At separate events over the past few days, contenders atop Georgia’s general election ballot pushed their campaigns ahead of the final weeks of electioneering.
With control of the U.S. Senate at stake, the two contenders attacked each other as dangerous for the country.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff called his Republican challenger, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, unfit for office because of a former Collins staffer’s reported ties to white nationalists and due to the social media posts by Collins’ son-in-law, who lives on the congressman’s property.
“A sitting congressman, currently running for Senate, hosts a neo-Nazi at his house, and that neo-Nazi produces neo-Nazi propaganda from the congressman’s house, and the congressman won’t or maybe can’t get the neo-Nazi in his house to stop producing neo-Nazi content from his house while he’s running for Senate,” Ossoff said at a rally in Athens on Sunday.
“A man who won’t take responsibility for what happens under his own roof can’t be trusted with our national affairs,” Ossoff said.
Collins said at a fundraising dinner Monday that Ossoff was unfit for office as “nothing but a trust fund kid” among “communist crazies.” He characterized Ossoff as supporting “Biden inflation,” transgender-friendly legislation and “wide open” borders allowing “all these criminals just to flood into our country and yes, harm and murder Americans.”
Collins then segued to the passage of his Laken Riley Act, the first bill signed into law by President Donald Trump after he started his second term in the White House. The legislation was a reaction to the murder of a University of Georgia student by a man authorities said was in the country illegally.
Entrepreneur Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor, took a different tack against his opponent, Keisha Lance Bottoms, while speaking after Collins at the same Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition “Victory Dinner” at the Cobb Convention Center.
Rather than mentioning his opponent, Jackson focused on a story he has often told about his childhood. He described an alcoholic mother with a sixth-grade education who worked as a waitress after his father abandoned him as an infant.
“I had seven stepfathers before I was 12 years old,” Jackson said.
He said he wound up a ward of the state in foster homes. As a young adult, he said he could not afford college and found commission work in a “personnel” job. He said he was so successful at it that he was soon able to buy the firm, which he then expanded into healthcare recruitment.
The founder, chairman and CEO of Jackson Healthcare grew wealthy enough to spend more than $100 million of his own money financing his run for governor.
In the late 2000s, Jackson said, he considered becoming a missionary, but an adviser set him on a different path, telling him that “God has given you the capability to know how to make money.”
Jackson said he provided foster children with Christian life coaches and financial support through college.
“My purpose in life since 2008 is to have kingdom impact,” Jackson said. He said he would “take care of the least of these … . “I want to show them how I got out of poverty and I want to tell them that Jesus saved me and following Jesus is the best way to help you in every regard of your life.”
Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta and now Democratic nominee for governor, attacked Jackson in an interview with reporters at the Athens event with Ossoff, characterizing Jackson as a profiteer who was unconcerned about the public good.
Bottoms cited Jackson’s reported investment in a data center in Texas, his connections to a financially troubled hospital in Alabamaand his company’s contract work for the state of Georgia.
“He doesn’t care about people in Texas. He doesn’t care about people in Alabama. He doesn’t care about people in Georgia. It is all about how he makes money for himself,” Bottoms said, according to videos provided through a partnership with C-SPAN. “He wants to continue to rig the system to benefit himself.”
The campaign rhetoric came a month before early voting starts Oct. 13 and seven weeks before Election Day on Nov. 3.
Ossoff, one of the most prolific fundraisers in the U.S. Senate, has been in office since 2021 and wants to keep Georgia’s U.S. Senate delegation in Democratic hands. His fellow Democratic senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, has also been in office since 2021 and was reelected the next year.
Republicans have controlled the Georgia governor’s office since 2003, an era that Bottoms would like to end and that Jackson would like to extend by another four years.
Ty Tagami writes for Capitol Beat News Service
