Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins just entered Georgia’s U.S. Senate race in late July, but his campaign says he’s already built the infrastructure needed to flip the Senate seat red in 2026.
Incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., narrowly won the state in a 2022 runoff election and is now up for reelection.
“He [Collins] is the consensus candidate. He is the broad coalition candidate and he is the candidate best suited to win next November, without a doubt,” a source within the Collins campaign told The Daily Signal.
In the May 2026 Republican primary, Collins is facing off against U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., as well as Derek Dooley, a former college football coach who is the son of the late University of Georgia head football coach Vince Dooley. All three of these candidates have put Ossoff on blast for his support of former President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
A spokesperson for the Carter campaign told The Daily Signal, “Buddy Carter is the only proven, battle-tested conservative who has the resources to take on radical liberal Jon Ossoff and expose him for the trans activist he is.”
Carter has made transgender participation in women’s sports a focus of early campaign messaging.
Carter’s spokesperson added, “Georgia deserves a MAGA Warrior in the senate, and that man is Buddy Carter.”
Ossoff’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The son of former Rep. Mac Collins, R-Ga., Mike Collins has represented Georgia’s 8th Congressional District since 2023. He also owns and operates a large trucking business.
In the House of Representatives, Collins has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump and introduced the Laken Riley Act, which the president signed into law in January. The legislation, named for a young Georgia woman killed by an illegal immigrant in February 2024, requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain noncitizens who have been arrested for certain property crimes or violent crimes.
He has made this accomplishment a main focus of his early campaign promotional materials, and has repeatedly attempted to tie Ossoff to Biden’s border policies.
Georgia is a state of over 11 million people, with 159 counties spread out over almost 60,000 square miles.
But now, two weeks into his campaign, Collins is boasting of having county campaign chairs in every single county in the state. These chairs are called “convoy captains,” a reference to his career in the trucking business.
The county chairs, who include state legislators and other local Republican figures, will be part of Collins’ low-propensity voter engagement effort.
His campaign says this approach is based off the Trump campaign, where Trump established local offices in neighborhoods to engage low-propensity voters.
“We’ve modeled this system after the ‘Trump Force 47’ program that was in Georgia and battleground states across the country last year that really drove out these low-prop voters and shifted the tides of the election,” an operative within the campaign told The Daily Signal.
The Collins team says the county chairs are high-profile names, figures from the political orbit of both Donald Trump and Gov. Brian Kemp who helped both of those politicians win statewide.
These include figures such as state House Majority Whip James Burchett in Ware County, and Matthew Gambill, the governor’s floor leader in the House, in Bartow County.
With the people it has serving as county chairs, the team says it believes Collins is uniquely poised to maximize voter turnout in a state with a diverse voting population.
“The names that are on that list were on the governor’s list, were on Trump’s list,” said a campaign operative. “They are county commissioners, they are donors, and these are a very high number of recognizable names.”
Dooley’s campaign, when asked by The Daily Signal if it had an infrastructure in place, spoke proudly of the political newcomer’s work on the road.
“Since launching his Georgia First campaign for the U.S. Senate last week, Derek Dooley has been on the road, meeting with grassroots conservatives across the state,” said Dooley spokesman Connor Whitney. “In just 10 days, he’s visited 16 counties … and he looks forward to earning the trust and endorsement of Georgia voters and defeating Jon Ossoff next year.”
When Carter’s campaign was asked what they were doing in this early stage of the campaign cycle, a spokesperson replied, “Buddy is traveling the state, sharing his MAGA record and building an operation. As the only self-made Trump conservative this race, he’s working to earn every vote.”
Collins’ Georgia county infrastructure is also similar to that of Republican candidates such as former Rep. Mike Rogers in Michigan, who has built a similar infrastructure across all 83 counties of the Wolverine State.
With the primary not until May 2026, and the possibility of a runoff primary after that, setting up a statewide voter engagement team could be crucial for securing early support.