Derek Dooley campaigned in rural Georgia this month with a lifelong friend: Gov. Brian Kemp, who also happens to be the state’s most popular Republican. Yet Mr. Dooley remains, by his own admission, the underdog in the Republican Senate primary runoff.
His opponent, Representative Mike Collins, who led after both advanced to a runoff in the first-round election last month, is the race’s self-styled MAGA candidate. President Trump has not endorsed either man ahead of the June 16 runoff — at least not yet.
But Mr. Collins told a Republican women’s club in suburban Griffin last week that Georgia’s MAGA crowd has “always known” who’s who. “I’ve been out there all over the country with President Trump,” he said.
Trump-aligned candidates have won nearly every time the president has made a primary endorsement this year, but some of those elections occurred in deeply Republican states, including Louisiana and Texas. In Georgia, Republicans face a much more difficult electoral landscape in their bid to unseat Senator Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, who has banked more than $32 million for the November election. That’s far more than either Republican so far.
The stakes are high for Democrats too, who must hold the seat to have any realistic chance of taking control of the Senate.
Given the president’s endorsement success, a Trump nod for Mr. Collins before the runoff would likely notch another victory for the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. But he could also make it harder to oust Mr. Ossoff, who had been considered the Democrats’ most vulnerable senator seeking re-election this year but is now seen as a formidable incumbent.
Mr. Collins, a second-term congressman who owns a trucking company, said people ask him “all the time” if Mr. Trump plans to endorse him.
“You don’t ever put words in the mouth of the president,” he said in a brief interview in Griffin, which is south of Atlanta. “I would love to have his support. He always has this impeccable ability of just putting his thumb on there at the right time, to get the biggest bang for the buck.”
Mr. Dooley, a lawyer and former football coach, said he would also be “honored” to receive Mr. Trump’s backing, though that seems unlikely given the history of hostility between the president and Mr. Kemp. In any event, that was not Mr. Dooley’s focus, he said in a brief interview in rural Sandersville, about halfway between Atlanta and Savannah. “I’m not worried about the president,” he said.
Mr. Trump does not have a perfect record. His pick in the Iowa governor’s race lost in a five-way Republican primary last week. Mr. Trump did not endorse him until just a few days before Election Day.
Mr. Dooley, whose father was a famed football coach at the University of Georgia, has been trailing Mr. Collins, whose father served for 12 years in Congress. Mr. Dooley insisted that he could close the gap and even overtake his opponent in the final days of the race, especially if more moderate Republicans in the Atlanta area turn out on June 13.
Mr. Collins led in the first-round election last month by nearly 11 percentage points. He said his campaign was better organized and predicted that his MAGA credentials would compel Republicans who tend to vote only when Mr. Trump is on the ballot to turn out.
Were the president to support Mr. Collins, the runoff would pit Mr. Trump against Mr. Kemp. The two men have had a strained relationship ever since the governor refused to participate in the president’s attempts to reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 victory in the state. Mr. Kemp decided last year against running for the Senate seat himself.
Though Mr. Kemp remains more popular than Mr. Trump among Georgia Republicans, the influence of the party’s MAGA wing has grown — a shift that would further solidify should Mr. Collins and the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, both win their primary runoffs.
State Representative Josh Bonner, a Fayetteville Republican who campaigned for Mr. Collins in Griffin, said the Trump-Kemp history is less important to primary voters than picking a proven legislator to take on Mr. Ossoff.
“There’s very stark differences between the two candidates that have nothing to do with the governor or the president,” he said.
The long shadow of the election six years ago haunts Georgia Republicans. They suffered serious blows when Mr. Ossoff and another Democrat, Raphael Warnock, won their Senate runoffs in early 2021. Mr. Warnock then won re-election in 2022.
The losses still sting.
“The Republican Party has not won a Senate race in 10 years,” a woeful Mr. Dooley told about 50 people, some of them longtime acquaintances of Mr. Kemp and his wife, Marty, in the staid conference room of a local bank in Sandersville. Republicans, he added, needed a nominee that could appeal not only to their base but also to swing voters.
Mr. Kemp said the nominee should be a “political outsider,” as Mr. Dooley is. The governor, sounding like a political operative, cataloged Republicans who ousted Democratic senators in 2024: Bernie Moreno of Ohio, “a car salesman”; Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, “a finance guy,” and Tim Sheehy of Montana, “a former Navy SEAL.”
“They didn’t have to worry about defending some political record,” Mr. Kemp said.
The House Ethics Committee has been looking into Mr. Collins over allegations that his office paid a district office intern who had a romantic relationship with the congressman’s chief of staff but did not actually work in the office. Mr. Collins has dismissed the investigation as based on an anonymous “bogus claim.”
The investigation makes Mr. Collins an easier target for Mr. Ossoff, Mr. Dooley said.
“He’s hoping Mike Collins wins the nomination,” he said. “He’s begging for it, so when Mike does, he can deploy all that cash and go full attack.”
Last week, a group of Democratic state lawmakers in Georgia called for an investigation into a school safety company founded by some of Mr. Dooley’s relatives that received millions of dollars in contracts during Mr. Kemp’s tenure. Some relatives also gave to political committees backing Mr. Kemp and Mr. Dooley’s Senate campaign. Mr. Dooley dismissed any suggestion of impropriety as “absolutely not true at all” and noted that state money had been distributed directly to school districts.
Mr. Collins, acting like a front-runner, did not dwell on Mr. Dooley at the festive Republican women’s club luncheon in Griffin. Instead, he portrayed himself as a Goldilocks candidate: a hard-line conservative who could pass bipartisan legislation. Mr. Collins sponsored the first piece of legislation that Mr. Trump signed in his second term — the Laken Riley Act, which targets unauthorized immigrants for deportation if they have been charged with certain crimes.
“How many times have the Republicans had control of the House, the Senate and the White House, and we still struggle to get anything done?” Mr. Collins told about 50 Republicans over a lunch of chicken salad sandwiches.
“It seems like the problem is always in the Senate, and it’s not because we don’t have enough Republicans — we do,” he continued. “Sometimes, we just don’t always have the right Republican.”
