Georgia Republicans want the president to endorse a candidate in their critical Senate primary. They’re hoping it doesn’t come too late.
Some GOP strategists and officials are worried President Donald Trump will wait until the 11th hour to back his preferred Republican contender. His last-minute endorsement worked out fine for Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was likely already ahead in Texas. Not so much for Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa), who lost his bid for governor on Tuesday, four days after Trump backed him.
With early voting in Georgia’s Republican Senate runoff less than two weeks away, some Republicans are warning that the timeline for Trump to tilt the scale in the race is closing. Both Rep. Mike Collins, a loyal Trump ally, and former college football coach Derek Dooley amped up their jockeying for Trump’s support after last month’s initial primary.
“The window is starting to close,” said Casey Cagle, a former Georgia lieutenant governor who is supporting Collins in the Senate race. “Candidates have to spend time and resources to make sure people know about the endorsement.”
That ticking clock is only adding to the speculation of when the president might leave his mark on the race.
“I wouldn’t want Trump to get in at the last minute down here. What happened in Iowa could happen in Georgia next and continue to ruin the president’s win streak,” said one person connected to the Georgia Senate race who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak openly about the state of play of the runoff.
Republicans are eager for Trump to step in and help unify their party around either Collins or Dooley as they face an uphill battle to defeat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who they widely acknowledge is a formidable opponent. Ossoff, who has led by a relatively comfortable margin in public polls, has built a massive campaign war chest and avoided a messy primary of his own to coast into the general election. That makes the urgency for Republicans to consolidate behind a single candidate all the more pressing — and there is no better mechanism with which to clear a conservative field than a Trump endorsement.
But Trump still appears to be mulling his options, even as the candidates made overtures to the White House in the early days of the runoff. Collins himself spoke to several Trump allies, according to a person familiar with the conversation, and the Dooley campaign has continued its contact with the White House, according to two people familiar with his outreach efforts.
Trump is likely weighing his options, said one senior national Republican official, who suggested the endorsement is under “active consideration” by the president. Shortly after the May 19 primary, the president called one of his most faithful lieutenants in the state — Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who’s running for Georgia governor — to take the race’s temperature, according to one person familiar with the conversation.
The White House deferred to the RNC when asked for comment. The Republican National Committee said they are on offense in Georgia, bashing Ossoff and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms, when pressed on if Trump will make an endorsement ahead of the GOP runoff.
“Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms are running as a united ticket, fully embracing each other’s records of defunding the police, coddling criminals, rolling out the red carpet for illegals, and advancing the failed Biden-Harris agenda. Republicans are on offense to save Georgia from these radical lunatics and continue delivering on President Trump’s historic agenda,” said RNC spokeswoman Emma Hall.
Republicans in Georgia are eager for the president to get involved, but they don’t want a repeat of what happened to Feenstra, even as they acknowledge that the dynamics of the Georgia race are different from Iowa. The three-term representative was narrowly defeated by businessperson Zach Lahn in the GOP primary for Iowa governor after failing to capitalize on Trump’s late endorsement and consolidate MAGA support in what many local Republicans deemed a lackluster campaign.
A second Georgia-based Republican strategist said if Trump does endorse in the state, “I would think it would need to come before June 8,” to have a decisive impact. Statewide early voting for the June 16 runoff begins June 8.
Another Georgia-based GOP strategist, who is uninvolved in the race, cautioned that the president’s backing “is only good in a Republican primary if Republican primary voters are aware of the endorsement.”
Trump’s grip on Georgia’s GOP has tightened in recent years, and has already been put on full display this election cycle: He’s vanquished longstanding foes like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky and Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana. There is no doubt that the president’s endorsement will carry weight in Georgia, a perennial battleground.
Before Iowa, Trump was on a streak with endorsing winners, from Paxton, who beat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the Texas Senate runoff last week, to Rep. Julia Letlow, who beat Cassidy in the Louisiana primary — a reality the president bragged about in a Truth Social post on Monday night, writing that his endorsement “score for two weeks” is “38-0.”
Collins, a loyal Trump ally on Capitol Hill, finished first in the state’s May primary by a ten-point margin. Public polling shows him in the lead, but Dooley has experienced a late burst of momentum. A recent pollfrom JMC Analytics and Polling had Collins at 50 percent and Dooley at 36 percent, with 15 percent of voters undecided.
“In Georgia, who President Trump endorses matters, even if it’s late,” said Clayton Henson, a senior adviser to Derek Dooley. “We are making our case and we are working to earn the trust of the President’s coalition.”
When asked for comment, Collins’ campaign pointed POLITICO toward a remark the representative made earlier this year: “The president has always had the impeccable ability to put his name on someone at the right time to get the most bang for his buck,” he told reporters in March.
Collins has tried to signal from the onset of his campaign that he is the natural inheritor of the MAGA mantle, and several MAGA-aligned groups — like the powerful Club for Growth super PAC and Turning Point Action, which usually aligns with Trump but split with him in Iowa — have already lined up behind him.
But shortly after the primary, Collins’ campaign faced backlash after his top aide Brandon Phillips, who is also at the center of a House Ethics complaint, posted a vulgar insult directed at a Dooley-aligned operative’s wife on social media.
Collins has since disavowed Phillips and hired a slate of top Trump campaign operatives, including pollster Tony Fabrizio and data strategist Tim Saler, in addition to Chip Englander as a general consultant.
Dooley, for his part, has leaned hard into his support from GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, a longtime family friend who has had a sometimes-frosty relationship with Trump afterdefeating him in the 2022 primaries. But Dooley has also attempted to woo Trump’s base, emphasizing the importance of expanding the Republican coalition to win statewide in a battleground like Georgia.
“It’s an honor to have Gov. Kemp’s endorsement. His leadership has been inspirational to me,” Dooley said during a one-on-one runoff debate with Collins at the end of May. “And of course I would be honored to have the president’s support. Everybody would love President Trump’s support. We’ve all been very supportive of his agenda.”