Atlanta's Former Mayor Is Running for Georgia Governor. The 2020 Protests Could Cost Her the Race.

When Americans vote in the midterm elections next month, it seems likely that Democrats will see decisive victories across the country.

This trend seems likely to affect Georgia's two most high-profile races differently. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, is running for reelection against Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican who represents the state's 10th congressional district, while in the race to replace Gov. Brian Kemp, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms faces Republican billionaire Rick Jackson.

Ossoff and Bottoms may both be Democrats, but their prospects look very different: A recent poll put Ossoff nearly seven points ahead of Collins, but Bottoms was a point and a half behind Jackson, trailing the senator from her own party by more than five points.

Democrats hope that if Ossoff does well enough, it will boost their other candidates. But it's worth asking why Bottoms, who was feted as a possible vice presidential candidate, is struggling to break even against someone with no prior name recognition, in a year expected to be a boon for her party.

It's possible that the crime and protests of 2020 could be weighing down Bottoms' candidacy in an otherwise auspicious year for Democrats.

Mayor Bottoms and the 'COVID Crime Wave'

Bottoms' single term as mayor of Georgia's capital city would be defined by summer 2020. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, violent crime rose across the country, but it was worse in Atlanta—homicides were up 59 percent, while most other cities averaged 33 percent. Bottoms herself later called it the "COVID crime wave."

Then on May 25 in Minneapolis, a police officer killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Footage went viral, and protesters across the country took to the streets.

In some places, including Atlanta, protests turned destructive, and the police responded in kind.

Bottoms called for peace. "If you care about this city, then go home," she exhorted rioters in a news conference. "When you burn down this city, you're burning down our community."

She won bipartisan praise. "Your passion, your composure, your balance, has been really incredible," then-presidential candidate Joe Biden told her.

But just days later, Atlanta police officers shot and killed a black man, Rayshard Brooks, in a Wendy's parking lot. Protesters gathered the next day and burned the restaurant to the ground.

Meanwhile, after the district attorney announced charges against the cops involved in Brooks' shooting, more than 170 officers called out sick in protest. Bottoms admitted that officer morale "is down tenfold."

Then on July 4, less than half a mile away from the site of Brooks' death, protesters shot into a car, killing 8-year-old Secoriea Turner.

The crime spike persisted into 2021, and in May of that year, Bottoms announced that she would not run for a second term.

Officially, she said, it was "time to pass the baton on to someone else," though her announcement "came as the city faces a homicide rate topping that of this time last year—a historically deadly one in Atlanta," Henri Hollis wrote at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Indeed, it seems the "COVID crime wave" had caught up with her: A September 2021 poll found that while 57 percent of city residents approved of the job she was doing, 53 percent also felt the city was on the wrong track, including 48 percent of Democrats. The top issue was crime, which 70 percent of respondents felt was headed in the wrong direction.

She later told New York that by stepping down, she was "putting my emotional and mental health first"—a worthy reason, though a bit odd since she now seeks an even higher office.

Then again, she also had higher aspirations. Bottoms was one of the first officeholders to endorse Biden for president in 2020, and she later made his shortlist of potential running mates. After the end of her term, she joined Biden's White House as director of the Office of Public Engagement, after which she moved over to the President's Export Council for the remainder of his term.

Bottoms announced her run for governor just four months after leaving Washington. And while she locked up the Democratic nomination easily, winning 56 percent of the vote among seven candidates, she didn't exactly fire up the base, and it seems like she just expected to coast to victory.

"It feels a lot like she gained the nomination…largely from name identification," progressive journalist Zaid Jilani tells Reason. "She really wasn't raising that much money or spending that much on television….It should be a high-profile race in many ways, but the ideas she's putting forward are fairly rehashed," and "she doesn't have that much creative advertising."

Rick Jackson's Deep Pockets and Shallow Record

Rick Jackson, meanwhile, seemed to come out of nowhere.

President Donald Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in August 2025, and Jones led the Republican primary field at the end of that year.

While Kemp famously resisted Trump's efforts to subvert Georgia's presidential election results in 2020, Jones was a willing participant in the scheme.

"I've been the Trump guy since 2015, not '16," Jones bragged. "I've taken all the battle scars and everything else. I know who ran and hid during 2020 and everything else."

Then in February 2026, just three months before the primary, Jackson entered the race. He was a septuagenarian with no name recognition, but he was also quite wealthy, so he blanketed the state with ads to introduce himself to voters.

In six weeks, he spent over $30 million—"more than any candidate has ever spent in a primary race for Georgia governor, with more than two months before the May 19 election," wrote Jeff Amy of the Associated Press.

It worked: Jackson beat Jones in a primary runoff with 53 percent of the vote. By then, he had spent $108 million on his campaign while raising less than $400,000 from donors.

Jackson has made much of his background, as a child of poverty who entered the foster system at age 13 to escape a dysfunctional household. As an adult, he started in sales and worked his way up to entrepreneurship, starting Jackson Healthcare in 2000 and growing it to more than $1 billion in annual revenues. He is also a generous donor to charitable causes, particularly those relating to foster care.

But with no political record, Jackson can be hard to pin down on certain issues.

For example, one Jackson ad criticizes Bottoms for the rise of data centers in Atlanta, even though he has also spoken positively of their economic potential.

Georgia Democrats have tarred Jackson as a Trumpian election denier, singling out a comment he made at a campaign event: When asked if the 2020 election was stolen, Jackson replied, "That was totally ridiculous what happened in 2020 and our people really let us down." ("Just as Governor Kemp did, Rick acknowledges both Biden's win and that there were issues in the 2020 election that needed to be resolved in order to ensure Georgians have faith in our electoral system," a campaign spokesperson told CNN.)

During the primaries, he even took heat from both sides on abortion: Jones accused Jackson's company of working with Planned Parenthood, while Jackson himself seemed to suggest he wanted to change the state's abortion ban to remove exceptions for rape or incest. ("Rick believes we have a strong pro-life law in place and he wants to keep it as it is," his campaign said in a statement.)

And while he made Trump-like pledges, like to "make Georgia No. 1 in the nation for criminal deportations" and keep "the religion of woke ideology" out of schools, his platform calls for an "intelligent Medicaid expansion" in the state.

Jackson has also pivoted just over the course of the campaign.

He bragged in his campaign announcement video that he "donated a million bucks to Trump," and he's said that if elected, he would be "just like" Trump but "with a southern tone."

He said Trump had "no bigger supporter" than himself, and he could not name a single Trump policy he disagreed with. When Trump endorsed Jackson at a campaign rally in July, the candidate pointed to the president and said, "I'm going to be this man's favorite governor."

But like many other Republicans, Jackson has distanced himself from the president, whose approval rating is at an all-time low. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that in campaign appearances, Jackson has stopped mentioning Trump directly, preferring to compare himself to Kemp, the sitting governor who remains popular.

He apparently also scrubbed all mentions of the president from his campaign website.

But one thing that has remained consistent in Jackson's campaign strategy is criticizing Bottoms' record as mayor.

Will the 'COVID Crime Wave' Sink Bottoms?

Some of Jackson's campaign ads feature grateful children who grew up in foster care and benefited from his philanthropy, but for the most part, they have targeted Bottoms over her record.

One ad, titled "Disaster," paints Bottoms' tenure as exactly that, with the city becoming practically unlivable during summer 2020.

"Keisha ended cash bail, gutted the corrections budget, let Atlanta burn, and unleashed a crime wave," Jackson wrote on X to accompany another ad. "Then she walked away."

"If Keisha wants to run from her record," according to a campaign email, "we're going to make sure Georgia remembers exactly what that record was."

Many Jackson ads, flyers, and mailers have featured images of Secoriea Turner, the 8-year-old girl killed by gunfire. (Turner's parents have asked Jackson's campaign to stop.)

But is it fair to blame everything on Bottoms? While Atlanta was worse than most, many major cities saw large homicide spikes: Chicago's murder rate climbed more than 50 percent that year, while New York City's went up nearly 40 percent. Murders in Columbus, Ohio, rose a staggering 67 percent.

Regardless, Bottoms was in charge at the time. And the attacks do seem to have an effect, as she's locked in a dead heat against Jackson.

Granted, Bottoms was never a particularly strong candidate. When she ran for mayor in 2017, she won the runoff election by fewer than 800 votes, even with the endorsement of the outgoing mayor.

Georgia also has not elected a Democratic governor in nearly three decades, though it has elected Democrats to the U.S. Senate three times since 2020 and seems poised to reelect one this year.

There's also the fact of Jackson's money, saturating the state with eight-figure ad buys while Democrats were spending only a fraction of that.

Of course, money alone can't buy a victory: Kemp defeated Stacey Abrams in each of the last two races for governor, despite being comfortably outraised and outspent each time.

But Bottoms currently trails Ossoff by five points in an election cycle expected to be quite beneficial to their party.

It seems the race will serve as an indicator of how fresh the summer of COVID-19 still feels for Georgians.

"To the kind of voter that Jackson is courting, it probably is true that had Democrats [instead] nominated the mayor of Macon [a smaller Georgia city], they would be in a stronger position than nominating the mayor of Atlanta, especially one who was in power during those years," Jilani tells Reason. "If he wins, it demonstrates that that is still a fairly potent line of attack."

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