A Trump-endorsed Senate candidate seems poised to lose a key swing state

In June President Donald Trump endorsed Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), a far right Republican and backer of Trump’s debunked Big Lie about the 2020 election, to oppose incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA).

Now, according to one political reporter, Trump’s pick is putting the key swing state of Georgia in peril for the GOP.

“Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins enters the general election facing a challenge that goes beyond winning over swing voters: convincing Republicans in Georgia and Washington that he can defeat Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff,” wrote the Atlanta Journal Constitution's Greg Bluestein on Monday. “The GOP nominee trails in early polls, faces a massive fundraising disadvantage and carries the sort of political baggage that his rivals long warned could doom him in November against a rising Democratic star.”

Bluestein elaborated that Collins must simultaneously broaden his appeal beyond the base of hardcore Trump supporters and convince donors that giving to his campaign is not a lost cause. So far he has succeeded in the second goal, as the Republican Party’s Senate super PAC the Senate Leadership Fund announced a $44 million investment in April in the winner’s campaign. Yet the first task has proved more elusive, and Ossoff has maintained a lead in the polls.

“A measure of despair is seeping in,” Bluestein reported. “Even U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, the race’s third-place finisher, acknowledged on SiriusXM that Collins was ‘way behind’ and warned that a poor showing could be a ‘drag at the top of the ticket.’” Although Rep. Carter later qualified his observation by pointing out that the race is still young, Bluestein pointed out that Trump’s political brand could prove to be a drag on the ticket.

“Ossoff decided early to cast the race as a referendum on Trump,” Bluestein reported. “But he is also taking the contest into deeply personal territory. Minutes after Collins clinched the nomination, Ossoff branded him a ‘notorious bigot, antisemite and extremist’ and released a video portraying him as a scandal-shadowed Trump lackey.”

In addition to these allegations, Collins has also been accused by the House Ethics Committee of misusing taxpayer funds so that his former top aide, Brandon Phillips, could engage in campaign work while drawing a government salary and arranged for his girlfriend to have a paid, no-show internship. Collins has denied the allegations.

In addition, after Collins fired Phillips, he hired a man named Kip Talley who became controversial after he promised to use “the levers of the legislative branch” to empower a Holocaust denier to be released from prison. Talley was also eventually let go, but that did not help Collins beat the suspicion of bigotry: His son-in-law was reported by CNN to have posted Nazi imagery, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and white nationalist propaganda on social media platforms.

And, of course, there remains Collins’ insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, despite that claim being thoroughly debunked.

Polling expert Harry Enten observed in June that Collins is "starting to feel a whole lot like Herschel Walker 2.0," a reference to the football star-turned-politician who lost the 2022 Senate election because of his similar embrace of Trumpian conspiracy theories.

"Most Republicans, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, believe that the 2020 election was, in fact, stolen," Enten observed, noting that this view is not held by the general electorate.

"The Republican Party [is] all the way over on the right, and the rest of the American public is in the same camp, and the actual — this is the real world we're dealing with here," Enten explained.

Even conservatives have expressed reservations about Trump constantly harping about the 2020 election. Conservative podcaster Erick Erickson recently described Trump’s ongoing obsession with claiming the Georgia election was stolen as an “in-kind contribution to Ossoff’s campaign.”