Jon Ossoff won a second term in the Senate on Tuesday, defeating Republican Rep. Mike Collins in a race in which more than 50 Black Georgia lawmakers had publicly condemned his opponent. CBS News and NPR reported the win, as did the Guardian and Al Jazeera. Ossoff, 39, holds a seat that Black Georgia voters helped flip in 2021.
The Black stake in this race was never abstract. In August, more than 50 Black state lawmakers signed a statement saying: “We condemn the Georgia congressman and urge our Republican state legislators to join us in demanding answers for his extensive ties to white nationalists.” They pointed to Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who posted antisemitic content, and to Kip Talley, his former chief of staff, who took part in a group chat with white supremacists.
In October the Daily Beast reported that two organizers of Collins’s campaign convoy program, Joshua Mote and Michael Boggus, had held leadership roles in American Patriots USA. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the group as a white nationalist hate group, and it was founded by Chester Doles, a former Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi National Alliance leader. The campaign said “the past associations of these individuals was not known to the campaign.”
Collins’s answer on his son-in-law was: “No one speaks for me, and I don’t speak for anyone else. I condemn all forms of antisemitism.” He said Scheer had never been part of his campaign. Those are his words, and they stand beside the record: the people around him kept turning up in the same places, and a Senate campaign chooses its organizers.
Ossoff ran on affordability, health care and government accountability, while Collins ran on the president’s immigration enforcement agenda and shrinking government. Al Jazeera’s report, with 38% of the vote counted, showed Ossoff at 63% to Collins’s 29%. Final totals were not in when this was written. Sen. Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s other Democratic senator, wrote: “Congratulations to my brother, Jon Ossoff! Honored to be in this fight with you.”
The result is a hold for Democrats, not a settlement. Georgia’s governor’s race between Keisha Lance Bottoms and Republican Rick Jackson had not been called when CBS last updated, and Bottoms, if she wins, would be the first Black woman elected governor in the country.
A Senate seat won with the votes of Black Georgians is a debt, and Ossoff has one to pay. The test comes in the months ahead, on voting rights protections, on the Justice Department’s conduct toward Black-majority counties, and on whether he pushes his party to defend the districts Republicans just redrew.
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