Ex-Atlanta mayor runs for Georgia governor, framing bid as a check on Trump

Former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is entering the Georgia governor’s race, casting herself as a fighter who would challenge President Donald Trump and uplift the working people she said are suffering from his economic policies.

Lance Bottoms, 55, who stepped into the national spotlight as mayor during the unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, announced her bid Tuesday in a campaign video calling the president and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk “a disaster for our economy and our country.”

The announcement previews a line of attack for national Democrats, who see the Georgia governor’s seat among the party’s top offensive targets in 2026. Lance Bottoms’s campaign will test the power of an anti-Trump message in a crucial swing state the president won by a narrow margin in November. And if elected, she would make history as the first Black female governor in the country. Former state representative Stacey Abrams, who became a national star in the Democratic Party with her efforts to organize and turn out less-regular voters, sought to cross that historic barrier but lost twice to outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp.

Kemp, who is term-limited, built a unique political brand during his two terms — shepherding his state through the pandemic, focusing on the state’s economic development and showing his independence by soundly defeating a 2022 primary challenger backed by Trump, who was angry that Kemp had refused to help him overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.

In her announcement, Lance Bottoms accuses Trump of breaking his promise to address rising prices — as headlines about the economic impact of his administration’s tariffs appear on-screen — and argues he gave “an unelected billionaire the power to cut Medicare and Social Security,” a reference to Musk’s campaign to improve government efficiency. The workforce reductions and other changes to government overseen by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have damaged customer service and slowed claims processing at the Social Security Administration, The Washington Post has reported.

Lance Bottoms also called attention to more than 2,000 people fired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is based in Atlanta, as part of the administration’s workforce purge — losses she said in an interview had only compounded economic uncertainty in the state. Lance Bottoms said many Georgians who voted for Trump in November had hoped he would alleviate the stress their families are feeling from inflation. Instead, she said his policies have brought new dangers and hardships, with his tariffs stoking uncertainty for farmers and about 600,000 people whose jobs are tied to the ports of Savannah and Brunswick.

“There is a lot of instability that’s been created by Donald Trump, and people are looking for a leader who’s going to fight for them and fight against these policies that are making their lives more difficult,” Lance Bottoms said.

Stickers line a table for voters to wear after casting ballots in Austell, Georgia, on Nov. 5.

In a state where some critical swing voters have historically split their tickets by voting for Kemp, a Republican, and Democratic Sen. Raphael G. Warnock, Lance Bottoms said she will focus on issues that can appeal to some of the voters who backed Trump, pledging to expand health-care access and improve housing affordability.

“We all want the same thing, regardless of where we live in the state,” she said. “We want communities that are thriving. We want communities that are providing quality education for our kids. We want to be able to put food on the table. We want to be able to put gas in the car. We want to be able to access health care. We want our communities to be safe. All of these things transcend party.”

Trump won Georgia in November with 50.7 percent of the vote to Democrat Kamala Harris’ 48.5 percent — in part because he was able to surge less-frequent voters to the polls to support him. But he will not be on the ballot in 2026, and in the past his endorsement has not been enough to lift some of his preferred candidates. Trump’s effort to punish Kemp for refusing to help overturn the state’s 2020 election results backfired in 2022 when Trump endorsed former senator David Perdue, a Republican who lost to Kemp by a wide margin. Trump’s chosen candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022, former football star Herschel Walker, also lost.

The field of candidates to succeed Kemp is still shaping up.

On the Democratic side, Georgia state Sen. Jason Esteves recently entered the race by promising to push back on Trump’s “chaos.” Former DeKalb County chief executive Michael Thurmond has said publicly that he is weighing a run as he travels around the state on a listening tour while promoting his book. Abrams has not publicly ruled out another run.

Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones is expected to be among the most formidable GOP contenders, in part because of his loyalty to Trump. He was investigated over allegations he had sought to help Trump try to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, but a special prosecutor last fall announced he would not seek criminal charges against Jones, finding that he had “not acted with criminal intent.”

During the recent legislative session, Jones worked with Republicans to advance many of Trump’s priorities, including a bill to ban biological males from participating in women’s sports. Jones joined Trump in Washington in February when the president signed his “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” executive order.

Also running is Republican Attorney General Christopher Carr, who cites a record of creating thousands of jobs for Georgia as the former chief of the Department of Economic Development. He has also touted his record working closely with Kemp to crack down on gangs and retail crime, while also increasing prosecutions for human trafficking.

Lance Bottoms, who was a judge and city council member before she was sworn in as Atlanta’s mayor in 2018, rose to national prominence in 2020 when demonstrations over Floyd’s death had led to vandalism and destruction in her city. Speaking as the mother of “four Black children,” she made an impassioned plea to protesters to “go home.”

“When I saw the murder of George Floyd, I hurt like a mother would hurt,” she said at that May 2020 news conference. “This is not a protest. This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos.”

Bottoms speaks at a news conference after fatal spa shootings in Atlanta in 2021.

Lance Bottoms surprised many political observers when she decided in 2021 not to seek a second term as mayor — a post she held during a turbulent period encompassing the covid-19 pandemic and a spike in violent crime that shook the city. After her term ended in 2022, President Joe Biden tapped Lance Bottoms for a post in his administration as his senior adviser for public engagement. She later advised the Biden-Harris campaign.

While the nation in recent years has steadily elected more Black women as mayors, other executive positions for which mayorships have traditionally been stepping stones have remained out of reach, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. No Black woman has been elected governor or president. In 2024, for the first time, two Black women were elected to the Senate.

While Lance Bottoms is aware of the history she stands to make, she said she does not intend to make one aspect of her identity the centerpiece of her campaign.

“I am a Black woman. I’m a mother. I’m a daughter. I’m someone who lives in this state, who experiences firsthand those things that go well in the state and those things that don’t go so well in the state,” she said in the interview. “So in terms of it being historical, we’ll let the history books talk about that. But I’m running in the fullness of who I am.”