Keisha Lance Bottoms wins Georgia governor race, becoming first Black woman elected to the post

Result on Tuesday

Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat and former mayor of Atlanta, won the Georgia governor's race on Tuesday, 3 November, defeating Republican Rick Jackson, a billionaire businessman. The Associated Press and NBC both projected the result. Bottoms becomes the first Black woman elected governor in the United States, and she takes over from Brian Kemp, the Republican governor who leaves office in January after eight years because of term limits. The Guardian read the outcome as a sign of voters turning against Donald Trump and Republicans more broadly. Sources differ on how long Republicans held the office: Il Fatto Quotidiano counts 23 years, while The New York Times says no Democrat had been elected governor in Georgia in more than 25 years.

Money and the final stretch

Jackson was favored to win until recent days, according to The Guardian, after putting a large part of his personal fortune into the campaign. The Guardian put his spending above $100m, while Al Jazeera and Axios put it above $200m, and Axios described the run as his first campaign for public office. Bottoms was heavily outspent, and national Democratic funders stepped in to support her, according to Axios. In the closing stretch she campaigned alongside Jon Ossoff, Barack Obama and former vice president Kamala Harris, and Ossoff also won re-election on Tuesday.

Campaign and Black voters

Her victory relied in part on the state's large Black electorate, which turned out in big numbers during early voting. Republicans attacked her record as Atlanta mayor, casting the city as a place in crime-ridden decline. Her time at City Hall overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over police violence. Bottoms rejected the Republican framing in an interview with the Associated Press.

“It's a long-standing playbook to paint Atlanta as this big bad place.”

Background and platform

Bottoms was born in Atlanta on 18 January 1970. She joined the Atlanta city council in 2010 and served as mayor from 2018 to 2022. She later became an adviser to former president Joe Biden and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Her platform centers on easing the cost of living for working families, investing in public services from schools to health care, and building affordable housing. Her campaign positioned her as an unrelenting foil to President Trump, who carried Georgia two years ago. Several statewide candidates he backed lost to voters, and he faces a criminal indictment tied to efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat.

What comes next

Axios argued that Bottoms's win creates an easier path for Ossoff or Raphael Warnock to pursue the presidency in 2028, because she could temporarily appoint a successor to a Senate seat if either won the White House. A second open question is whether the outgoing Republican lawmakers will return for a special session to redraw district lines and narrow the powers of the next governor.