Six years ago, Jon Ossoff reached Election Day as a young Democratic challenger trying to dislodge a sitting Republican senator in a state his party had only just begun to crack. In November 2020, David Perdue took 49.73 percent of the vote, ahead of Ossoff’s 47.95 percent. Georgia’s majority requirement kept Perdue from winning outright and sent the race to a January runoff, where Ossoff reversed the result by little more than 1 percentage point.
These days, the landscape greeting Ossoff in the upcoming 2026 midterms looks considerably different. He is now the incumbent, backed by one of the country's largest campaign accounts, and leads Republican candidate Mike Collins in every poll in the latest RealClearPolling average. That average, covering surveys conducted between September 10 and 23, puts Ossoff at 51 percent and Collins at 43.2 percent.
The two candidates will meet for a televised debate Thursday at 7 p.m., with Georgia’s early voting period beginning less than a week away on October 13. Newsweek reached out to the Ossoff and Collins campaigns via email for comment. Political analyst Michael Fahey described the change since 2020 as “almost a different race.” “In 2020, Ossoff was the challenger trying to convince Georgia voters to take a chance on him,” Fahey told Newsweek.
The Democrat then won the January 5 runoff by 54,944 votes, taking 50.61 percent to Perdue’s 49.39 percent. Ossoff is now starting from a different place. The six most recent surveys in the RealClearPolling average give him leads of 4 to 10 points, though two put him at 49 percent, an important distinction in a state where a candidate needs a majority to avoid a runoff.
Polling a month before an election, as ever, remains only a snapshot of what could later materialize, predating the final weeks of campaigning, when candidates make a last-ditch effort to drum up support. Still, Ossoff spent much of his 2020 campaign trying to catch up to an incumbent who ultimately finished ahead of him in the first round. While he eventually prevailed, Ossoff has several advantages this time around that weren't available to him in 2020.
They’ve seen it,” Fahey said. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll released in May 2025 put Republican Governor Brian Kemp at 49 percent against Ossoff’s 46 percent. Kemp was also the only Republican tested in that poll who came close to Ossoff, and his approval rating stood at 60 percent.
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