ATLANTA: Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected governor of Georgia on Tuesday night, defeating Republican Rick Jackson to become the first Black woman elected governor of a U.S. state. The Associated Press called the race at about 9:15 p.m., with Bottoms holding roughly 55 percent of the vote in one of the most closely divided states in the country.
Bottoms, 56, is also Georgia’s first Black governor and its first woman governor. She is the first Democrat elected to the office since Roy Barnes in 1998, and her victory ends a 24-year Republican hold on the governor’s mansion. She will succeed Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who was barred by law from seeking a third term. Jackson conceded the race Tuesday night.
A fifth-generation Georgian reaches the mansion
Bottoms rarely made the barrier itself the argument. A descendant of enslaved Georgians, she spoke instead about her family’s long hold on this state. “I am at least a fifth-generation Georgian,” she said during the campaign. “I say ‘at least’ because we can only trace our family back five generations, to a plantation in Crawfordville.” Her grandfather moved to Atlanta from rural Georgia and walked through the back doors of downtown buildings that his granddaughter would later enter through the front as mayor.
Her road to the race ran through Atlanta City Hall, where she served on the City Council before winning the mayor’s office in 2017, and then through Washington, where she served as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden and directed the White House Office of Public Engagement. She won the Democratic primary in May without a runoff. It was the third Georgia governor’s race in a row led by a Black woman, after Stacey Abrams carried the Democratic banner against Kemp in 2018 and 2022. Eight years ago, Abrams became the first Black woman nominated for governor by a major party. On Tuesday, Bottoms finished the climb.
The campaign she ran
The money ran the other way. Jackson, a 72-year-old billionaire health care executive and the founder of Jackson Healthcare, put more than $200 million of his own fortune into the race, after defeating the sitting lieutenant governor, the attorney general, and the secretary of state in the Republican primaries. Bottoms answered the spending gap with a platform built on the cost of living: expanding Medicaid to cover hundreds of thousands more Georgians, raising the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, raising pay for teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public employees, pausing new data center development, and repealing Georgia’s ban on abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy.
In the rivals’ lone debate, after Jackson said he wanted to govern like “Trump with a Southern tone” and become the president’s favorite governor, Bottoms replied: “I’m not running to be his favorite governor. I’m running to work on behalf of people like you.” Ahead of Election Day, she put the stakes plainly: “What we do in this moment will echo through history.”
What changes at the Capitol
The victory breaks the Republican statehouse trifecta, the party’s hold on the governorship and both chambers of the General Assembly, for the first time in more than two decades. Republicans were favored to keep the state Senate, which means Bottoms will govern across the aisle from day one, with a Medicaid expansion and a wage bill that need Republican votes to move. On the same night, Georgia voters reelected Sen. Jon Ossoff, and the state now sends to the Capitol a Black woman governor in a state already represented in the Senate by Raphael Warnock, its first Black senator.
Nationally, Bottoms was one of eight Black major-party nominees for governor on Tuesday’s ballots. Only three Black governors had been elected in American history before this week, all of them men. In the U.S. Virgin Islands, voters also elected Stacey Plaskett governor on Tuesday, making her the first Black woman elected governor of a U.S. jurisdiction.
In January, a fifth-generation Georgian whose family can be traced only as far back as a Crawfordville plantation will take the oath and move into the governor’s mansion on West Paces Ferry Road. The record will show the door she walked through to get there.
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