Rep. Mike Collins was branded a “bigot congressman,” while Sen. Jon Ossoff was attacked as a “trust fund kid” allegedly backed by a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein during a fiery Georgia Senate debate Thursday night.
“Mike Collins has brought dishonor to our state through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists,” Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, said in his opening statement, setting the tone for an evening marked by repeated personal attacks from both candidates.
The senator repeatedly accused his Republican challenger of racism and antisemitism, pointing to a series of social media controversies involving Collins, members of his staff and his son-in-law.
“If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club,” Ossoff said at one point.
Later, the senator claimed Collins had “hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office” and had promoted neo-Nazi content online. Ossoff also accused the congressman of being “in cahoots” with white supremacists.
Collins rejected the accusations, saying, “I’ve condemned racism, antisemitism, hate. I don’t care where the source is.”
“And I tell him that too,” Collins added, appearing to refer to his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who allegedly shared anti-Jewish and white nationalist rhetoric on social media.
“It’s wrong. We have no place in this world for that,” Collins said.
Collins, meanwhile, criticized Ossoff for supporting far-left candidates and accepting campaign contributions from billionaire liberal donor Reid Hoffman.
“I’ve never heard him say a word about his DSA pick up there [in Michigan] … Abdul El-Sayed. Hasan Piker? How about Reid Hoffman? None of those. He doesn’t denounce anybody or anything or condemn them because he’s part of them,” Collins charged.
“One of his megadonors is data center billionaire Reid Hoffman, who is also one of Epstein’s buddies,” the congressman said.
“He’s got an answer to those people. He doesn’t have to answer to local people,” Collins added.
Collins also targeted Ossoff’s opposition to President Trump’s tax-cutting agenda and his role in the fall 2025 government shutdown.
“Tax cuts are the answer to keeping more money back in people’s pockets … but my opponent doesn’t get that,” Collins said.
“My opponent’s a trust fund kid who’s never had a job in his life. He doesn’t understand that. He doesn’t understand business,” he added.
The congressman also said, “It was just this time last year that Jon Ossoff shut the government down for 48 days. He shut it down, y’all, right when we were trying to get that emergency money out for Hurricane Helene so that our farmers and our small communities could repair and prepare for this year’s harvest.”
“He didn’t care about that,” Collins argued. “He shut it down because he wanted to defund Border Patrol and ICE … we deserve to know why he left that border wide open.”
The latest RealClearPolitics polling average shows Ossoff holding an advantage of nearly 8 percentage points over Collins in the closely watched Georgia Senate race.
