Keisha Lance Bottoms makes history as first Black woman elected governor of a US state after winning Georgia
Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms has won Georgia's governor race, becoming the first Black woman elected governor of a US state and ending 24 years of Republican control of the office.
Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms has made history by winning Georgia's race for governor, becoming the first Black woman elected governor of a US state and the first woman ever to hold the office in Georgia. News organisations projected her victory on election night, 3 November, after she defeated her Republican opponent, billionaire healthcare executive Rick Jackson, in one of the most closely watched contests of the 2026 midterm elections.
Bottoms, 56, secured about 54 per cent of the vote, leading Jackson by more than 360,000 votes with most ballots counted, according to projections by the Associated Press. Her win ends more than two decades of Republican control of the Georgia governor's mansion and makes her the first Democrat to win the race since 1998.
The result is striking not least because of the scale of the spending gap. Jackson, a healthcare businessman endorsed by President Donald Trump, poured more than $200 million of his personal fortune into his campaign, vastly outspending Bottoms. She nevertheless prevailed on a campaign that, according to her team, focused on the economy and everyday policy concerns rather than national political fights.
Bottoms is no stranger to Georgia politics. She served as mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022, and later worked as a senior adviser to former President Joe Biden and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Born in Atlanta in 1970, she has spoken of her family's deep roots in the state: she is the great-great-granddaughter of Shephard Peek, who was sold into slavery in Crawfordsville, Georgia, in 1826, and is believed to have become a member of Congress after the Civil War.
Her victory also completes a long arc for Georgia Democrats. Bottoms is the third consecutive Black woman the party has nominated for governor in the state, following Stacey Abrams, who became the first Black woman nominated for governor by a major US political party in 2018 and ran again in 2022, losing both times to the outgoing governor, Brian Kemp. Abrams lost to Kemp by a single percentage point in 2018; eight years later, Bottoms has won the office outright.
Bottoms will succeed Kemp, a Republican who has served as governor since 2019 and is leaving office in January after eight years because of term limits. She is due to take office in January 2027, and her win makes her the first Atlanta mayor to go on to become Georgia's governor, according to the National Urban League.
The Georgia result was one of several milestones for Black candidates in Tuesday's elections. Bottoms was among five Black governor-elects across the country after the midterms, and on the same evening Stacey Plaskett was elected governor of the US Virgin Islands, becoming the first Black woman elected governor of a US jurisdiction. The night formed part of a broader Democratic surge in the midterms, in which the party also swept both chambers of Congress.
Reaction to the result has underlined its symbolic weight. Marc Morial, president and chief executive of the National Urban League, noted that Bottoms is not only the first Black woman to win a governor's race in the United States, but also the first Atlanta mayor to reach the governor's office. For many Black women in American politics, who have long formed a core of the Democratic Party's support while remaining under-represented in its highest offices, the victory marks a new milestone.
Yet the path to taking office may not be smooth. Attention in Georgia is already turning to the state legislature, where Republicans could attempt to redraw congressional and legislative maps before Bottoms is sworn in. Any such move would shape the political landscape she inherits and test the balance of power in a state where Democrats have now won the top office but Republicans still hold sway in the legislature.
What comes next will be watched closely. Bottoms campaigned on economic issues, and her first months in office will show how she intends to govern a state that remains one of the most closely divided political battlegrounds in the country. For now, though, the result stands on its own: after three straight elections in which Georgia Democrats put a Black woman at the top of the ticket, one of them has finally won.
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