Five takeaways from blistering Georgia Senate debate between Ossoff and Collins

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) feuded in a fiery debate over personal scandal allegations and the Trump administration’s handling of top voter issues, including affordability, data centers, Iran, and immigration.Ossoff and Collins launched blistering attacks on each other’s character during their opening statements and throughout the hourlong faceoff inside Gray Media’s studio production facility in Atlanta on Thursday evening.Both candidates wove personal attacks and affordability points into questions that a panel of journalists from across the state asked on a variety of topics. The race is the only Senate race in the country where a Democratic incumbent has a seat in a state that President Donald Trump won in 2024. A RealClearPolitics average of six surveys taken between Sept. 10-23 of Georgia voters showed that Ossify had a 7.8-percentage-point advantage over Collins, 51% to 43.2%.Affordability The first question focused on the financial and economic impacts of the tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed since January 2025. Although the White House has touted that the taxes on imports would benefit Americans, the cost of goods remains high.Ossoff vowed to “repeal those tariffs” if elected to a second term, adding that Collins “sold out Georgia to his pathetic, childlike devotion to Donald Trump, voting for the tariffs that have sent groceries soaring. … Go buy groceries. No one in this state seriously believes these tariffs are working.”Collins called for the widening of the Savannah River on the coast to allow for more goods to be exported and blamed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act as the root cause of inflation.Collins pointed to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed under the Trump administration as an action that has reduced taxes on families by more than $3,000.“Tax cuts are the answer to keeping more money back in people’s pockets,” Collins said. “That, in turn, when you keep money in the private sector, it turns over another five, six, seven times. … That creates more taxes, more tax-paying people, and businesses grow. But my opponent doesn’t get that. 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.”Data centers Collins vowed to help constituents who do not want data centers in their communities to fight them while also helping residents who want the facilities to acquire them. Collins then pivoted to putting down data centers as a negative that his opponent was affiliated with.“Ossoff, he’s got his major donor, one of his megadonors, his data center billionaire Reid Hoffman, also one of Epstein’s buddies out there, has funneled money into his campaign,” Collins said. “He’s got to answer to those people. He doesn’t have to answer to local people.”Ossoff said Georgians should not have to pay anything to subsidize the energy costs of data centers.“Mike Collins voted to take that money out of your pocket and out of your community and give it instead to data center developers,” Ossoff said. “And that’s the problem, Mike. It’s not just that you’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online. It’s that you’re robbing your constituents to subsidize your donors.”Iran war Ossoff charged Republicans and Collins with misleading the public about the U.S. conflict with Iran.“They told us last year that they obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. This year, they told us it posed an imminent threat. So, on top of the tariffs, now we have eight months of war,” Ossoff said. “Eighteen Americans killed in action. Hundreds wounded. Iran still has its uranium. Iran still has its drones and missiles. Diesel’s at an all-time high. Unleaded gas is at $4.”Collins defended Trump as having had “every right to go in there and make sure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon.”“Jon Ossoff knows this. The [International Atomic Energy Agency], they had already sounded the bells and the alarms that Iran was close to getting a nuclear weapon,” Collins said. “Iran doesn’t only want to decimate and kill Israel; they want us as well. We’ve been at war with this regime for 47 years. They’ve been killing American service members for 47 years, and they were this close to getting a nuclear weapon, and they would have used it.”Personal scandal Ossoff said the debate was a chance for the public to put Collins on “trial” over allegations that he held white nationalist views and befriended people with those views, as well as a media report that the congressman misused taxpayer funding in office.“Mike Collins has brought dishonor to our state through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists,” Ossoff said.Collins is under a House ethics investigation over allegations that he and his former chief of staff misused congressional funds to pay an employee who did little to no work.The Republican nominee responded that the ethics complaint was “bogus.”“It is a nothingburger. It is election season, and my opponent, the Democrats, they wanted to ride this thing through the election,” Collins said. “Matter of fact, I look forward to the day they need to release all of that.”The accusations against Collins include a revelation in July that his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, was using social media to push white nationalist views and deny the Holocaust.Collins was asked by the moderator to “denounce white supremacy.”“I’ve condemned racism, antisemitism, hate. I don’t care where the source is, and I tell him that too. It’s wrong. We have no place in this world for that,” Collins said.Ossoff escalated his attacks against the Georgia Republican on the topic of voting rights, claiming, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”Immigration enforcement One reporter asked the candidates about a federal immigration raid that resulted in the arrests of 475 illegal immigrants working at a Hyundai plant in Georgia. Collins was asked how he would address how Congress handles visas so that American workers are not passed up, but did not answer the question.Ossoff claimed Collins would amplify Trump’s deportation agenda and strengthen it in his home state.“They promised to go after the worst of the worst. Instead, they’ve rounded up people at job sites with no suspicion of any criminal history,” Ossoff said. “They’ve ripped breastfeeding infants from their mothers. They’ve unleashed federal agents to kill Americans on the streets of our cities with impunity.”“That’s Mike Collins’s immigration policy, and that’s what you would expect from the bigot congressman who called for executing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters, who still won’t apologize for personally amplifying neo-Nazi propaganda and allowing it to be disseminated from his home,” Ossoff said.MAJOR ICE OPERATION UNDERWAY IN CALIFORNIA: ‘GO AFTER ANYBODY’Collins, who sponsored the Laken Riley Act in honor of a female college student who was attacked, sexually assaulted, and murdered by an illegal immigrant in Georgia in 2024, was asked about illegal immigrants being held in local county jails because the federal government lacks immigration detention space.Collins said he supported local and state police assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of county jails and that if local jurisdictions would turn over illegal immigrants arrested by local police, communities would be safer.