Dems can win this red-state race if they can find the right face

With Brian Kemp leaving the governor’s office after next year’s election, Georgia Democrats have an opportunity to make history.

All they need now is a candidate.

The alleged frontrunner for the 2026 nomination is Keisha Lance Bottoms. According to a poll of Democratic primary voters commissioned by her own campaign last month, Bottoms “pulls more support than all other named candidates combined,” drawing 38 percent of likely primary voters.

However, I’d argue that’s more a sign of weakness than of strength. Only 9 percent of voters polled in that survey said they haven’t heard of Bottoms, which tells us that she’s a well-known commodity with less than overwhelming support, even in a field of relative unknowns.

And frankly, it’s hard to envision Bottoms winning a statewide general election. She is a former Atlanta mayor, which historically puts her at a disadvantage in much of the rest of the state. More important than that, Bottoms proved mediocre in the mayor’s office, accomplishing little and declining to run for re-election after her first term, without offering voters or supporters much of an explanation for walking away.

At a time when Democrats are looking for fighters, I’m not sure that’s a resume they should find attractive.

If Democrats do make Bottoms their nominee for governor, they also guarantee an endless run of commercials retelling the tragic tale of Secoriea Turner, the eight-year-old Atlanta girl who was shot dead by vigilante gang members in 2020. Secoriea was shot while riding with her mother in the back seat after Bottoms, as mayor, allowed gang members to take and keep control of a site in southwest Atlanta.

That’s a hard, even impossible thing to explain to voters.

In an election season that Republicans are desperately trying to turn into a soft-on-crime referendum, Secoriea’s story would become an anchor around the neck of every other Democrat on the ballot, from the U.S. Senate down to local races.

Bottoms’ best-known challenger is Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor and, more famously, a Republican recently turned Democrat. Duncan deserves credit for recognizing that the party of Donald Trump bears no resemblance to the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Johnny Isakson, and for having the moral clarity and guts to act on that recognition. As far as I can tell, his conversion to the Democratic cause is sincere, but in an era of heightened tribal identities he’s asking a lot from primary voters to place their faith in him.

So far, I’m a little surprised by the open reception he’s getting, but translating voter curiosity into actual ballots will be difficult. If Duncan can pull it off, it would be a major miracle and a national news story, but I’m not seeing much in the way of political miracles these days.

The other two major announced candidates, Jason Esteves and Michael Thurmond, offer an important generational contrast, and my guess is that one of the two will emerge as the nominee.

Esteves, 42, is a former chair of the Atlanta Board of Education and a former one-term state senator. He comes across well in public and has built an impressive slate of endorsements from those who have worked with him in his previous roles. In the investment world Esteves might be touted as a growth stock, and sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t.

Thurmond, 72, has served ably in a variety of state and local offices, including state legislator, state labor commissioner and DeKalb County executive. He knows the state and state government, he has the resume of a governor and he campaigns and operates as a moderate. But for Democrats, he’s also the last holdover from a political era that a lot of Georgia voters either don’t remember or never experienced in the first place.

In the current environment, that might not be to his advantage.

• Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press.
• Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.