We’ve grown accustomed these days to demographic firsts. Just in the last day or so, we’ve seen the election of the first Muslim U.S. senator and the first Hispanic governor of Texas.

What happened in Georgia this week was on a different order of magnitude, however. Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected the nation’s first African-American woman governor, but that’s not even the half of it.

When Bottoms takes the oath of office in January, she will be joined by the new attorney general, Tanya Miller, secretary of state, Penny Brown Reynolds; state school superintendent, Lydia Powell; public service commissioner, Shelia Edwards; agriculture commissioner, Katherine Juhan-Arnold; labor commissioner, Nikki Porcher, insurance commissioner and Keisha Sean Waites, insurance commissioner. In all, eight African-American women were elected to statewide office.

If Democrats hold to the majority they appear on Wednesday morning to have won, the next speaker of the House will be Rep. Carolyn Hugley of Columbus.

It’s hard to think of any precedent in American history for this kind of demographic shift. A majority of the state’s executive offices and its most powerful legislative office will be held by African-American women, who for a long time have been denied their fair share of the political pie, both generally and within their adopted party.

Josh McLaurin, the newly elected lieutenant governor, is neither a woman nor African-American, but he will be especially important to the Bottoms administration’s effectiveness in working with the General Assembly.

Republicans appear to have held on to their majority in the state Senate, although their majority has narrowed. McLaurin and Republican state Sen. Greg Dolezal are said to have cooperated on various legislative matters before they became opponents in this race. That was probably good on-the-ground experience for the challenges McLaurin will face.

The historical breakthrough in Georgia came on the massive blue wave that produced dramatic results across the country, but in the minds of a lot of Georgia Democrats who have been expecting a demographic rebound for decades, it was overdue.
A first look at the interactive map on the secretary of state’s site indicates that Bottoms did a good job limiting Rick Jackson’s margins in the rest of the state, while she put up huge majorities in the core Metro Atlanta counties.

If not for Gov. Brian Kemp, that might have been the story told by the map in 2022 or 2018. Kemp was very skillful in stitching together a majority that depended on counties far from Atlanta. But depending on counties where deaths outnumber births isn’t a winning strategy in the long run. More than half a million new voters, most of them in the Metro area, have been registered since 2024, and it appears they voted heavily Democratic in this election.

There were more than a few flowers tossed online at Stacey Abrams for the role she has played in building the Democratic coalition which showed up in this election. She also played a major role in Georgia Republican politics as Kemp’s opponent in his two races for governor. A year or so ago I observed that Kemp and Sen. Jon Ossoff, who at that moment appeared to be heading into a race with each other, were the state’s two most talented politicians. On the strength of what she pulled off this year — winning a crowded Democratic primary without a runoff, picking up early on the importance of Donald Trump in every race this year, coordinating seamlessly with Ossoff and winning while outspent more than 8-to-1 — Bottoms deserves to be in that company. Now she has to govern.

The true arc of this year’s campaign in Georgia can be traced by the number of times Jackson mentioned Trump’s name at the beginning of the campaign in comparison with the number of times he mentioned Kemp toward the end. Not so many months ago, Republican Senate hopefuls were vying with each other for the president’s endorsement, which he bestowed on Rep. Mike Collins. That turned out as badly as Trump’s choice in several other races around the country, or his ill-advised attempts to save the GOP’s congressional majority by redrawing states’ maps.

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