Keisha Lance Bottoms made history in Georgia on Tuesday night. The former Atlanta mayor won the race for governor, and no Black woman had ever been elected governor of a US state before her.
Bottoms, a Democrat, beat Republican businessman Rick Jackson. With almost all of the expected vote counted, NBC News had her on about 54 percent.
A first that took a long time
Before this week, only three Black people had ever been elected governor in the United States, and all three were men.
Georgia came close before. Stacey Abrams was the Democratic candidate for governor in 2018 and again in 2022, and she lost both times. This was the third election in a row in which Georgia Democrats picked a Black woman to lead their ticket. This time she won.
Bottoms is also the first Democrat to win a race for Georgia governor since 1998.
From City Hall to the top job
Bottoms was mayor of Atlanta for one term, from 2018 to 2022, and she did not run again. After that she worked in Joe Biden’s White House as an adviser.
Her campaign leaned hard on health care. The biggest promise she made was to expand Medicaid in Georgia.
$200 million was not enough
Jackson is a billionaire and the owner of Jackson Healthcare. Few voters knew his name when the campaign started, but he beat Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones to win the Republican nomination.
He then put more than $200 million of his own money into the race. It still was not enough to stop Bottoms.
Our take
Money buys a lot of TV ads, but it did not buy this election. On Tuesday the voters of Georgia gave the biggest job in the state to a woman they already knew well from her years running Atlanta.
Plenty of people tried to make this kind of history before her. She is the one who got it done.
What do you make of this result? Tell us in the comments.
Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Keisha Lance Bottoms official portrait by the Executive Office of the President (public domain); at a climate hearing in 2019 by Senate Democrats (CC BY 2.0); at Atlanta City Hall in 2019 by Celine Admiraal for the Netherlands Embassy (CC BY 2.0); with Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2023 by Adam Schultz, The White House (public domain).
