Abrams says Black women face a higher bar for governor
Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms is pressing her case for Georgia governor against Republican nominee Rick Jackson, a 72-year-old white billionaire who grew up in Atlanta but now lives on a sprawling suburban estate and whose closing campaign has built its message around her four-year tenure as Atlanta mayor. No Black woman has been elected governor in any state, and all 83 of Georgia’s governors since 1776 have been white men. Bottoms, 56, is the former Atlanta mayor, a former City Council member, magistrate judge and prosecutor, and a one-time senior adviser to President Joe Biden’s White House.
The history she would make is not one she often raises. Bottoms rarely if ever mentions slavery, Jim Crow segregation or even race explicitly, according to the Associated Press. Her own family history runs through it: she is “at least a fifth-generation Georgian,” she said, because “we can only trace our family back five generations to a plantation in Crawfordville.”
Jackson has hammered the former mayor as a failure and painted her four-year tenure as a crime-ridden decline. President Donald Trump has joined in, accusing Bottoms of ruining a once-great city. At a rally in Macon last weekend, Trump said Bottoms “destroyed Atlanta with her crime and filth and constant riots.” He insisted, “I always viewed Atlanta as a great city,” adding, “It’s not considered that anymore.” Trump had made a similar claim in 2017, when he called the district of then-U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon, “crime-infested” and said it was “falling apart.” The district includes the world headquarters of Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Jackson’s television advertising, a deluge funded by more than $200 million of his own money, features 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 campaign’s surrogates have sharpened the frame. Top Jackson surrogate John King, a former Atlanta police officer and now state insurance commissioner, sometimes tells rallies that “Keisha Lance Bottoms let Atlanta burn.” The reference points to protesters setting fire to a Wendy’s restaurant close to where Brooks was killed, and it carries 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.
Bottoms calls the frame a political tactic. “It’s a long-standing playbook to paint Atlanta as this big bad place,” she said, dismissing the Republican frame as ridiculous for a city that once hosted the Olympics and recently staged eight World Cup soccer matches. One of her most recent ads answers with 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.”
Her record as mayor is more complicated than the campaign’s shorthand. 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. She also 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. Republicans have exaggerated her action on bail.
Her latest advertising retort follows a surge of fundraising that she did not have throughout Jackson’s summer advertising onslaught. The ad’s voice-over says, “When a national crisis poured into Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms stood up.” Bottoms, 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 say the ad, and the reality of how she handled the matter in real time, depicts a political figure who is tough and empathetic, aware of public safety concerns and the realities for Black Americans.
Republican coalitions in Georgia and most states are overwhelmingly white and anchored in suburbs, smaller cities and small towns, according to the Associated Press. Those are places where many voters look skeptically, even scornfully, upon big cities and the people who run them. Some of the rhetoric directed against Bottoms, the same reporting found, is steeped in the specter of race and gender. “It’s easy for people to attack Atlanta and Mayor Bottoms based on their own biases,” said Beverly Rice, a retired educator and Bottoms supporter.
Bottoms’ bid marks the third consecutive time 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 because of term limits. Abrams came as close to winning a governor’s race as any Black woman before her. Abrams, also an Atlantan, had served previously as state House minority leader, a role Republicans minimized as insufficient experience. In an interview, Abrams was reluctant to assign race and gender as the deciding factor in her defeats, but 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. She said the executive standard “does not apply equally across candidates” in politics, and that Bottoms “has a sound argument” because she has held the executive’s role.
Republicans have made her experience a chief line of attack. Jackson has singled out her decision not to run for a second term as mayor and to join Biden’s White House as a senior adviser — a move Bottoms said she deliberately put off to finish her four-year term — and in Jackson’s telling, Bottoms “turned her back on Atlanta.” “Bad mayors don’t make good governors,” Jackson has said over and over in the closing stretch of the campaign.
Bottoms and her advisers 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. “I have 100% faith that she can win if people just judge her with their values,” Rice said. “I don’t look at her and see a ‘Black governor.’ I see a governor for all the people.”
The closing stretch of the campaign runs on two arguments: Jackson and Trump’s case that Atlanta under Bottoms was a crime-ridden decline, and Bottoms’ appeal to voters to judge her on her record and her policy agenda. Bottoms will answer Trump and Republicans at a rally Wednesday headlined by Barack Obama, the first Black U.S. president.