Jon Ossoff has been re-elected to the Senate in Georgia, defeating Mike Collins, his Republican challenger.

Ossoff, regularly cited as a potential Democratic presidential contender in 2028, has becoming a rising star in the party. In recent months he has made headlines with a steady stream of viral speeches on conspicuously national issues.

The senator made his re-election campaign a referendum on the Trump administration’s misdeeds, highlighting self-serving stock trades and business deals by the president and those in the president’s orbit, as well as the consequences of the war in Iran and Trump’s trade policies on the pocketbooks of Georgia’s voters.

He raised at least $115.9m for the election cycle, outraising Collins by many multiples. Ossoff had never been behind Collins in the polls.

Speaking at a Democratic election night event in Georgia on Tuesday evening, Andre Dickens. the Atlanta mayor, declared his party cared “about whether you can afford your groceries; whether you can fill up your tank and make it to the weekend. That’s not left or right,” he said. “That’s life.”

“As mayor, I talk to people every day who are struggling,” said Dickens. These people see politicians in Washington “making decisions that benefit themselves, instead of the people that they serve”, he added. “The people are tired, and they’re angry.”

Collins ran a campaign focused on immigration enforcement and anti-transgender policies that was badly marred by ties between campaign staff and white nationalists, neo-Nazis and far-right extremists.

Reporters from CNN revealed that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who had worked with his trucking business, advocated white supremacist and Nazi views online. Collins’ former chief of staff, Kip Talley, and other aides had met with white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, who had been asking Collins’ office to intervene on behalf of Charles C Johnson, a Holocaust denier and rightwing activist who was incarcerated on contempt of court charges.