Jon Ossoff wins Georgia Senate race over Republican Mike Collins

Jon Ossoff has been re-elected to the Senate in Georgia, defeating Mike Collins, his Republican challenger.

Ossoff made his re-election campaign a referendum on the Trump administration’s misdeeds, highlighting self-serving stock trades and business deals by the president and those in the president’s orbit, as well as the consequences of the war in Iran and Trump’s trade policies on the pocketbooks of Georgia’s voters.

He raised at least $115.9m for the election cycle, outraising Collins by many multiples. Ossoff had never been behind Collins in the polls.

Collins ran a campaign focused on immigration enforcement and anti-transgender policies that was badly marred by ties between campaign staff and white nationalists, neo-Nazis and far-right extremists.

Reporters from CNN revealed that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who had worked with his trucking business, advocated white supremacist and Nazi views online. Collins’ former chief of staff, Kip Talley, and other aides had met with white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, who had been asking Collins’ office to intervene on behalf of Charles C Johnson, a Holocaust denier and rightwing activist who was incarcerated on contempt of court charges.

Ossoff had repeatedly hammered Collins on these connections at debates and in campaign advertising.