This story originally appeared in La Fronde’s Nov. 5 newsletter. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On election night, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Washington bureau chief Tia Mitchell was wrapping her head around Georgia’s dizzying and historic results. Besides Jon Ossoff’s very swift and decisive win, it was also a huge moment for Black women: Keisha Lance Bottoms will become the country’s first Black woman governor, alongside seven other Black women elected to major statewide offices.
I couldn’t help but think about why this moment was so different for Black women compared to Stacey Abrams’ 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial runs, and it’s something I wanted to unpack a bit with Tia. She’s also spent a lot of time with Ossoff, someone else I wanted to get a read on. Why is he so hesitant about running for president right now? Tia had some thoughts on that, along with plenty more insight into what unfolded in Georgia and what it could mean for 2028.
How have the last 48 hours been for you?
It’s just crazy. It’s been a whirlwind. Yes, the election is over, but I think no one was prepared for how much Democrats won and what that says about the moment. I was telling someone, it’s hard because it’s almost like there’s no nuance. Democrats won everything. There was no bright light for a Republican. That’s the narrative. [I’m] trying to search for the nuance in the meaning and the context. So I think, especially for me, I wasn’t prepared for it to be complete. Like, Democrats literally won everything.
I was gonna ask how this compares to other elections that you’ve covered.
Nothing like this. I mean, I covered [Raphael] Warnock and Ossoff, right? And so that was, in its own way, a very sweeping, decisive victory. They were Democrats winning statewide in Georgia after like 20 years of Republicans. They changed the balance of power in the Senate, so they were very consequential in their wins. But even then, it was on the same ballot that all these other Democrats ran statewide [and lost]. Two years later, when Warnock ran for re-election, it was on the same ballot that all the Democrats still lost statewide. And in 2020, yes, Joe Biden won, but Georgia’s General Assembly, for example, was still overwhelmingly conservative. So it still wasn’t like this.
I was gonna ask you sort of what this means, because although there is basically a blue tsunami that happened here, does that mean that it’s going to necessarily carry over to the presidential election, you think? Or do you think there is still a lot of work cut out for Democrats in order to build that trust again with voters?
This blue wave is not necessarily a permanent thing. I think it’s two things as we look at 2028. The biggest one is going to be what do Democrats do with these two years? And it’s not just Democrats in Congress; it’s Democrats that now control Georgia and many other states. It’s new Democrats who are mayors and governors and how they lead. So there is going to be a question like, “Okay, Democrats, we gave you the power. Does it pay off?”
But just as important is going to be what does Donald Trump do with his final two years in office? At the end of the day, Keisha Lance Bottoms can’t end the war in Iran, right? And the war in Iran is the main reason why gas prices and fertilizer prices are so high. At the end of the day, Congress can pass bills to restore healthcare subsidies, or reverse some of the Medicaid and food stamp cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill. But does Trump veto it? You know, does Trump continue to talk about beautification projects and monuments and ballrooms and golf courses, or does he say, “All right, I get it. I’m going to work with Congress to address some of your concerns.”
So, let’s say Donald Trump doesn’t change, and for the next two years — it’s new wars, strikes, tough immigration policies, and Congress kind of has to mitigate things without his help. I think that continues to put Republicans at risk in 2028. So I’ve seen people talk about how George W. Bush, in his final term in 2006, faced a tough, terrible midterm, and then in 2008 it gets worse for Republicans because Obama wins and [Democrats get] a trifecta [control of the U.S. House, Senate, and presidency]. To me, that’s the risk: if the president is still really unpopular, then Democrats can build on this in 2028. But if Democrats are considered to have fizzled away all this power they were given, then maybe there is room for Republicans to say, “See, we told you so. We’re going to pivot away from Trump, but we’re going to give you some other alternatives. Trust us in 2028.”
One person that I want to talk about is Ossoff, because there have been a lot of rumors of him potentially running for president, and he’s sworn that he is not going to do that. What do you think about that? Do you think that he’s being genuine about that, or do you think that there could be a possibility of this happening as we get closer to 2028?
I think he’s genuine in having zero interest, and that’s his quote: “I have zero interest.” Because I am the reporter covering Georgia, I have been talking to Ossoff about things far before he gathered national attention. So I have a little bit of a longer frame of reference to some of where he stands. I know how protective he is of his family. I know how concerned he is about the privacy of his still very small children, and I think those concerns are what cause him to be hesitant about running for president, because his oldest daughter is pre-K [age], and his youngest daughter is a toddler. We’re talking about very small children who the internet has never seen their face, and that’s on purpose. Senator Ossoff is serious about that. I don’t know if he wants to give that up. He’s also a relatively young man. He’s 39 years old. He can wait and still run for president later, right? So that’s why I think he has zero interest.
That being said, I still leave room for that to change as he digests the moment, as he digests his popularity coming out of this Senate race. Because I think he would like to be president one day. He’s never said that to me on or off the record. But just knowing him, knowing kind of where he stands on things from a political standpoint, I don’t think he’s like, “Well, no, I don’t want to be president. That’s not a job I seek.” I don’t think that’s the truth. I just think it wasn’t necessarily on his bingo card to do it right now. But similar to Barack Obama, I think that there were people who took Obama to the side and said, “I know you’re a first-term senator. I know you’re a relatively young man, but this is the moment. This is the timing that works. So if you’re going to do it, do it now.” I think if those conversations happen for Ossoff, maybe there is a universe, but honestly, I think it would take a lot of convincing. So my bets are on him not running in 2028. I think Raphael Warnock is much more likely to dip his toe in the water.
And do you think Warnock has a shot at mobilizing votes?
Yeah, I mean, I think Warnock’s lane — and this is a lane that we’ve seen emerge with Democrats — is Democrats who are tied to faith leadership, who are able to speak to voters on both sides of the aisle in religious and spirituality and morality terms that Democrats in the past have almost ceded to Republicans. Don’t get me wrong, their politics — Warnock and Talarico and Senator-elect Hamilton — their approach to Christianity in politics is very different than a Mike Johnson or a Paula White-Cain, or the leaders of the white Christian nationalist movement that we’ve seen. But they still speak in ways that resonate with Christians, with people who want their elected officials to feel like they do have a moral center [that] is rooted in more than just brutal partisanship and power. [Warnock is] very effective in that way. He’s also just a very effective communicator, period, which comes from the fact that he’s the pastor.
And again, he’s also someone that I’m privileged to cover in a way that most people don’t. When you understand Ebenezer Baptist Church — it’s not just that he’s the pastor of a church; he’s the pastor of a church that Martin Luther King and Martin Luther King’s entire family is tied to. I was at church with Warnock just this past Sunday. This is a church that’s been around for over 100 years, and they’ve only had [five] lead pastors. So it’s a very historic church. It’s a megachurch with a large population. It’s a church with deep money. It’s the church where Black people with money are known to have gone over these generations. And so there are a lot of politics and personalities you got to manage at a church like this. If you’re familiar with TV shows like ‘Beyond the Gates’ or ‘Greenleaf,’ these are the kind of churches that get portrayed. You know what I mean? And so when I say Warnock is rooted in the church that has given him skills that he’s transferred over to being a senator, it’s more than just delivering a sermon. It’s managing a team, managing personalities, managing people with high expectations, and knowing how to speak to people like that. I think people don’t always think about that when they think about the fact that he’s a pastor. Same for Adam Hamilton. He has a megachurch with thousands of parishioners. You got to be good at politics in church leadership.
But I also think that Warnock is sitting back, and unlike Ossoff — and again, I don’t know this, but just my perception of him is Ossoff’s got a piece of paper that when he was like 16 years old, he wrote out his life’s plan and was like, “In 2042, I’m going to be president.” You know what I mean? Warnock, when he was 16 years old, was like, “I’m going to be a pastor because I love Martin Luther King,” and all this politics stuff kind of came unexpectedly. And so for Warnock, I think he’s open to the prospect of running for president or becoming someone’s running mate. But for him, he’s sitting back there and going, “Does it make sense for what I want to accomplish? Because at the end of the day, I am a pastor who just wants to do good.”
He’s still a politician. Every politician, especially on a big stage, you gotta have a little bit of self-importance to think people are gonna give you millions of dollars to help you get elected to this thing. You gotta have an ego to be a successful politician at these high levels. So I don’t want to paint anybody running for the Senate or for president as, “I just want to do a good thing out of the goodness of my heart.” But I do think there’s a part of Warnock that’s like, “I want to accomplish good things. If I think I could be the person to do it by taking this action, then I’ll go for it.” But it’s got to make sense.
Another interesting person is Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is now our first Black woman elected governor. What do you think made that moment possible? Because, you know, I think of Stacey Abrams in this case, how she kind of paved the way for this Democratic mobilization, but then she never made it to that seat. So what do you think are the differences between their two stories here?
First of all, what Keisha Lance Bottoms accomplished is extraordinary on its face. The fact that she will become the first Black female governor in U.S. history — and quite frankly, that it took the nation 250 years to get here — is something that I think we have to digest, and what that means about how race and gender play into society. Not just that women are half of the population, but we’re more educated than men, and on a trajectory of leading households and things like that, but there’s still not been a woman president in 250 years. So we got to think about that.
So Keisha Lance Bottoms, I think she accomplished it, quite frankly, by being human. Early in her candidacy, and really during the interim years when she was no longer working in the Biden administration but before she was a declared candidate, on her social media she was doing hair tutorials, she was doing TikToks with her kids. And a lot of people, when she launched her campaign, were like, “Where did this come from? You’ve been doing TikToks, girl, and all of a sudden you’re getting back into politics?” But I think it helped. When Rick Jackson, the Republican opponent, was like, “This woman wants to let Atlanta burn,” people were like, “The mom?”
And she also took a note out of the Stacey Abrams playbook and went across the state, to rural counties that maybe are Republican-leaning counties overall, but we know there are Democrats there. She went to them and said, “I still need your vote. I can’t rely on just Metro Atlanta.” And I think that helped people say, “She’s not scary. I saw her in person, or I’ve paid attention to what she’s saying.”
Also, this is where the Stacey Abrams playbook comes into factor. Stacey Abrams said, “Look at the demographics. Georgia is changing. It is not the red state that maybe we made it out to be. People are moving here. We’re getting more diverse. We’re getting younger, and if we harness the power of people of color and young people, Democrats can win.” And maybe she was a little bit ahead of her time.
I think we also can’t ignore the fact that Stacey Abrams is an unapologetic, plus-size, dark-skinned, single Black woman, and for some people, for different reasons, those things are difficult for them to digest when they’re voting. Keisha Lance Bottoms is a lighter-skinned Black woman who chose not to wear braids when she became a candidate. She wore straighter hair with curls. Any woman of color who’s tried to enter corporate America has had to wrestle with their hair and how they present to the world, and what people may infer from how they wear their hair. You can say, well, maybe if Stacey Abrams tried to play the game better, could she have become more palatable to people? Maybe, but we’ll never know, because Stacey Abrams chose never to play the game. She’s always worn her hair in natural styles, natural twists and coils. She has a gap in her teeth. She’s chosen to keep her gap and not get braces or something to fix the gap in her teeth that some people might say, “Well, that doesn’t look as professional.” Again, she is plus-size. She is dark-skinned. She is single, and she’s never talked about her dating life in ways that have allowed people to speculate, and she said, “Let them speculate. I’m going to still be me, and no, I’m not going to show up to a gala with a guy just to get you off my back about whether I might be gay.”
So these are things that I think we all know were a factor — not necessarily the deciding factor in why Stacey Abrams didn’t win in 2018 and 2022, but yes, they are factors. There is vitriol about Stacey Abrams among some conservatives in Georgia. You know, “she’s this radical leftist, weird lady.” And I think Keisha Lance Bottoms deliberately took steps to not allow those things to be tied to her, and we can’t ignore that, right? But also, just the demographics: the Georgia of 2026 is not the Georgia of 2022. Definitely not the Georgia of 2016.
And finally, I’ll say, just by having someone pave the way, it makes the road smoother. Just by Stacey Abrams being on the ballot, campaigning, even if she didn’t win, there were people in the audience who said, “Wow, there’s a Black woman up there who wants me to vote for her for governor, and I got to think about that. And even if I don’t vote for her, I’ve now seen it, and maybe that makes it a little bit more of a possibility.” The fact that Kamala Harris, when she became vice president, said, “I stand on the shoulders of Shirley Chisholm,” and when Barack Obama became president and walked out on election night, Jesse Jackson was in the audience with tears running down his face. Those are examples to me that anytime someone achieves something great, they usually say there’s someone who came before them who maybe didn’t quite reach that peak, but helped them up the mountain. And so, to me, that’s how I think about Keisha Lance Bottoms’ dynamic in conjunction with Stacey Abrams. But that being said, Stacey Abrams isn’t saying this. I’m not saying this. Keisha did this on her own.
And the final thing I’ll say is, we can’t ignore the context of the overall political space we’re in right now, where Republicans were down bad, right? Trump saying, “Pretend like I’m on the ballot.” I think a lot of Democrats took him at his word. Rick Jackson told Trump, “I want to be your favorite governor.” He campaigned. He showed up to rallies with Trump, including one in October that he initially was going to skip, and I don’t know if he got pressure or he just decided that for turnout purposes he needed to show up. But he showed up to campaign alongside Donald Trump in early voting. And once he tied himself that closely to Donald Trump, he put himself among the many Republicans who were rebuked, because people want to elect people that they think will stand up to Donald Trump.
Side note: I have a thing where I try to call our elected officials, particularly those of color, by their last names, because I think we tend to be more casual with elected officials of color than we do with other elected officials. Like, you know, we have Congresswoman Nikema Williams, and people love to just say “Nikema,” but do you call Rep. Austin Scott “Austin”? No, you call him Rep. Scott. So I say I’m not gonna say “Nikema.” Everybody’s Rep. something. But I feel like with Keisha, her name is such a powerful — her name is a metaphor in and of itself. So I think we love it, but I want to get in the habit of — again, we’re not saying “Brian,” we’re saying Governor Kemp. And I’m not rebuking anyone else, but for me, I never called Governor Kemp “Brian” a day in my life, so I need to start saying Governor-Elect Bottoms because I want to be consistent in that way.
In addition to Bottoms, there are also seven other Black women who were elected to statewide office this week. What does that signal as far as how the political landscape has shifted in Georgia itself? Do you think it’s all tied to what we were just saying about the Stacey Abrams to Keisha Lance Bottoms effect, or do you think there’s something bigger happening here?
So I think Georgia voters voted for Democrats up and down the ticket, and so when these Black women became the party’s nominees, they benefited from the fact that people were like, “I don’t care who it is, I’m voting for the Democrat.” And none of the Democrats were seen as particularly problematic. So, Democrats were just successful.
When we talk about these Black women, we actually have to back up to the primary, because the primaries were competitive and these Black women beat out other candidates. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and I think Black women went to the polls in the primary and said, “When I have a choice, I’m picking the Black woman.” And there have been very few Democratic primaries this year in Georgia where the Black woman on the ballot didn’t win. I don’t mean to say that it was only Black women voting for these Black women, but I think because Black women were the base of the coalition, that just gave all these Black women on the ballot a natural advantage and made them hard to beat.
Quite frankly, for Mayor Bottoms, there were people like the Democratic strategists and the people behind the scenes who have been at this game a long time who were very frustrated when she threw her hat in the ring. They did not think she would be a great general election candidate because she was mayor during the summer of 2020, and because she didn’t run for another term, they thought that would turn people off and make them think that she’s just not in it for the right reasons, and wouldn’t have the stamina. And so a lot of them were backing other candidates — Jason Esteves top of the list. He was the chosen candidate from the donor class and the strategist class, and that’s who they backed, and they felt that he would be a better general election candidate because they felt he didn’t have the baggage. Quite frankly, all the concerns about Black women on the ballot, and could they win a general election, existed. But she won the primary, and they couldn’t say anything about it.
And I don’t think we can ignore all the behind-the-scenes of the people figuring out what ads would work. Rick Jackson, yes, he was a former foster child who became a billionaire and has this really moving rags-to-riches story. He talked about supporting foster children, and that I think people found really moving. Well, Mayor Bottoms was like, “Well, about that, I adopted all of my children. So let’s talk about foster children. Let’s talk about adoption.” So they thought about it, and she had ads and social media posts doing the TikToks with her kids, and so there was a team effort there too that I think we can’t take away from.
Black women ran in the primary. They all got to the ballot. They stuck together as a ticket. That’s the other thing, I think, in Georgia. Ossoff campaigned with Mayor Bottoms. When he campaigned alone, he talked about Mayor Bottoms. He talked about the Democrats up and down the ticket. Barack Obama came, and all the ticket was there. Half of them were on stage ahead of Obama. They ran as a ticket, and I think it really helped them all get over the finish line together.
