Trump beats a longtime adversary with a late Georgia endorsement, and other election takeaways
Republican gubernatorial candidate Burt Jones gives his concession speech as his wife Jan
(CNN) — President Donald Trump finally got the best of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a Republican race on Tuesday — but voters rejected both of them in another.
In the GOP primary runoff to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins defeated Kemp’s choice, former football coach Derek Dooley. Collins’ win sets the stage for what will be one of the most closely watched Senate races of this year’s midterm elections — one that could have 2028 presidential implications if Ossoff wins reelection given the national buzz he’s generating.
The win for Collins, and Trump, came in an uneven stretch for the president’s picks in Republican primaries. The same Georgia GOP voters that backed Collins rejected the candidate for governor endorsed by both Trump and Kemp in favor of a self-funding businessman, Rick Jackson.
In Alabama, Trump-endorsed Rep. Barry Moore won the runoff for the GOP’s Senate nomination. But in Oklahoma, Trump’s choice in the governor’s race, Mike Mazzei, was in second place and only receiving about one-fourth of the vote in a primary that’s headed to a runoff.
Here are early takeaways from Tuesday’s elections.
Trump finally beats Kemp in Georgia proxy battle
Kemp fended off a Trump-backed primary challenger in his reelection campaign four years ago. But as Republicans looked to replace the two-term governor on Tuesday, Trump prevailed in what turned into a proxy battle between the two heavyweights.
Kemp recruited the more moderate Dooley, a former University of Tennessee football coach, into the race. Trump then waded into the runoff in its final days with an endorsement of Collins, a conservative who had aligned himself with the “Make America Great Again” movement.
In backing Collins, Trump made clear that he was still smarting over Kemp’s refusal to back his lies about widespread fraud in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election — the same reason he sought to oust the governor in 2022. He criticized Dooley in a telephone rally for Collins on Monday for acknowledging that Trump lost Georgia in 2020.
“That’s not exactly the right thing to say, and it’s certainly not what we all stand for with Make America Great Again,” Trump said.
Defeating Ossoff in November will be a much taller task for Collins, one that might be the ultimate gauge of whether Trump or Kemp had the right instincts in the GOP primary.
Ossoff is sitting on $32 million in campaign funds — a head start of more than $30 million over Collins after Republicans pumped money into the costly primary runoff. Democrats are also buzzing about Ossoff as a potential 2028 presidential contender.
Republicans entered the cycle hoping to recruit Kemp himself to challenge Ossoff. The popular governor might have been the party’s best hope of defeating the 39-year-old incumbent — and in doing so, ending Ossoff’s chances at the 2028 nomination before that race has even begun.
Instead, Kemp saw his picks lose out in both marquee Republican races.
For Ossoff, any talk of 2028 is moot without a fall victory
He’s the only Democratic senator running for reelection in a state President Donald Trump won in 2024.
That fact alone should make Ossoff one of the most endangered incumbents in this year’s midterm elections.
But Ossoff, the first millennial elected to the US Senate, is seen by Democratic leaders and donors in a far different light. He’s increasingly mentioned as a man to watch in a seemingly endless field of potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates.
Yet that is getting ahead of things, a point that Ossoff advisers are well aware of.
For any future ambitions to materialize, Ossoff must perform in November in one of the most competitive battleground states in the country.
In short, Ossoff knows his focus must be 2026. A fall defeat would render any 2028 talk moot – something Republicans are mindful of.
Ossoff wasted little time Tuesday night by delivering a blistering attack against Collins, calling him “a notorious bigot, antisemite and extremist.” Yet for the next four and a half months, Collins is not only his opponent, but a man who could stand in the way of a political future.
Collins told supporters Tuesday night, “Y’all know what the mission is.”
“It’s to put a Republican in that seat and get rid of that Jon Ossoff in November. Return this seat to the people of Georgia. And I look forward to helping and getting the help and working to do just that.”
An outsider wins GOP nomination for Georgia governor
In the governor’s race, both Trump and Kemp have egg on their faces.
The self-funding Jackson defeated Jones, the lieutenant governor with endorsements from both the president and the governor. Jackson did so with much stronger support from urban and suburban counties, overcoming Jones’ stronger performance in rural counties.
Jackson, a former health care executive, spent more than $91 million on television advertising this year, according to AdImpact. He brushes off questions about his personal fortune with a rags-to-riches story: Jackson is the child of a broken marriage, cycling through foster homes as his mother battled alcoholism.
His ads portrayed Jones as beholden to special interest and himself as an outsider taking on a rigged political system. But he also aired biographical spots — including one featuring four grandchildren who pick out a zany shirt for Jackson to wear as they try to help him stop looking “so mean” in his ads. And he highlighted his ties to Kemp, including using the governor’s own comments from an April interview with Politico in which he called Jackson a supporter and praised his life story.
While Jackson didn’t have Trump’s endorsement, he earned praise from Trumpworld.
“This has been a hard-fought race with a lot of mudslinging, but I know Rick Jackson to be a good man — and that counts for a lot,” the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said in a social media post Monday.
Notably, Jones didn’t mention the president in his concession speech.
Jackson will take on Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor and senior adviser in former President Joe Biden’s administration.
That race’s outcome could depend on how many Georgia voters split their tickets, selecting one party’s nominee in the governor’s race and the other in the Senate contest. Those who do so represent the very class of swing voters that both parties will be courting in battleground states like Georgia in 2028.
Losses by Trump-backed candidates are suddenly adding up
Trump’s potent endorsement is suddenly looking … well, still potent, but perhaps a little less like a silver bullet.
In losing the GOP primary runoff for Georgia governor to Jackson, Jones becomes the second Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate to lose this month alongside Iowa Rep. Randy Feenstra.
He also becomes the third Trump-endorsed statewide candidate to lose this year, when you include Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller’s primary loss in March. Another Trump-backed candidate, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, didn’t reach 30% of the vote in the state’s crowded GOP gubernatorial primary. She’ll face Attorney General Alan Wilson in a runoff next week.
And the number of Trump-backed candidates to lose their party’s nomination is already rivaling some of the other Trump-era election years.
According to an analysis of data kept by Ballotpedia, the three Trump-endorsed statewide losers are already more than we saw during the entire primary seasons in 2018, 2020 and 2024.
Depending on how things break Tuesday, 2026 could start to rival the high-water mark for Trump-backed candidates losing nominations. That would be in 2022, when three of them lost gubernatorial primaries and four others lost for other statewide executive offices.
The 2022 election year, of course, took place when there was some genuine thought that the Republican Party might turn the page on Trump after his 2020 loss and the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Today, Trump is president once again.
And his endorsement still clearly matters a lot. Just ask Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas or Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, all of whom lost last month after Trump backed primary challengers against them.
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CNN’s Jeff Zeleny and Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.
