Tanya Miller was elected attorney general of Georgia on Tuesday, defeating Republican state Sen. Brian Strickland with 55.5 percent of the vote, 2,316,898 ballots to his 1,855,529. The Associated Press called the race at 10:50 p.m. Miller becomes the first woman elected to the office and its first Black woman. She is the second Black person to hold it, after Thurbert Baker, and the first Democrat since Baker left in 2011.
She succeeds Chris Carr, who gave up the office to run for governor, and she takes over the Department of Law in January. In her victory speech she aimed the night at the people she says the system overlooks. “Every young person who has ever been underestimated,” she said, “every Georgian who has ever felt invisible to the institutions meant to protect you, I want you to hear me. You matter. Your voice matters. Your vote matters, and your future matters. There is room for you in the promise of Georgia.”
A prosecutor’s road to the top law office
Miller, an Atlanta Democrat, built her name in courtrooms. She served as a federal prosecutor and as a Fulton County prosecutor, where she led homicide cases, then moved into trial work of her own, wrongful death, personal injury, and civil rights cases. Her campaign described a prosecutor who never lost, and prosecutors and sheriffs across the state lined up behind her.
Voters sent her to the Georgia House in 2022 from an Atlanta district, and she rose to chair the House Democratic Caucus. She announced for attorney general in August 2025 outside the state Capitol, won the May primary with nearly 85 percent of the vote against former House Minority Leader Bob Trammell, and ran the general election on a three-word slogan: “People first, always.”
What she says she will do with the office
Her agenda starts with consumer protection, which she called her laser focus: an expanded consumer protection division, and no hesitation about corporations that collude on prices, pollute water, or rig the economy against working families. On public safety she named gang violence, including gang activity run from inside Georgia’s prisons, and human trafficking, with pressure not only on traffickers but on the businesses that enable them.
She also promised an open government office: clear guidance so local governments stop withholding public records, and an Open Records Act extended to the Georgia Legislature itself, whose members are exempt today. And she drew the office’s line of loyalty in one sentence voters heard all fall. “When you are the attorney general, your fealty is to the law.”
One seat in a statewide sweep
Miller’s win was one strand of a night that rearranged Georgia. Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first woman and first Black governor in state history, Penny Brown Reynolds became the first Black woman elected secretary of state, and women won at least eight statewide races. At the Democrats’ celebration in Atlanta, a supporter waved a hand-lettered sign that summed up the new order at the top of state government: “Black women lead Georgia.”
Georgia has had an attorney general for more than two centuries. In January, for the first time, the office belongs to a woman, a former homicide prosecutor who ran on the promise that people come first, always.
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