about Mr. Ossoff’s ambitions.
He referred to the possibility that his opponent is considering a presidential run by saying that Hasan Piker, a provocative liberal streamer, had “endorsed Jon Ossoff for president for 2028.”
Mr. Piker has not, in fact, made an endorsement. And Mr. Ossoff has not declared any intentions … yet.
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
The post ‘You’ve Hired Half the Third Reich’: 6 Key Moments From the Georgia Senate Debate appeared first on New York Times.
