ATLANTA — Keisha Lance Bottoms talks a lot about the policies she would pursue as Georgia governor. The Democratic nominee is less likely to talk about the history she would make by winning the job.
Never has a Black woman been elected governor in any state. The former Atlanta mayor and onetime White House adviser to Democratic President Biden is trying to do it in a Deep South state where her lineage extends back to antebellum enslavement.
“I am at least a fifth-generation Georgian,” Bottoms, 56, says as she campaigns. “I say ‘at least’ because we can only trace our family back five generations to a plantation in Crawfordville.”
Bottoms rarely if ever mentions slavery, Jim Crow segregation or even race explicitly. But that story — hers, Georgia’s and the nation’s — shadows her battle with Republican nominee Rick Jackson.
The billionaire, a 72-year-old white man who grew up in Atlanta but now lives on a sprawling suburban estate, has hammered the former mayor as a failure, painting her four-year tenure as a crime-ridden decline. Other Republicans, up to Donald Trump, have joined in, with the president accusing Bottoms of ruining a once-great city.
“It’s a long-standing playbook to paint Atlanta as this big bad place,” Bottoms said, dismissing the Republican frame as ridiculous for a town that once hosted the Olympics and recently staged eight World Cup soccer matches.
One of her most recent ads pushes back by featuring clips of the news conference she held with the city’s law enforcement leaders during the peak of 2020 street protests of police violence in Atlanta and nationwide against Black men. “If you care about this city, then go home,” she said. “We are better than this.”
Bottoms would have her chance to answer Trump and Republicans at a rally Wednesday headlined by Barack Obama, the first Black U.S. president.
Some Black women see the attacks as loaded
Republican coalitions in most states, and certainly in Georgia, are overwhelmingly white and anchored in suburbs, smaller cities and small towns. Those are places where many voters look skeptically, even scornfully, upon big cities and the people who run them. But some of the rhetoric directed against Bottoms is steeped in the specter of race and gender in a state where all 83 governors since 1776 have been white men.
Jackson’s TV ads, a deluge funded by more than $200 million of his own money, feature footage of the demonstrations and violence in Atlanta in 2020, along with grainy images of Bottoms. The protests followed the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, an unarmed Black man, by a white Atlanta police officer.
The Republican campaign effort has not gone unnoticed among some Bottoms supporters, especially other Black women.
“It’s easy for people to attack Atlanta and Mayor Bottoms based on their own biases,” said retired educator Beverly Rice, a Bottoms supporter.
Bottoms’ bid marks the third consecutive time that Georgia Democrats have nominated a Black woman for governor. Stacey Abrams lost in 2018 and 2022 to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who is leaving office in 2027 after eight years due to term limits. Abrams came as close to winning a governor’s race as any Black woman before her.
In an interview, Abrams was reluctant to assign race and gender as the deciding factor in her defeats. But she said Black women running for governor face a higher bar because there is no example yet for voters who place a special emphasis on executive experience. Abrams, also an Atlantan, had served previously as state House minority leader, a role Republicans minimized as insufficient experience.
Abrams said that executive standard “does not apply equally across candidates” in politics. She said Bottoms “has a sound argument” because she has held the executive’s role. Before that, Bottoms was a City Council member, magistrate judge and prosecutor. That resume, Abrams and others said, is why Republicans have so aggressively criticized Bottoms’ experience.
“Bad mayors don’t make good governors,” Jackson has said over and over in the closing stretch of the campaign.
He has taken special notice of her decision not to run for a second term as mayor, instead joining Biden’s White House as a senior adviser – a move Bottoms said she deliberately put off to finish her four-year term. In Jackson’s telling, Bottoms “turned her back on Atlanta.”
Republicans say Atlanta ‘burned’ in Bottoms’ tenure
Other conservatives have gone further than Jackson.
“Keisha Lance Bottoms let Atlanta burn,” top Jackson surrogate John King, a former Atlanta police officer and now state insurance commissioner, sometimes says at the candidate’s rallies.
That is a reference to protesters setting fire to a Wendy’s fast food restaurant close to where Brooks was killed. The reference carries an extra weight in a city whose symbol is a phoenix rising from the ashes — a symbol adopted because Union forces burned parts of a young Atlanta during the Civil War.
At a Trump rally last weekend in Macon, a smaller city in middle Georgia, the president hammered away, too. Bottoms “destroyed Atlanta with her crime and filth and constant riots,” Trump said, echoing the kind of sometimes profane attacks he has leveled against many places with large or majority Black populations.
“I always viewed Atlanta as a great city,” he insisted. “It’s not considered that anymore.”
In a 2017 dispute with then-U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Trump called the civil rights icon’s district, which includes Delta Airlines’ and Coca-Cola’s world headquarters and the Georgia Institute of Technology, “crime-infested” and said it was “falling apart.”
Bottoms counters with a more complicated reality
Atlanta did see a crime spike during Bottoms’ tenure, but it was not an outlier alongside the COVID-19 pandemic surge across the country, according to federal statistics. After the pandemic waned, U.S. and Atlanta crime rates dropped significantly. Bottoms did sign an executive order blocking the Atlanta jail from holding federal immigration detainees.
Republicans have exaggerated her action on bail. Bottoms signed a city ordinance that eliminated cash bail for certain nonviolent crimes, intending to reduce the jail’s population and what she and other city officials deemed excessive punishment for low-grade offenses.
Her latest advertising retort follows a surge of fundraising that she did not have throughout Jackson’s summer advertising onslaught. “When a national crisis poured into Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms stood up,” a voice-over says.
Besides her exhortation for people to leave the streets, the mother of four said, “Above everything else, I am a mother, so you are not going to out-concern me and out-care about where we are.”
Her aides see the ad — and the reality of how she handled the matter in real time — as depicting a political figure who is tough and empathetic, aware of public safety concerns and the realities for Black Americans.
But Bottoms’ advisers, and the candidate herself, also say they want Georgians to make their decisions on tangible policy distinctions, most notably her emphasis on addressing economic struggles and expanding Medicaid insurance eligibility — a move that would reach urban and rural populations across racial lines.
That is the point of the governor’s office, said Rice, the retired educator.
“I have 100% faith that she can win if people just judge her with their values,” she said. “I don’t look at her and see a ‘Black governor.’ I see a governor for all the people.”
Barrow writes for the Associated Press.