Keisha Lance Bottoms Becomes Georgia's First Black Woman Governor, Flipping the Seat for Democrats

Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former mayor of Atlanta, was elected governor of Georgia on Tuesday, the first Black woman to hold the office. She defeated Republican businessman Rick Jackson and flipped the governor's mansion in a key swing state. She is the first Democrat to win a Georgia governor's race since 1998.

The margin of money was not close. Jackson, a billionaire, put more than $200 million of his own fortune into the race, and Bottoms won despite a staggering spending deficit. Jackson began as a relative unknown, but his wealth and outsider appeal carried him past the sitting lieutenant governor, who had Trump's early endorsement, as well as the attorney general and the secretary of state in the Republican contest.

Bottoms will succeed Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who was barred by law from seeking a third term. It was the third consecutive Georgia governor's election with a Black woman leading the Democratic ticket. Kemp twice beat Stacey Abrams, who remains a prominent voting rights advocate and Democratic fundraiser but chose not to run a third time. The result also runs against voters' longtime reluctance to send an Atlantan to the governor's mansion, and it reflects how the growth of the state's largest metro area is reshaping its politics. On the same ballot, Georgia reelected Democrat Jon Ossoff, its first Jewish senator, to serve alongside Raphael Warnock, its first Black senator.

Bottoms rarely dwelt on the history she was making. Before Election Day she said what the state did in this moment would echo through history, but she mostly steered toward the economy and toward standing apart from President Donald Trump's administration. She did talk about her family. Descended from enslaved Georgians, she described herself as at least a fifth-generation Georgian, because her family can be traced back only five generations, to a plantation in Crawfordville. Her grandfather moved to Atlanta from rural Georgia and had to walk through the back doors of downtown buildings that she later entered through the front as mayor. Her ancestry, she said, is always present with her. She was one of eight Black major party nominees for governor this year; only three Black governors have ever been elected in the United States, all Democratic men. Republican Lisa Demuth of Minnesota was the other Black woman running for governor this cycle.

Her platform was concrete. She called for expanding Medicaid to cover hundreds of thousands more people, raising the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, and raising pay for teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees. She wants a pause on new data center development, a halt to installing additional automated Flock cameras used by law enforcement, and repeal of Georgia's ban on abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. She called the ban a life and death issue, citing women who have died from miscarriage and pregnancy complications because doctors fear prosecution.

She also made Jackson's own words a theme. He had said he wanted to govern like Trump with a Southern tone and become the president's favorite governor. In their only debate, Bottoms said she was not running to be Trump's favorite governor but to work for people like the voters in front of her. She disputed Jackson's claim to be a self-made outsider who understood economic struggle, pointing to the lucrative government contracts held by his company, Jackson Healthcare, and accused him of using money made from taxpayers to try to buy the election.

Jackson's ads hit her record hard. They used clips of protests after the 2020 police killings of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and George Floyd in Minneapolis, both Black men killed by white officers, and criticized her for not seeking a second term as mayor, saying she abandoned the city. She withstood the attacks.

Her win does not hand Democrats the statehouse. Republicans have held the governorship and both chambers of the General Assembly for more than two decades. Democrats were trying to flip the state House on Tuesday, but Republicans were heavily favored to keep the Senate, which would leave Bottoms with at least one GOP-led chamber to work with. How her Medicaid, wage and abortion proposals fare there is the next test.