Jon Ossoff’s campaign has placed Social Security at the centre of the Georgia Senate race after resurfacing a 2025 remark by Republican challenger Mike Collins in which Collins said it should become more advantageous for people to “get off of Medicaid, get off of Social Security, get back into the workforce.” Ossoff’s campaign has turned the clip into a major attack line, portraying Collins as wanting to push Americans off Social Security and back to work.
The political fireworks come with an important footnote: fact-checkers say the short clip leaves out surrounding context. Collins was discussing President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and arguing that lowering taxes could make working more attractive; he did not explicitly propose forcing Social Security recipients back into employment. Still, the wording has given Ossoff a remarkably potent political weapon in a state where older voters are paying close attention to the program.
Jon Ossoff Makes Social Security a Central Weapon
Jon Ossoff has repeatedly used the Collins quotation in television advertising, including an ad that plays the disputed phrase more than once. FactCheck.org reported that Ossoff’s campaign had spent more than $2.8 million on the advertisement since it began airing in August. The campaign says its message does not claim Collins would literally use force to remove people from Social Security, but instead argues that his comments reveal a policy preference.
For Ossoff, the strategy is politically understandable. Social Security is an unusually powerful issue among older voters, and a July AARP poll found that voters aged 50 and older ranked Social Security among their leading concerns. The same poll found Ossoff ahead overall but Collins holding an advantage among older voters—making every sentence about retirement benefits potentially worth its weight in campaign advertisements.
Jon Ossoff Faces a Republican Opponent With a Remark That Won’t Disappear
Collins’ original comments were made while defending Trump’s tax-cut legislation and arguing that tax policy could encourage people to work. His statement referred to both Medicaid and Social Security, making the precise meaning of the Social Security portion a subject of political and media debate. Fact-checkers concluded that Ossoff’s presentation of the quote omitted important context.
Satirically speaking, Georgia’s Senate race has now reached the stage where a single sentence from a year-old radio interview can be resurrected, given a campaign soundtrack and sent back into the political bloodstream. Somewhere in Georgia, an exhausted campaign staffer is probably listening to the same seven seconds of audio for the 900th time and wondering whether anyone remembers the rest of the interview.
Jon Ossoff and Mike Collins are therefore heading toward an increasingly expensive and closely watched Senate contest in which Social Security could remain a major dividing line. The controversy illustrates how a politician’s words can acquire an entirely new life once they enter a campaign advertisement. OGM News will continue following the Georgia Senate race, the Social Security debate and the next political twist, because this particular sound bite appears nowhere near ready for retirement.
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