Make no mistake: Georgia’s new leaders walked a road Stacey Abrams built

Georgia woke up Wednesday to a government that looks different from any in its history. Keisha Lance Bottoms is governor-elect, Georgia’s first female governor and the first Black woman elected governor of any U.S. state. Beside her are seven other women who won statewide contests Tuesday, for attorney general, secretary of state, agriculture commissioner, labor commissioner, insurance commissioner, state school superintendent and the Public Service Commission.

These women earned their wins. They campaigned hard, raised money and made their case to voters. But make no mistake about it: every one of them walked a road that Stacey Abrams spent more than a decade building.

Start with the math. In 2018, Abrams finished roughly 55,000 votes short of beating Brian Kemp. She could have conceded and gone quiet. Instead she went to work. She founded Fair Fight, which helped register at least 800,000 new Georgia voters ahead of the 2020 election. Even earlier, as a state lawmaker in 2013, she had started the New Georgia Project to register voters.

Those voters did not stop at 2020. They became the foundation of the coalition that elected Bottoms. Black voters drove her victory: about 9 in 10 backed her, according to ABC News Voter Polls. Young voters turned out for her too, with about 3 in 4 voters ages 18 to 29 choosing her. Those are the communities Abrams spent years registering, organizing and persuading that their votes counted.

Then there’s the barrier no voter file can measure. Before Abrams, no Black woman had ever won the Georgia Democratic Party’s nomination for governor. She did it twice, in 2018 and 2022. Tuesday was the third Georgia governor’s race in a row with a Black woman at the top of the ticket. By the time Bottoms ran, a Black woman running statewide in Georgia was no longer a novelty. That change in imagination counts as much as any registration drive.

Critics will point out that Abrams lost twice. They will note that Bottoms did better than Abrams with Latino voters, winning about 6 in 10, roughly 10 points more than Abrams in 2022. They will bring up the troubles of the New Georgia Project, which closed after fines, layoffs and instability.

Those points are real, but they don’t change the story. Movements are rarely won by the first person through the door. Abrams’ losses were not failures. They were the groundwork. Her work showed Democrats that Georgia could be won, showed donors it was worth investing in, and showed a generation of Black women candidates that the top job was within reach.

Abrams herself was characteristically generous on Wednesday, writing that the night’s victories had “transformed what we imagine for America.” She did not claim credit. She doesn’t have to. Georgia knows where this moment came from.

When Bottoms is sworn in, the history will be hers. The path will always be Stacey Abrams’.