ATLANTA — It took 50 states and more than two centuries. Tuesday night it took Georgia.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, was elected governor of Georgia, the Associated Press projected. She is the first Black woman ever elected to lead an American state.
“This win is for all of us,” she told supporters, 11Alive reported.
She beat Republican Rick Jackson, a 72-year-old health care executive and billionaire who spent more than $200 million of his own money on the race, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His line all year was that “bad mayors don’t make good governors.” Georgia didn’t buy it.
“Tonight, the voters spoke … and I respect their decision,” Jackson said, the New York Amsterdam News reported.
What it ends
Bottoms ends 24 years of Republican control of the Georgia governor’s mansion. She is the first Democrat to win the office since 1998, and the first woman Georgia has ever elected governor.
She also finishes something. This was the third straight Georgia governor’s race with a Black woman at the top of a major party ticket. Stacey Abrams came close twice and lost both times to Brian Kemp. Bottoms closed the distance.
Before Tuesday, only three Black Americans had ever been elected governor, all of them Democratic men: Douglas Wilder in Virginia, Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and Wes Moore in Maryland.
Where she comes from
Bottoms was born and raised in Atlanta. Her father was the soul singer Major Lance. When she was 8, he went to prison on drug charges and the family lost its home. Her mother kept a beauty salon going in the West End.
She went to Florida A&M, got her law degree at Georgia State, and worked as a prosecutor and a judge before winning a City Council seat in 2009. In 2017 she won the mayor’s race by a hair in a runoff.
Her four years at City Hall brought a ransomware attack, the pandemic and the summer of 2020: the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, the protests that followed, and the July 4 killing of 8-year-old Secoriea Turner. She told protesters to go home, and she has said since that she still asks herself whether she moved hard enough. She didn’t run for a second term. She went to the Biden White House as a senior adviser instead.
What she promised
She ran on expanding Medicaid, guaranteeing access to pre-K, letting local governments cut grocery taxes and pausing new data center construction, the AJC reported.
“Let’s choose hope over fear, progress over division, and come together to build a better Georgia for everyone,” she said.
Out here, California elected Xavier Becerra the same night. Across the country, Democrats had a good Tuesday. But the line in the history books belongs to a girl from the West End whose mother did hair to keep the lights on.
Photo: Keisha Lance Bottoms. Executive Office of the President / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. This report draws on the Associated Press, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the New York Amsterdam News and 11Alive.
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