Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Georgia governor’s race on Tuesday night, leading Republican Rick Jackson 54.9% to 45.1% with about 78% of the vote counted, per NBC News. NBC News and the AP project her the winner. That ends 24 years of Republican control of the office.
Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, defeated Jackson, according to NBC News. The AP also projects her as the winner. She takes office in January.
What the Georgia governor’s race numbers show
The calls came fast, and the margin explains why. Certification will settle the final numbers.
That’s not a nail-biter finish. That’s a decisive night, and our breakdown of how Georgia flipped to the Democrats shows how it happened.
A big first in the Georgia gubernatorial election
Bottoms is the first woman and the first Black person elected governor of Georgia, NBC News reports. Georgia also had not elected a Democratic governor since 1998. She succeeds term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who is leaving after two terms.
Reuters says Stacey Plaskett was also elected governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands the same evening, which complicates the “first Black woman elected governor” framing for any U.S. jurisdiction. Fox 5 Atlanta adds that the “first in the nation” claim may also hinge on the outcome in Minnesota. We’ll stick with what’s confirmed: first in Georgia, no asterisk.
The $200 million question
Here’s the thing about this Georgia governor contest: it tested how far money can carry a campaign. Jackson, a billionaire healthcare executive, spent more than $200 million of his own money in his first run for public office. He also beat Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who had backing from both Trump and Kemp, in the GOP runoff, as we covered when Jackson won the Republican nomination. Trump endorsed him in July.
Bottoms had her own heavy hitter. Obama endorsed her on Oct. 8. She served one term as Atlanta mayor and later worked in the Biden White House.
A $200 million self-funded campaign lost to a former mayor. Money talks. On Tuesday night, it didn’t get the last word.
What Georgians should expect after the Georgia governor election
Bottoms ran on Medicaid expansion, a $15 minimum wage and fully funded Pre-K, expanded to 3-year-olds. All of that costs money, and it needs a legislature to sign off. Axios says to watch what lame-duck Georgia Republicans do before she is sworn in.
The national stakes matter too. Axios notes that a Democratic governor could temporarily appoint a Senate successor if Sen. Jon Ossoff or Sen. Raphael Warnock ever won the presidency. Ossoff also won re-election the same night, which makes 2028 chatter inevitable.
For a state that just sent a Democrat to the governor’s mansion and re-elected a Democratic senator in the same night, the question for Republicans is simple: what happened, and what do they do about it before January?
