Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor who more recently served in top posts at the Democratic National Committee and in former President Joe Biden’s White House and 2024 campaign, is running for governor of Georgia.
She announced her campaign Tuesday morning, releasing a video on social media that recounts her upbringing and tight-knit family and criticizes President Donald 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.
She criticizes Georgia’s decision under successive Republican governors not to expand Medicaid, promising to do so if she is elected, and she highlights 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.”
Speaking Monday with NBC News ahead of her announcement, Bottoms said that “Trump 2.0 has been even more catastrophic for our state,” ticking off a laundry list of sectors she said are hurting because of his actions.
“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.
She’s now running statewide after Trump carried Georgia by 2 percentage points last year, following an even narrower victory there by Biden in 2020.
Bottoms, who started her political career as a judge and a member of the Atlanta City Council, took office as mayor at the beginning of Trump’s first term. 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.
She vocally pushed back against GOP Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to lift Covid restrictions in the state, battling him in court over her decision to keep the city’s mask mandates despite an order from Kemp banning the mandates. Kemp is finishing his second term and isn’t allowed to run again next year.
Asked about the issue of crime in Atlanta during her tenure, Bottoms argued that crime went up across the country in the aftermath of Covid, and she said that during her first meeting in the Oval Office with Biden, she pressed him for flexibility in how to spend Covid relief funding. She said she put that funding toward tangible results like an Office of Violence Prevention and a program to get young people summer jobs, which she said has helped lower crime rates.
“If it had been Atlanta and Atlanta alone that experienced this uptick, I would have known that it was something that we were not doing during that time. But unfortunately, it was experienced in communities big and small across America, ” she said.
As mayor, Bottoms also signed a measure that barred the city from accepting new detainees from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She said Monday that the decision stemmed from her disagreement with the Trump administration’s “family separation policy” during his first term.
While she said that “we can all agree that we don’t want violent criminals on our streets” no matter their citizenship status, she criticized the Trump administration over episodes like an undocumented Georgia college student’s facing deportation after she was pulled over for a minor traffic stop. But Bottoms didn’t directly address whether she’d seek similar prohibitions on cooperating with ICE if she’s elected governor.
She is the highest-profile Democrat in the race so far. On the Republican side, state Attorney General Chris Carr is running, and more high-profile Republicans could be weighing bids for the open seat.
Bottoms, who is looking to become the first Democratic governor of Georgia in more than two decades, hails from its biggest city — and also the bluest part of a state that has held some of the nation’s closest elections in recent years, from voting for Biden and Trump in back-to-back presidential elections to recently electing two Democratic senators. Bottoms said her pitch to voters across the state is that her platform “transcends party affiliation” and “geographical lines.”
And as more Democrats raise questions about whether the party should have stuck with Biden last year and some question whether he had experienced cognitive decline in office, Bottoms said she “didn’t have any concerns about the president’s cognitive abilities” during her work with him.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com