Could Georgia Get A Governor Named Keisha?

Keisha Lance Bottoms, the charismatic former Atlanta mayor who took on Donald Trump before joining former President Joe Biden’s White House, is running for governor of Georgia.

Bottoms made the announcement in a video released Tuesday to social media, in which she recounted her upbringing and willingness to take on Trump. 

“These days, most Georgians are right to wonder: Who’s looking out for us? Donald Trump is a disaster for our economy and our country. From his failure to address rising prices to giving an unelected billionaire the power to cut Medicare and Social Security — it’s one terrible thing after another,” Bottoms says in the video.  

Bottoms also calls on the need to expand Medicaid and her support for “…first responders like firefighters and police officers, as well as teachers; promises to ‘crack down on corporate landlords raising prices;’ and says her administration would help young people get “better pathways to college or career training,” NBC News reports.

During an interview with NBC News, Monday–a day before she would make her announcement–Bottoms said that “Trump 2.0 has been even more catastrophic for our state.” 

“From the 600,000 people across our state who have jobs that are directly impacted by what’s happening in our Port of Savannah and Trump’s tariff policies to people being laid off at the CDC, Trump has directly impacted this state, and not in a positive way,” she said, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose headquarters is in Atlanta.

“Everything that Trump does is impacting us, whether you’re looking at your retirement account or you are a CEO who’s looking at stock prices fluctuate. He has not been a great president for Georgia,” she said.

But before Bottoms can set her eyes on the Thanos of the American government, she’s got to fight the uphill battle in her own backyard. Bottoms won’t just be running against the Republican candidate, assuming that she wins the Democratic bid, she’ll be running against a rigged system that helped current governor Brian Kemp in office for eight years.  

That’s because…how shall I say this … Kemp has a history of playing fast and loose with Georgia’s votes.

Editor: Don’t be shy now, Stephen. 

Me: Fine, Brian Kemp is a professional Black vote suppresser. 

In 2018, as then Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp was running for governor against Ga. darling Stacey Abrams, he was sued for “…suppressing minority votes after an Associated Press investigation revealed a month before November’s midterm election that his office has not approved 53,000 voter registrations – most of them filed by African-Americans,” PBS reports.

Just a year before he would run for governor, Kemp and his cronies enacted a law that a voter’s registration information had to match data from the Department of Motor Vehicles or Social Security Administration. This law disproportionately affected black and Latino voters and thus legally allowed for their votes not to be counted. 

Here’s how Michael Harriot explained all the ways Brian Kemp has worked to suppress the Black Vote in a piece aptly titled: “The Wizard of Voter Suppression: Brian Kemp’s Long History of Making Black Votes Disappear.”

Between 2008 until 2012, the state of Georgia struck 750,000 voters from its rolls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an unusually high rate of purging, but still within reason. However, after Kemp got his hands on the state’s voting apparatus, he has purged twice as many voters. Kemp has nixed nearly 1.4 million voters from Georgia’s books for inane reasons such as missing hyphens, rumors that voters have moved and even misspelled street names. And since he became the Republican nominee for governor, he has doubled down.

One of his biggest weapons is his “exact match” policy. If a voter’s registration doesn’t match their DMV records (which often has flawed data), Kemp has mandated that the registration be invalidated. There are reports of voters with hyphenated names being removed from rolls because their registration didn’t have the hyphen. Others have been deleted because their addresses were misspelled.

To be fair, when voters sued the state of Georgia about this policy in 2013, noting that it was arbitrary and not a legal standard, Kemp did stop doing it. Then he simply had the Republican-led state legislature pass a law codifying the exact match system, and continued his purge.

Kemp also uses other methods to get rid of voters. He tosses out the names of people suspected of not being citizens. He purges inactive voters. He kicks out people who didn’t serve on jury duty. He uses every imaginable method, and somehow the voters left out are always black.

Let’s just say that for the sake of journalism and the excitement of a Black woman running for governor––if elected Bottoms would become the first Black female governor in the history of the United States––that Kemp has a lobotomy and somehow stops throwing away Black votes, which he could easily do from outside the office––Bottoms would also be required to pull all of the votes that Abrams received and during her two failed attempts at governorship, and well, I don’t know if that’s possible. 

I’m not thoroughly entrenched in Ga. politics, but I have eyes and know that I can’t remember these two powerful Black Southern women ever being sistergirls. Meaning, I don’t know if Abrams, a kingmaker and powerhouse in Ga. politics, will stump for Bottoms. And if Bottoms can’t pull Abrams voters (Abrams fell only 54,723 votes short in 2018 and close to 300,000 votes in her 2022 bid), then she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. 

But what do I know? I once thought America was smart enough not to elect Orange Stalin into office and look how well that turned out. 

And, Bottoms was a beloved mayor. During her time in Atlanta she “…presided over the city’s response to the Covid pandemic and amid the protests (some of which turned violent) in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, as well as a fatal police shooting in Atlanta around the same time,” NBC News reports.

She also publicly pushed back against Kemp’s decision to lift COVID restrictions in the state, even battling him in court over city mask mandates. Bottoms is currently the highest-profile candidate to enter the race. 

SEE ALSO:

Georgia Prosecutor Declines Criminal Charges Against Deputy Who Killed Exonerated Black Man

Georgia Woman Charged With Involuntary Manslaughter After Black Boyfriend Found Shot Dead

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