By David Morgan
May 19 (Reuters) – A hardline Republican congressman and a former college football coach who has never held elective office advanced to a runoff on Tuesday in Georgia’s U.S. Senate Republican primary election, extending a messy intra-party battle to determine who will face Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in the November general election.
• U.S. Representative Mike Collins led former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley 40.5%-30% with 80% of the vote counted, according to the Associated Press. Their projected advance to a June 16 runoff eliminated a third contender, Representative Buddy Carter, who had spent heavily to gain statewide name recognition.
• The eventual Republican nominee faces an uphill battle against Ossoff, a 39-year-old former media executive whose political fate could determine whether Democrats have a chance of taking control of the Senate, where Republicans currently have a 53-47 seat majority.
• Collins, a 58-year-old two-term member of the House of Representatives, positioned himself as the consistent party frontrunner by striking a brash, outspoken persona akin to President Donald Trump and touting his role as sponsor of the Laken Riley Act, named for a Georgia nursing student killed by a man charged with being in the U.S. illegally.
• Dooley, 57, who is a lawyer as well as a former football coach, has run as an alternative to politics in Washington with the endorsement of two-term Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Kemp was seen as an early favorite for Senate nominee but declined the opportunity.
• Ossoff, the only Senate Democrat running for reelection in a state Trump carried in 2024, has been polling ahead of both Collins and Dooley, who like other Republican candidates in the state must contend with Trump’s sagging approval numbers in a climate of rising prices for gasoline and other staples.
• Trump won Georgia with nearly 51% of the vote. But independent political analysts now rate the state as leaning Democratic. Ossoff first won election to the Senate by defeating Trump-aligned Republican incumbent David Perdue in a runoff election in 2021.
(Reporting by David Morgan. Editing by Michael Learmonth)
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