Georgia is holding a competitive governor’s election in 2026 to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is Democrats’ nominee in the race, while Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire businessman Rick Jackson are facing off in a June 19 primary runoff for the Republican nomination.  

Georgia, once a Republican stronghold, has emerged as a key battleground state in the Trump era. In 2020, Biden won by just under 12,000 votes, placing Georgia at the epicenter of President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his election loss. In 2024, Trump won the state by two points. Georgia is represented in the U.S. Senate by two Democrats: Sen. Raphael Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is up for reelection in 2026 in what is expected to be one of the year’s most competitive races for the upper chamber of Congress. 

Bottoms served as the mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022 and then led the White House’s public engagement efforts under President Joe Biden, who has backed her campaign in a rare post-presidential endorsement. 

If elected, Bottoms would make history as Georgia’s first woman governor and the first Black woman elected governor in United States history.

Governors and state legislatures have become increasingly important and visible as the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress have delegated policymaking on abortion, child care, LGBTQ+ rights and more to the states. 

Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, signed into law in 2022, has made national headlines. In 2024, ProPublica reported on women who died while seeking to end their pregnancies in the state. This year, Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse from the metro Atlanta area, was kept on life support for 16 weeks after being declared brain dead because she was pregnant, her family said, pointing to Georgia’s abortion law as the reason they had to keep her on life support. In June, Smith was taken off life support after her baby was delivered. 

In all, 36 governorships are up in 2026. Five Democratic-led states won by Trump in 2024 (Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) are holding elections for governor in 2026, while two Republican governors in states won by former Vice President Kamala Harris (New Hampshire and Vermont) are up for reelection.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled state Rep. Derrick Jackson's name.