On Tuesday, Georgia voters did something they hadn't done in 28 years. They elected a Democratic governor. Then they kept going down the ballot, all the way to the bottom.

Every statewide office on the ballot went to a Democrat. Democrats took the state House for the first time since 2004. And Black women won seven of the eight top jobs in state government.

There was one place the wave didn't reach: Georgia's seats in the U.S. House. Republicans kept all nine of theirs.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: a clean sweep, and history

Keisha Lance Bottoms beat a billionaire

Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, beat Republican Rick Jackson 54.3% to 45.7%, according to NBC News results, with 99% of the vote counted. Four years ago, Republican Brian Kemp won the same office with 53.4%.

She is the first woman and the first Black person ever elected governor of Georgia, and the first Black woman to serve as governor of any state in the country's history. Before Tuesday, Georgia hadn't elected a Democratic governor since 1998.

Jackson tried to buy the job. After spending more than $100 million of his own money to win the Republican primary, he put another $88 million into the general election by Oct. 20, then $4.5 million more the next day, according to Capitol Beat. Without his own checks, his committees would have raised about as much as hers. And from Aug. 1 to Oct. 20, he got 80 donations of $10 or less. Bottoms got more than 74,000.

It didn't work. Bottoms won majorities in eight counties that voted for Kemp in 2022, including Fayette, Houston and Peach, according to the Georgia Recorder.

Some of that was Jackson's own doing. Steve Bigler, a Gwinnett County voter, told the Recorder he voted for Kemp in 2022 and would have again. But Jackson's ad warning that immigrants who broke the law would be "deported or departed" made him uneasy. "Let's just get a little humanity into our politics," he said. A company Jackson owns has paid $3 million to settle claims it trapped foreign nurses in contracts they couldn't leave.

Another Gwinnett voter, Conrad Gill, said he was leaning toward Jackson until an ad came out about his ties to Trump, including his statements that he'd be "Trump's best friend as a governor." "I don't think Trump is doing a good job," Gill said. "I think he's very corrupt."

Jon Ossoff beat Mike Collins by 18 points

Sen. Jon Ossoff beat Republican Rep. Mike Collins 59% to 41%, according to NBC News — about 750,000 votes. In September, Collins was asked about sending federal troops to Georgia's polling places and said that was "fine with me". Federal law makes it a crime.

Black women won almost everything

When the counting was done, Black women had won seven of Georgia's eight statewide executive offices, according to WSB-TV. With a seat on the utility board, that's eight Black women who won statewide races on Tuesday:

• Governor: Keisha Lance Bottoms.
• Attorney general: State Rep. Tanya Miller, a former federal and Fulton County prosecutor, beat Republican state Sen. Brian Strickland. She'll be the first woman ever to be Georgia's attorney general, and the second Black person.
• Secretary of state: Former Fulton County Judge Penny Brown Reynolds beat Republican Rep. Tim Fleming, who was Kemp's deputy when Kemp was secretary of state. She'll be the first Black person elected to the job that runs Georgia's elections, including the 2028 presidential vote.
• School superintendent: Educator Lydia Powell beat Richard Woods, who had held the job since 2015. She'll be the first Democrat in the job in more than 30 years and the first Black woman to lead Georgia's public schools, which teach more than 1.7 million students.
• Labor commissioner: Nikki Porcher beat Republican Bárbara Rivera Holmes.
• Insurance commissioner: Keisha Sean Waites beat Republican John King.
• Agriculture commissioner: Katherine Juhan-Arnold beat Republican Tyler Harper.
• Public Service Commission: Shelia Edwards won an open seat on the board that sets Georgia Power's rates.

"Black women for sure lead Georgia," Atlanta attorney Michelle Augustine told the Recorder at Bottoms' rally, waving a sign that said so.

There was more history below that. Fulton County elected Mo Ivory as the first Black woman to chair its county commission. State Sen. Josh McLaurin won lieutenant governor, so a Democrat will preside over the state Senate for the first time since 2007.

The state House flipped

Republicans ran the Georgia House for more than 20 years. Going in, Democrats needed to flip 10 seats to get to 91, a majority of the 180. By Wednesday, unofficial results put them at that 91, according to Atlanta News First.

Some of the Republicans who lost, according to the Recorder:

• Ron Stephens of Savannah, beaten by attorney Stephanie Burgess.
• Deborah Silcox of Sandy Springs, beaten by Beth Fuller, a former public health worker at the CDC.
• Noelle Kahaian of Locust Grove, beaten by truck driver Mishael White by nearly 8 points.
• Bethany Ballard of Warner Robins, beaten by Renita Duncan, a retired Army command sergeant major.

House Minority Leader Carolyn Hugley of Columbus plans to run for speaker. She would be the first woman and the first Black person to hold the job. Republicans kept the state Senate, but only 29 to 27.

Why it matters: Democrats will now decide which bills even get a hearing in the House. "I can list for you 25 things that I've introduced that never got a hearing, and times are going to change," said Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, a Decatur Democrat. And the first fight is health care. The state's own officials say Georgia "does not have the financial capacity" to cover the 100,000 more people that Trump's budget bill will add to Kemp's Medicaid program. All nine Georgia Republicans in the U.S. House voted for that bill.

Power bills got a new referee

Democrats will control the Public Service Commission, the board that regulates Georgia Power, for the first time in decades. It was all Republican from 2007 until Democrats won two seats in a 2025 special election. It approved six rate increases in a few years, adding an estimated $500 a year for the average household. Edwards and Peter Hubbard both led by more than 10 points on election night. Edwards says she'll turn it into "a consumer-focused commission versus a utility-focused commission."

The bad: they won, by less

Six Republicans on this site won seats in the U.S. House. Every one of them got a smaller share than the Republican who won the same seat in 2024, according to NBC News results.

• Brian Jack won the 3rd District 58.6% to 41.4%. He beat the same Democrat, Maura Keller, in 2024 with 66.3%. Before he ran for Congress, he was Trump's White House political director, and he made the call that put Mo Brooks on the stage at the Jan. 6 rally.
• Rich McCormick won the 7th District 56.2% to 43.8%, down from 64.9%. He sits on the Armed Services Committee and reported buying a defense contractor's stock almost two and a half years late.
• Austin Scott won the 8th District 60.4% to 39.6%, down from 68.9%. He hasn't held a town hall since 2015, so 200 Georgians asked their questions to an empty chair.
• Andrew Clyde won the 9th District 59.3% to 40.7%, down from 69%. After a winter storm hit his district, he asked FEMA for help while sponsoring a bill that would let a president refuse to spend money Congress approved.
• Rick Allen won the 12th District, around Augusta, 52.1% to 47.9% — about 11,000 votes. In 2024 he won with 60.3%. When a hospital CEO in his district warned that the budget bill could cost him his ICU, Allen called him "dead wrong".
• Clay Fuller won the 14th District 58.8% to 41.2% over Shawn Harris. In 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene beat Harris in the same seat with 64.4%. Fuller, a former district attorney, has demanded Anthony Fauci be jailed at least five times in two months.

"Republicans should heed the margins and recognize that there was discontent in their districts even when they won," Emory political scientist Andra Gillespie told the Recorder.

The ugly: 56% of the vote, 5 of 14 seats

Democrats won every statewide race in Georgia on Tuesday. Then look at the U.S. House.

We added up NBC's results for all 14 Georgia districts. Democratic candidates got 2,342,772 votes, about 56%. Republican candidates got 1,825,455, about 44%.

Democrats won 5 of the 14 seats. Republicans won 9.

Republicans held nine seats going in, and they kept all nine, the Recorder reported, on a map they redrew in 2023.

How the map was drawn

In October 2023, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled that the congressional map Republicans drew in 2021 watered down the power of Black voters, and ordered a new majority-Black district in west metro Atlanta.

The legislature added that district. But it also redrew north metro Atlanta. The 7th District, then held by Democrat Lucy McBath, was redrawn from majority minority to majority white, according to the Georgia Recorder.

The voters who won the case asked Jones to reject the new map. Their lawyer argued the new 7th District could itself break the Voting Rights Act. Jones overruled them. He said he saw no evidence of a new violation, and that the lawsuit was about Black voters, not all minority voters. He approved the map in December 2023. It kept Republicans' majority in the delegation.

So the court never said the 2023 map was fair. It said the legislature had drawn the Black-majority district he ordered, and that the plaintiffs hadn't shown the other changes broke the law.

They wanted to go further

This summer, Republicans tried to cut even deeper. After the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais weakened the part of the Voting Rights Act that voters use to challenge maps that dilute minority votes, Kemp called lawmakers back to redraw the maps for 2028.

Minutes before that session began on June 17, House Speaker Jon Burns and other GOP leaders dropped the redistricting. He didn't say the idea was wrong. He said lawmakers needed "ample opportunity" for public input first, and the plan was widely expected to come back after the election.

Now it won't, at least not this year. On Wednesday, Kemp said he won't call a special session to redraw the maps or to cut the new governor's powers. "The resounding rejection of MAGA politics that you saw last night did not invite much adventurism," said McLaurin, the lieutenant governor-elect.

What the map was worth on Tuesday

Under the current map, the closest Republican seats were close indeed. Rick Allen held the 12th by about 11,000 votes. In the open 1st District around Savannah, Republican Jim Kingston won 51.4% to 48.6%, fewer than 8,000 votes. In the open 10th, Republican Houston Gaines won with 53.6%.

Meanwhile, the Democrats' five seats were packed. Lucy McBath won the 6th with 80.9%. Nikema Williams won the 5th with 90.2%. Democrats piled up huge wins in a few districts and fell short in the rest. That's how a party gets 56% of the votes and 36% of the seats.

The rest of the ugly

• Jackson wouldn't say who won 2020. During the primary, he refused to say who won the 2020 election, NBC News reported, and only admitted Joe Biden won once he faced Bottoms. When a supporter asked him to call Trump for troops because he feared Democrats would "cheat," Jackson said Kemp would get the National Guard instead.
• The election board tried to block the voting system. Five weeks before the election, Georgia's Republican-run State Election Board voted 3-2, over its own chairman's objection, to ask Trump's Justice Department to block the state's voting system.
• Republicans are leaving Democrats a bill. Lawmakers passed an income tax cut this year that the governor's own budget office said made a $1.3 billion hole in the budget, the Recorder reported. The state's rainy-day fund fell from $14.6 billion in January to $8.7 billion. Kemp says he may still call a special session on "budgetary issues" before Bottoms takes over.
• Some House seats are still being counted. In House District 103, Republican Soo Hong trailed Democrat Chris Luchey by 27 votes, close enough for a recount. In District 151, Republican Mike Cheokas faces Democrat Ethan Wolfe in a Dec. 1 runoff.

What the results show

Keisha Lance Bottoms beat Rick Jackson 54.3% to 45.7%, even though he put more than $190 million of his own money into the race. She is the first Black woman ever elected governor in the United States. Jon Ossoff beat Mike Collins 59% to 41%, Democrats won every statewide office on the ballot, and Black women won seven of the eight top state offices. Democrats also took the state House, at 91 seats in unofficial results. All six Republicans on this site who won U.S. House seats did worse than in 2024, and Rick Allen won by just 4 points. But Democrats won 56% of Georgia's U.S. House vote and only 5 of its 14 seats, on a map Republicans redrew in 2023.

Source

Georgia Democrats ride national blue wave into power in history-making election — Maya Homan, Alander Rocha and Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, November 6, 2026.