Senator Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, and Representative Mike Collins, the Republican challenger, debated for the second and final time on Tuesday in the contest for a Georgia Senate seat.
Mr. Collins, who faced a barrage of attacks from Mr. Ossoff when the rivals debated last week, needed to find a way to make a final argument to independent voters. Georgians began voting early in person on Tuesday.
The congressman hit the senator harder than he did at the first debate, casting the election as a choice between “Georgia and Georgetown,” a reference to Mr. Ossoff’s alma mater. And the debate was somewhat less focused on the high costs that Mr. Ossoff has hammered Mr. Collins on throughout the campaign.
Here are seven takeaways from Tuesday night’s debate.
Collins comes out swinging.
Polls suggest that Mr. Collins lags behind Mr. Ossoff in the race. Republicans have pulled some of their advertising money as a result, thinking it is better spent elsewhere before Nov. 3.
Perhaps sensing that his window to make an impression is closing, Mr. Collins tried to stick as much as he could on Mr. Ossoff. The congressman delivered his scripted opening more crisply than he did last week. Mr. Ossoff, Mr. Collins said, “views his success not as what he does for Georgia, but the number of clicks he gets on social media.”
Mr. Collins tried to hang inflation and ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Mr. Ossoff. He boasted about how Republicans limited illegal border crossings and painted Democrats, including Mr. Ossoff, as socialists.
Mr. Ossoff, for his part, continued to hound Mr. Collins on why he voted for higher tariffs, which have been blamed in part for rising prices. He also noted a House Ethics Committee review into allegations that Mr. Collins’s office had hired an intern who was romantically involved with the representative’s chief of staff and who had not performed any work. Mr. Collins dismissed the investigation as a “nothing burger.”
‘Are you a white nationalist?’
Mr. Collins could not avoid the steady stream of hits that continued from Mr. Ossoff on the congressman’s history of hiring aides who have espoused white nationalist and antisemitic views. At one point, a debate panelist asked Mr. Collins point blank if he was a white nationalist and what he wanted to say to “Black Georgians who question whether you will represent them equally.”
Mr. Collins answered “no,” seemingly to the question of whether he was a white nationalist, and said he condemned “any sort of hate speech, antisemitism, hate of any kind.”
J Street Action Fund, a liberal Jewish organization, has begun airing an anti-Collins digital ad noting those white nationalist ties. In both debates, Mr. Collins has tried to cast Ossoff, who is Jewish, as anti-Israel.
Call it the Georgia trucker election.
High diesel prices were the focus of much of the back-and-forth over the cost of living, with Mr. Ossoff pressing Mr. Collins to acknowledge the problem. Mr. Collins owns a trucking company in Jackson, Ga., his hometown.
“Diesel prices are high,” Mr. Collins conceded. But he maintained that more “supply is coming” and added that prices “will continue to come down.”
Mr. Ossoff’s campaign put out a video on Tuesday featuring a Georgia trucker, identified only as Richard, saying that he had voted for Mr. Trump three times but was backing “Senator Jon,” because “he’s listening to truck drivers like myself.”
Collins could not shed the ghost of 2020.
Mr. Ossoff repeatedly pressed Mr. Collins to answer whether he still believed that Mr. Trump won the 2020 presidential election, a falsehood Mr. Collins has championed. Mr. Collins largely sidestepped the question. “Everybody’s seen my views on that,” he said at one point.
Georgia was 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.
On Tuesday, when Mr. Ossoff asked Mr. Collins to clarify, the congressman said: “There was a lot of doubt in that election. Yes, Joe Biden was the president. And yes, we saw the results of the Biden presidency.”
Ossoff popularized the term ‘Epstein class.’ Collins tried to turn it on its head.
Mr. Ossoff, a canny user of social media, spread the term “Epstein class” earlier this year to refer to Mr. Trump and his big-donor allies. Mr. Epstein and his crimes have emerged as a major issue in this year’s midterm races.
On Tuesday, Mr. Collins reiterated his suggestion that Mr. Ossoff is a hypocrite for accepting campaign money from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn who corresponded with Mr. Epstein and visited his island at least once. “This call is coming from inside the house,” Mr. Collins said.
Mr. Ossoff did not engage with the attack. Instead, he criticized Mr. Collins for voting against releasing the Epstein files until Mr. Trump agreed. “Who on your team advised you to raise the Epstein files?” Mr. Ossoff said. “You voted to cover up the evidence, Mike.”
Ossoff tried to lift the Democratic candidate for governor.
Mr. Ossoff gave a shout-out to Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor who is the Democratic nominee for Georgia governor, saying it is “crucial” for Georgians to elect her because she wants to expand Medicaid in the state.
Mr. Ossoff made a similar pitch for Ms. Bottoms in last week’s debate as he tries to pull up down-ballot Democrats. Polls suggest that Ms. Bottoms is narrowly trailing the Republican nominee for governor, Rick Jackson, a wealthy health care executive.
The Democratic Governors Association announced on Tuesday that it was investing $10 million to help Ms. Bottoms in the race. Georgians have not elected a Democratic governor since 1998.
Ossoff keeps getting asked about 2028.
Mr. Ossoff has proved so adept at fund-raising and raising Democratic social media buzz that he has fielded questions for months about whether he might run for president in two years. He tried to put that chatter to rest once again in the answer to the debate’s very first question, when he was asked if he would commit to serving a full, six-year Senate term.
“Yes, I will,” Mr. Ossoff said. “I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president. I’m running for re-election to the Senate.”
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