Rep. Mike Collins was accused of being a “bigot congressman” while Sen. John Ossoff was derided as a “trust fund kid” bankrolled by an associate of Jeffrey Epstein during Thursday night’s fiery Georgia Senate debate.
“Mike Collins has brought dishonor to our state through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists,” Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, charged in his opening statement in the first of several personal attacks leveled by both candidates.
The senator repeatedly suggested his GOP opponent was racist and antisemitic – invoking various social media scandals involving the congressman, 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.
“[Y]ou’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office, and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online,” the senator later claimed, accusing Collins of being “in cahoots” with white supremacists.
The Republican congressman insisted in response that “I’ve condemned racism, antisemitism, hate. I don’t care where the source is.”
“And I tell him that too,” added Collins, seemingly referring to his son-in-law David Alan Scheer II, who allegedly shared anti-Jew and white nationalist rhetoric on social media.
“It’s wrong. We have no place in this world for that.”
Meanwhile, Collins took aim at Ossoff’s support of far-left candidates and his receipt of campaign contributions from lefty billionaire 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 also attacked the senator’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.”
The congressman also noted that “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 average of polls shows Ossoff with a nearly 8 percentage point advantage over Collins in the closely watched Senate race.
