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FIRST ON FOX: Republican Rep. Mike Collins will announce a campaign for the U.S. senate in battleground Georgia early next week, sources with knowledge told Fox News on Friday.
Collins is aiming to challenge Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is running for re-election in the key southeastern battleground state that President Donald Trump narrowly carried in last year’s election.
The GOP views Ossoff as the most vulnerable Democrat seeking re-election in the Senate in next year’s midterm elections.
Collins, a businessman who founded a trucking company, is in his second term representing Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, which includes a large swath of urban, suburban, and rural areas between Atlanta and Augusta.
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The conservative lawmaker, who’s the son of the late Republican Rep. Mac Collins of Georgia, has been moving closer to launching a Senate campaign for weeks.
“Tires kicked. Fueling up,” Collis wrote Monday in a social media post that was accompanied by a video where he showcased his ties to President Donald Trump.
“Congressman Mike Collins, he loves this state,” Trump said in a clip in the video.
Collins was an early backer of the president, supporting him as Trump first ran for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 cycle.
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In the 2024 presidential campaign, when Trump won back the White House, Collins traveled on behalf of Trump to the crucial early-voting primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
He also appeared at multiple Trump rallies during the 2024 cycle and opened three Trump campaign offices in Georgia.
And Collins, not facing a difficult re-election in his solidly red House seat, campaigned in ten congressional districts across the country to help elect Trump-aligned candidates as the GOP defended its razor-thin majority in the chamber.
Collins at the beginning of this year reintroduced the Laken Riley Act, which mandates that undocumented immigrants charged with burglary or theft be detained. It’s named after a Georgia nursing student killed by a man who had illegally entered the U.S. The case grabbed national attention.
The bill, which quickly passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate, became the first legislation signed into law by Trump as he started his second tour of duty in the White House.
A Republican source said that Collins has a “great relationship” with the president and his political team.
And a Georgia-based Republican consultant told Fox News that “the lane that Mike is going to run in is the America First fighter who’s been with President Trump.”
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“Mike has the opportunity to run in that lane because it’s an authentic lane for him,” added the consultant, who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely.
Trump, who is the ultimate kingmaker in GOP politics and whose endorsements in Republican primaries are extremely powerful, has yet to weigh in on whom he may back in Georgia’s burgeoning Senate race.
National Republicans were hoping to recruit popular two-term GOP Gov. Brian Kemp to take on Ossoff. But Kemp, who is term-limited, announced earlier this year that he would pass on a 2026 Senate run.
Republican Rep. Buddy Carter, who for a decade has represented a district in coastal Georgia, launched a Senate campaign in the spring. Carter is also courting a Trump endorsement in the GOP primary.
Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King was also running for the Republican nomination, but ended his bid on Thursday.
Former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley, who is the son of former longtime University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley, is also considering a Senate bid. The younger Dooley is close with Kemp, who’s a longtime friend.
Recent polling indicates that Collins holds the edge over his GOP rivals for the party’s Senate nomination and that he would be competitive with Ossoff in next year’s general election.
While Republicans consider Ossoff vulnerable, beating him won’t be easy.
The first-term senator hauled in over $10 million in the April-June second quarter of 2024 fundraising, bringing his cash-on-hand to over $15 million.
And Georgia Democrats are taking aim at Collins.
“Immediately after voting to rip away health insurance from 750,000 Georgians, Rep. Mike Collins now wants Georgians to give him a promotion?” Georgia Democratic Party spokesperson Devon Cruz said in a recent statement to Fox News Digital, as he pointed to the Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s megabill that Trump signed into law earlier this month.
Cruz argued that “Collins would join a crowded, messy primary that will leave the GOP nominee badly bruised, while Sen. Jon Ossoff is building massive momentum to take on whichever Donald Trump loyalist limps over the finish line.”
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