Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms Wins Georgia Governor’s Race

Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Georgia governor's race, defeating Republican Rick Jackson.

Bottoms, who served as Atlanta mayor, will take over from Republican Gov. Brian Kemp after term limits kept him from running again. She beat Jackson despite a lopsided spending gap: Jackson, a healthcare executive, put more than $100 million of his own fortune into the race, and The Associated Press put the figure at more than $200 million.

Bottoms becomes the first Democrat to win the Georgia governor's office since 1998. She is also the first Black woman elected governor of the state, and the first Black woman elected governor anywhere in the country.

Voters returned Democrat Jon Ossoff, the state's first Jewish senator, to office alongside its first Black senator, Raphael Warnock. This marks the third straight Georgia governor's race with a Black woman at the top of the ticket.

Bottoms called for expanding the Medicaid insurance program to include hundreds of thousands more people and wants to repeal Georgia's ban on abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. She also called for a pause on new data centers and pledged to shield Georgians from Trump administration policies. Jackson said he aimed to govern like Trump but with a Southern tone.

Bottoms focused her campaign on affordability and economic concerns. She ran ads that criticized Jackson's past support for data centers and tied him to Trump's challenges to the 2020 election results. Former President Barack Obama backed her in a video, and Ossoff's campaign sent millions to the state Democratic Party to aid her bid.

Georgia has long been a swing state with narrow margins in statewide races. Before Tuesday, only three Black governors had been elected in U.S. history, all of them Democratic men.