Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms won Georgia’s governor race, flipping the state blue for the first time in 24 years. NBC News projected on Election Day that she beat Republican Rick Jackson.
This matters because Georgia is a bellwether state, and bellwethers just signaled trouble for the party in power. The Georgia governor race result matters beyond Atlanta politics. It is also a big early sign of how the whole midterm night may go.
The Georgia governor race result, by the numbers
About 72% of the expected vote was in when NBC4 Washington, carrying NBC Decision Desk data, showed Bottoms at 56.1% (1,777,297 votes) and Jackson at 43.9% (1,389,190). NBC’s own governor results page had her at 55.8% with roughly 73% counted. It tagged the race as a projected flip. Those margins will move as the rest of the ballots come in, so treat them as a snapshot.
Pollsters missed badly. Going in, the race looked like a coin flip. The RealClearPolling average had Jackson ahead 48.3 to 47.3. InsiderAdvantage’s final poll had it tied at 49, according to MultiState’s race tracker.
A tossup turned into a double-digit gap in the partial count. That is not a rounding error.
Jackson, a billionaire healthcare executive, spent more than $200 million on ads, per NBC. Even so, Jackson’s $200M couldn’t overcome the deficit in early votes. He also beat the Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in the GOP runoff, then pledged support for the president. Bottoms is the former Atlanta mayor and a Biden White House adviser. She won her primary with endorsements from Joe Biden and Sen. Raphael Warnock.
Gov. Brian Kemp is term-limited, which made this an open seat and a true coin toss on paper. Our earlier look at the record early vote in Georgia flagged how much turnout was already banked.
How Georgians voted in the race for Georgia governor
The NBC News exit poll shows a split that follows the old pattern, with a twist. Early in-person voters went for Bottoms, 59% to 41%. Early mail voters went for her 63% to 37%, though that group was only 3% of the vote. Election Day voters, about 16% of the electorate in the poll, broke the other way: 60% for Jackson, 40% for Bottoms.
Democrats banked the early vote, and the Election Day wave was not big enough to catch them. Early voters won it.
The mood behind the vote
NBC’s exit-poll page carries a long list of crosstabs. Some of those questions read like national ones, such as Congress, Iran and AI. We could not confirm they are Georgia-only, so read them as exit-poll mood, not a Georgia verdict.
With that caveat, the mood is sour. In that poll, 72% of respondents say they are dissatisfied or angry. Another 73% rate the economy as not so good or poor. And 80% report severe or moderate hardship from inflation. Some 88% call the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their vote. Ninety percent say the same of government corruption.
On the president, 60% say Donald Trump prioritizes his own interests over the country’s. Another 63% say his policies worsened economic conditions. Congress gets a 74% disapproval. For more on that sour mood, see the exit poll showing Trump’s lowest midterm approval.
Here’s the thing: your grocery bill and your electric bill voted this year. Four in five people say inflation is squeezing them. That leaves the party in charge with a problem, whatever the ads said, and it shaped the Georgia governor’s race as much as any candidate did.
What comes next after the Georgia governor race
Officials are still counting votes, and state procedures require them to certify Georgia’s results. We did not find a concession from Jackson or a victory statement from Bottoms, so watch for both. The inauguration date was not confirmed in our research either.
The same night, NBC also projected that Democrat Jon Ossoff won Georgia’s Senate race. It also projected that Republican Byron Donalds will be Florida’s next governor. Nationally, Democrats need to flip four Senate seats and three House seats for control of Congress, per NBC4 Washington. We break down what that could mean in Democrats’ early Senate wins and the fight for Congress.
Pundits expected Georgia to be a nail-biter. If it was a preview, the rest of the map is about to get very interesting.
