ATLANTA—Georgia residents flocked to the polls in record numbers for early voting, which includes two hotly contested races—one of which could determine whether President Donald Trump has a cooperative Senate and if voters are inclined to choose a political outsider or career politician to govern their state.
The Peach State has had solely Democratic representation in the upper chamber of Congress since 2021. Meanwhile, Republicans have retained governorship of Georgia for 23 years.
Healthcare billionaire Rick Jackson, a Republican, seeks to extend that gubernatorial streak against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms, who also served as a senior adviser for public engagement under the Biden administration.
The Senate race will test the power of a President Donald Trump endorsement, after he threw his support behind Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) who faces incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.).
Polls list the governor’s race as a toss-up and the Senate bid as likely in favor of Ossoff.
The most recent RealClearPolitics average of polls had Jackson ahead of Bottoms by 1 percentage point; Ossoff was ahead of Collins by 8 eight percentage points.
Many pundits, election experts, and officials with voter-mobilization efforts said they believe Jackson is on a path to victory, and that Ossoff will retain his seat.
When The Epoch Times talked with Georgians on the ground over a span of weeks from both sides of the political spectrum—whether they were voters, staffers for the candidates, or personnel with get-out-the-vote efforts—they shared a commonality: confidence that their candidates would prevail.
Record Turnout
Early voting kicked off in Georgia on Oct. 13, which experienced a record first-day turnout. A week later, voters were still breaking records with more than 1 million ballots cast by Oct. 20, an increase of more than 112,600 through the same time period in the 2022 elections.
That record trend continued throughout the duration of early voting, surpassing the 2022 total of in-person ballots cast.
According to the Georgia secretary of state voter database, there are about 7.5 million active voters in the state, and 2.83 million have already voted.
Jacquelyn Harn, spokeswoman for Greater Georgia, a group founded by former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler that works to register, educate, and mobilize voters, said the week of voting before Election Day typically has the highest turnout.
“We’re breaking numbers with voter turnout right now across the state, so voter enthusiasm is there,” Harn told The Epoch Times. “It’s always great to see people realizing that their vote matters.”
She credited the increase in early-voting turnout to enthusiasm created by gubernatorial candidate Jackson, who raised more than $240 million, including about $200 million from himself, and spent about $213 million on his campaign.
Jackson’s opponent, Bottoms, has raised about $13.3 million and spent $11.4 million, but low-propensity voters have become aware of the governor’s race because of Jackson’s steep expenditures on the race, Harn said.
“More resources are being spent here, now more than ever,” Harn said. “He’s able to reach people that … organizations in the past haven’t been able to reach because of the resources, and so I think that is driving a lot of it.”
She added that Jackson’s millions could have a trickle-down effect.
Scot Turner, executive director of Eternal Vigilance Action, a nonprofit organization focused on election policy, concurred with Harn.
“I think Rick Jackson will win, and I think he’ll take the rest of the statewide offices with him on his coattails,” Turner told The Epoch Times.
Turner, a former Georgia state representative from 2013 to 2021, who has also been heavily involved in monitoring Georgia’s elections since his own name was on the ballot, said about two-thirds of the work carried out by Eternal Vigilance Institute is election related.
He predicts a Jackson victory and said Collins faces a tougher path to winning the Senate seat.
Incumbent Ossoff is polling with a healthy lead over Collins, Turner said, foreshadowing a repeat of the 2022 midterm election, when Republican Gov. Brian Kemp was reelected and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock prevailed over football legend Herschel Walker.
But, Turner noted, nearly one in five early voters for 2026 midterms did not vote in 2022.
“Some of those people were probably too young to vote in 2022, others may have moved to Georgia,” Turner said. “It introduces an interesting variable into the analysis. Nearly one in five voters lacks a strong voting history in the last midterm election, so it’s hard to figure out how they’re going to go.”
Spending in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race roughly reflects the governor’s bid, except the political parties are swapped.
Ossoff raised nearly $116 million throughout his reelection bid and spent about $105.8 million. Collins raised $9.7 million and spent $9.2 million.
Attention and Investments
Georgia’s top midterm races received the attention of U.S. presidents, both current and former, and come as a massive manufacturing investment was announced for the state.
Vice President JD Vance traveled to Atlanta after early voting began, preceding President Donald Trump’s two visits to the state for rallies to boost the Republican candidates.
“We’re going to send Mike Collins to the United States Senate,” Trump said at an Oct. 16 rally. “We’re going to send a great friend of mine and an amazing, amazing man—Rick Jackson will be your next governor.”
Joining the president at his first rally in Dalton, Georgia, was Jackson, Collins, former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who now serves as the head of the Small Business Administration, and several other state Republican officials and candidates.
Speaking to the media before the rally, Collins was asked how it felt to have Trump’s attention in his race.
“It just shows that he knows what I know. This thing is in the margin of error. It is right there. All we gotta do is just make sure that people go vote.”
Mack Parnell, executive director of the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition, a nationwide group that works to educate and mobilize faith-based voters, expressed the same sentiment.
Parnell told The Epoch Times he has traveled across Georgia for the past 18 months, speaking to residents from all walks of life to ensure people are, firstly, aware of the midterm, and secondly, educated on who’s running for which offices.
“This is the biggest effort that we have put into this just because we know in a state like Georgia every every ounce of effort matters,” he said.
Based on his conversations over the last year and a half, Parnell predicts Jackson will win the governor’s race by a slim margin, adding that he believes “Mike Collins has a pathway to victory, but it is exceptionally, exceptionally, exceptionally narrow.”
Although polling has Collins behind Ossoff, Parnell said Trump’s recent announcement at his second Georgia rally of a $4.2 billion investment from automaker Audi to build its first manufacturing facility in the United States—in the central city of Macon, Georgia—could have an effect on undecided voters.
“In the economic development world, it’s the white whale,” Parnell said. “It’s not just the vehicle manufacturing that you get, it’s all of the supply chain that comes to it, it’s the workforce development, and then the other thing is, strategically, it’s not in metro Atlanta. It’s literally in the center of the state.”
Trump described the investment as the largest in U.S. auto industry history.
Construction of the facility at its 1,500-acre site is set to begin next month, with plans for it to produce 200,000 cars annually.
“This is a long-term investment because we believe in the American market,” Audi Chairman and CEO Gernot Döllner said on stage at the Trump rally.
Parnell noted that a deal this significant could sway the undecided Georgia voter in the final days before the Nov. 3 general election.
As Trump invests his time and attention on the races and Audi invests its money into the state, the Democratic candidates for the Senate and governor races were boosted by former President Barack Obama, who headlined an Oct. 28 rally in Morrow, Georgia.
“When you campaign in as many elections as I have, you can tell when an election comes along, it just feels a little different,” Obama said onstage. “An election where people are so ready for something new, so hungry for something better, so sick and tired of being sick and tired that everywhere we go, it feels like change is in the air.”
Ossoff and Bottoms attended and also spoke at the event. The candidates have often campaigned together during the midterm cycle.
At a previous joint rally, Ossoff said, “Georgia deserves so much better than [Collins], and America deserves so much better than Donald Trump.”
“With every vote passed, we’re sending a message loud and clear for Donald Trump and slick Rick Jackson,” Bottoms said in her speech.
As previously stated by Parnell, the intensity at which both sides campaign matters because of the history of tight races in
Georgia has a history of tight races, which is reflected in the intense campaigning. In the 2018 governor’s race, Gov. Brian Kemp won by about 54,000 votes. President Joe Biden took Georgia in 2020 by almost 12,000 votes.
In the 2022 midterms, Georgians reelected Republican Kemp but also sent Democratic Warnock to the U.S. Senate over Herschel Walker.
Voter Concerns
Specifically in Georgia’s Senate race, both sides often attempted to link the other candidate to fringe groups.
Parnell, Turner, and Harn all described interactions with voters on the ground who vehemently reject the growing socialist movement under the Democratic Party.
They said that although Ossoff and Bottoms are not official members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), just the mere presence of the movement under their side could act as a repellent for on-the-fence voters.
Several Georgians who spoke to The Epoch Times at precincts across the state also mentioned socialism.
Husband-and-wife couple Greg and Mary Justice cast their ballots in Valdosta. Mary lawfully immigrated from Venezuela to the United States years ago and witnessed firsthand her home country’s descent into a socialism.
“I really love this country,” Mary Justice said. “[Socialism] will destroy us.”
A Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll released on Oct. 27 showed that 52 percent of registered voters have an unfavorable view of socialism.
A poll of 1,440 registered voters from Oct. 23 to Oct. 26 by The Economist/YouGov found 50 percent marking that they would vote for a Democratic Socialist candidate while 41 percent indicated they would not. The remaining 9 percent said they were unsure.
One voter who spoke to The Epoch Times expressed indifference to the socialism movement.
“Education is going wrong, taking care of people is going wrong, just humanity is going wrong right now,” said Alan Drew, who cast his early ballot on Oct. 13 in Valdosta. “We’re just not taking care of each other like we can, and you call it socialism if you want to. I call it looking out for each other.”
Meanwhile, Ossoff has taken aim at his opponent, often accusing Collins of having staffers on his campaign that were tied to white nationalist groups.
At a speech during a rally in Atlanta, the incumbent senator accused his opponent of being surrounded by neo-Nazis and white nationalists in his campaign—and personal life—which was met with raucous anger from hundreds of attendees.
Ossoff also had a webpage on his campaign website dedicated to these allegations.
Samuel Marshall, a Democratic voter who spoke to The Epoch Times, said that as a black man, he could never vote for Collins because of these allegations.
“I started seeing things where he’s been tied to white nationalists, and you know he could dismiss it, but the evidence is there,” Marshall said after casting his ballot for Democrats in Valdosta. “[Collins] can’t deny what’s there.”
Collins addressed the allegations during a debate with Ossoff earlier in October.
“I condemn any sort of hate speech, anti-Semitism, hate of any kind,” he said. “It’s abhorrent and I’ve fired people when things happen.”
Voter Issues
Democratic and Republican voters in Georgia held vastly different views on current hot-button topics and how they should be handled.
“The contrast has never been more sharp than it is this year, and I think that’s actually a sad thing,” Parnell said. “It’s just a total delineation of worldviews.”
Voter opinions about U.S. military actions on the Iranian regime varied from wishing for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s removal to staunch support for the attacks.
Greg and Mary Justice both reasoned that the Iran war is a short-term inconvenience for a long-term solution: ensuring the regime does not obtain a nuclear weapon.
“I think we need to be aggressive, I think we need to finish it,” Greg said. “Imagine Iran with a nuclear weapon, and all of the turmoil they’re causing now and have been.”
Greg Justice added that he believes Trump is “kind of a nut,” and Mary Justice finished his sentence, with “I think that’s what we needed.”
Democratic voters as well as candidates Ossoff and Bottoms, on the campaign trail and at rallies, have consistently said they don’t believe America is in danger from Iran.
“[Trump] got into a war that he didn’t have the right people around him to plan. He thought he could just go in and bomb them away, and it didn’t happen,” Marshall said. “Now you’re in a war you can’t get out.”
Marshall and other Democratic voters often blamed Trump’s decision to attack Iran for what has caused what they described as elevated prices on gas, food, and everyday items.
Ossoff told his constituents he would continue working to rein in the Trump administration’s actions against the Iranian regime, while Collins vowed to support the president’s agenda.
Aside from Iran, voters shared sharply differing opinions about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations to apprehend and deport criminal illegal immigrants across the country.
Republican residents in Georgia expressed great support for the fact that the U.S.–Mexico border has essentially been shut down, with zero illegal immigrants released into the United States in 17 months.
Removing mass numbers of foreign nationals illegally in the country is necessary to ease the strain on U.S. resources, and prices on everything will eventually come down, they said, but it could take time. Republicans said they would not trust Democratic candidates to handle border security again, referring to the crisis under the Biden administration.
The increase in immigration enforcement under Trump is also a direct result of how the issue was handled by President Joe Biden.
“What were they thinking?” Greg Justice said of the Biden administration. “They weren’t thinking about what was good for the country.”
Mary Justice said immigration enforcement and a locked down border is a personal issue for her. She said many of her family members lawfully obtained U.S. citizenship, sometimes waiting years to do so. Her brother and sister are still undergoing the process.
“Why make it so hard for them, and so easy for some others that shouldn’t be here, like the ones who crossed the border [under Biden],” she said.
Meanwhile, Democratic voter Christina Okuma said she was horrified by ICE and described agents as a secret militia for the federal government.
“I’m disgusted with what’s going on today, so we need some real changes,” Okuma told The Epoch Times.
Mason Jordan, an attendee at an Ossoff–Bottoms joint rally on Oct. 17 in Atlanta, concurred with Okuma’s stance, describing his disappointment in the federal government’s operations to apprehend and deport criminal illegal immigrants.
“We’ve got to get ICE out of the streets, we’ve got to stop looking at people as illegal, and we’ve got to start actually caring about respecting every single American and their values and contributions,” Jordan said.
Jamie Carson, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, told The Epoch Times via email that he believes voter enthusiasm is stronger among Democrats, which is historically expected during the midterm cycle.
Midterm elections often give the minority party a higher enthusiasm advantage, especially if whichever party the sitting president belongs to is unpopular, Carson wrote.
“Trump’s support among Republican voters is still extremely strong,” he said.
But he noted that Collins’s close ties to the president could have a tradeoff.
The partnership may dissuade independents and undecided voters in Georgia, who are ever-more crucial in Georgia’s elections.
“Both parties have highly consolidated bases, so the decisive question increasingly becomes what relatively small groups of independents and cross-pressured voters do,” Carson said.
Turner, with Eternal Vigilance Action, described a similar view about Georgia’s elections.
“It’s the middle here that decides elections,” Turner said. “They’re the kingmakers.”
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