Ask just about anyone who follows Georgia politics for a living — Republican or Democrat, pollster or scribe — about this year’s top of the ticket, and you’ll hear the same assessment.
Rick Jackson is the stronger of the two Republicans, and Keisha Lance Bottoms is the weaker of the two Democrats. That’s not a blanket partisan knock on Bottoms so much as a nod to reality: Jon Ossoff is an incumbent U.S. Senator with an enormous war chest. His most recent campaign reports show roughly $42.6 million in cash on hand to Mike Collins’ $2.1 million.
That gap has fueled plenty of consternation in Republican circles that Collins is a “weak” general election candidate. Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see. But the primary runoff was in June, and Mike Collins is our nominee. And here’s the part too many Republicans are missing: if we don’t want Keisha Lance Bottoms to be the next governor of Georgia, we have to get behind Mike Collins and help him close the gap with Jon Ossoff.
Why? Because Georgia doesn’t have a long history of split-ticket voting. It never has. Candidates who share the top of the ballot here tend to rise and fall together, and the record on this point is remarkably consistent with the 2022 results being an outlier.
Speaking of 2022, much has been written about the “Kemp-Warnock” voter and for good reason — it was a real phenomenon. But even in that cycle, Brian Kemp outperformed Herschel Walker by just 4.92% or 203,130 votes out of more than 4 million cast. That was considered a massive split, and it was still less than five points.
Go back to the January runoffs that followed the 2020 election, when David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler shared the ballot against Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock: a mere 0.43% separated the two Republicans’ performances. Or 2016, Johnny Isakson’s final campaign, when only 3.75% separated Isakson and Donald Trump — and both men carried Georgia.
Think about those pairings for a moment. Johnny Isakson and Donald Trump: can you imagine two more different candidates? Brian Kemp and Herschel Walker: same story, their shared love of Georgia Bulldog football aside. Rick Jackson and Mike Collins fit that same mold — two very different candidates sharing one ballot, their fates more intertwined than either might care to admit.
History is clear on this point: in Georgia, the top of the ticket finishes within a few points of itself, whether the candidates like it or not.
Now consider the numbers. A bipartisan poll conducted in July for AARP by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio and Democratic pollster John Anzalone found Bottoms up 2 percentage points on Jackson — within the margin of error — while Ossoff led Collins by 9 percentage points.
That’s a 7-point gap between our two candidates, and it’s too much. Any poll is a snapshot in time, but with total turnout likely to mirror that of 2022, that snapshot should alarm every Republican in the state. If Collins loses by 6 percentage points or more, we’re asking Georgia voters for something like a 7-point split ticket to save the governor’s mansion? That’s a big ask. Remember: just under 5% of voters cast their votes for Kemp and Warnock — and that was a lot. Historic, even.
Layer on one more hard truth: midterms are always challenging for the party of a sitting president. This cycle will be no different. Republicans up and down the ballot will be running into a headwind, which makes dragging an underfunded Senate candidate behind us a luxury we cannot afford. That’s not pessimism; it’s arithmetic.
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The good news? Georgia remains a center-right state, and as its voters have proven time and again, anything is possible. Collins may look like a long shot against Ossoff’s fortress of campaign cash, but long shots have a way of closing fast here. And every point he closes widens Rick Jackson’s path and protects Republicans in legislative and county races across the state.
Georgia has now enjoyed 24 years of really good Republican governors — governors who have kept taxes low, budgets balanced, and Georgia the best state in the country to do business. None of us wants to hand that legacy to the other party. Keeping it means embracing Mike Collins’ candidacy — writing the checks, knocking the doors, making the calls — and doing it now, not in late October.
Helping Mike isn’t just about a Senate seat. It’s about electing Rick Jackson, protecting our majorities, and holding the line in what we know will be a challenging year. In Georgia, we win together or we lose together. Let’s act like it.
Chip Lake is a veteran Georgia-based Republican political strategist and consultant.
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