The Executive Formula: Does Georgia's Ground Game Travel?

Southern Black Organizers · Post-Election Series · Southern Crossover, Part 2 of 3

Georgia showed what a statewide machine built over eight years can do. Part 2 asks a harder question: does that formula travel? Executive offices, governor and county executive, reward candidates who can hold a coalition together across city, suburb and countryside. Tuesday's results tested the formula in very different places.

The base is large and old. More than one in five residents of the eleven Southern states shown below is Black, and 105 counties are majority Black. That is the electorate national campaigns have long written off, and the one organizers have worked between cycles since the era described in The Ballot and the Bullet and Vote Anyway.

From Atlanta's Precincts to the Statehouse

Keisha Lance Bottoms won Georgia's governorship, becoming the first Black woman elected governor of any state. She did it on a foundation that predates her campaign, and much of it was built by Stacey Abrams. After her 2018 run for governor, Abrams and the groups she founded, Fair Fight and the New Georgia Project, kept registration drives, voter-protection lawyers, Black churches, the Divine Nine and neighborhood captains active between elections. Bottoms inherited that machine. Organizers say she was outspent roughly ten to one. The lesson for executive races is that the coalition must exist before the candidate does.

Black women in Georgia say the same thing about who built it. Writing in MadameNoire the day after the election, Danica Daniel traced the eight-year arc from Abrams's 2018 refusal to concede a race run under Brian Kemp's own supervision as secretary of state to Tuesday's slate of Black women elected to state leadership. She credits not one candidate but an ecosystem: Helen Butler of the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter, Nsé Ufot of the New Georgia Project and the reproductive-justice organizers who mobilized after the state's 2019 near-total abortion ban. Monica Raye Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, put it plainly: "The path to Reproductive Justice and collective liberation runs through the South, with Black women at the helm. Trust Black Women." She added a warning for every officeholder: "We will demand accountability from every elected official, regardless of political affiliation."

Kamala Harris made a related point to John Nichols of The Nation: treating the South as a lost cause is a "self-fulfilling prophecy." The executive wins here show the reverse is also true. Where local organizers kept the coalition alive between elections, statewide candidates had something to stand on.

From Maynard Jackson to the Mansion: Atlanta's Fifty-Year Bench

Bottoms's victory also stands on fifty years of Black leadership in the city where she was born and raised. Maynard Jackson took office in 1974 as the first Black mayor of a major Southern city and used City Hall to open public contracting to Black-owned firms. Andrew Young, the civil rights leader, succeeded him in 1982 and helped bring the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta. Bill Campbell led the city through the Games while passing a $149 million infrastructure bond. Shirley Franklin won in 2002 as Atlanta's first woman mayor and the first Black woman elected mayor of a major Southern city; she pushed through a $4 billion water-and-sewer overhaul and helped bring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers home to Atlanta. Kasim Reed, who managed both of Franklin's winning campaigns, won in 2010. Bottoms took office in 2018 as the city's second Black woman mayor — and its only mayor to have served in all three branches of city government, as a judge, a councilmember and chief executive. Andre Dickens holds the office today, sworn in for a second term this January. Atlanta was never the only proving ground. In Chicago, Harold Washington's 1983 victory and Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 campaigns showed that a Black-led, multiracial coalition could win executive power and pass it on, a story told in The Chicago Blueprint and Cultivating Democracy.

The bench reaches past City Hall. Fani T. Willis, the first woman to serve as Fulton County district attorney, won the office in 2020 and held it in 2024. And the distance the lineage has crossed is written in family memory: according to the reporting of Ernie Suggs in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the great-great-grandfather of Bottoms, Sheppard Peek, was enslaved in Crawfordville, where an 1860 document listed him at $1,400. The trail now runs from an 1860 inventory in Crawfordville to the Georgia governor's office. That distance is why organizers keep saying the ground game is measured in decades, not cycles.

The lineage also carries the Great Migration. Bottoms is the daughter of Major Lance (1939–1994), the Mississippi-born singer raised on Chicago's South Side who became a key voice of 1960s Chicago soul. Recording for Okeh Records with songs written by his friend Curtis Mayfield, Lance scored hits including "The Monkey Time" (1963), "Hey Little Girl" (1963), "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um" (1964) and "The Matador" (1964). Her path from a South Side soul family to the Georgia governor's office traces the return journey of millions of Black Southerners and their children.

The HBCU Bench

The Georgia story is also an HBCU story. Bottoms graduated from Florida A&M University. Abrams graduated from Spelman College. Andrew Gillum, who came within half a point of Florida's governorship in 2018, is also a FAMU graduate, and Kamala Harris, the first Black woman elected vice president, graduated from Howard University. Historically Black colleges trained the student organizers of the 1960s sit-ins, and they still produce the candidates and campaign staff reshaping Southern politics. The bench that won Georgia was built on those campuses long before it reached the ballot, a tradition traced in Black Studies, Then and Now.

South Carolina: When the Party Invests

South Carolina sharpens the argument. Christale Spain, the first Black woman elected to chair the state Democratic Party, named the Senate race the party's top target and campaigned on it for months. Democrat Annie Andrews defeated Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, in a state Donald Trump carried by more than 17 points. Unlike Bottoms, Andrews outraised her opponent. Where Black-led party infrastructure and real money arrived together, a "safe" Southern seat fell. Spain's full story is in The Organizer in the Chair.

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Beyond the South: Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas

The formula also showed up beyond the South, across the Sunbelt and the Midwest. In Wisconsin, David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, won the governorship, becoming the state's first Black governor. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa defeated Gov. Greg Abbott. Amy Acton became Ohio's first woman governor. In the coming weeks, county and ward returns will show how much of each margin came from metropolitan counties where Black and Brown organizers worked between cycles; we will map those results as they are certified.

In Nevada, Attorney General Aaron Ford defeated Gov. Joe Lombardo, according to the Associated Press, becoming the state's first Black governor.

Baltimore County: The Formula at the County Line

The Baltimore County executive race brings the question home. Julian Jones won, becoming the county's first Black executive. His victory rests on decades of change on the county's west side, in Randallstown, Woodlawn, Owings Mills and Milford Mill, where long-standing Black communities and newer arrivals have reshaped the electorate. That groundwork has deep roots at Morgan State University. Augustus "Gus" Adair, a Morgan political scientist, mentored Kweisi Mfume when Mfume was a Morgan student; in 1986 the two ran against each other for the 7th District seat, and Mfume, by then a popular voice on Morgan's WEAA 88.9 FM, won; his story is told in The Scholar in the Room. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, organizers carried that work into the county, pushing to elect the first Black members of the County Council. That groundwork, like Abrams's in Georgia, set the stage for an executive bid a generation later.

Jones ran on affordability and housing. The Baltimore Banner reports that more renters were evicted in the county than in any other Maryland jurisdiction in the 2025 fiscal year, that median rent is about $1,700 a month, and that a December 2025 study commissioned by the county found a shortfall of at least 19,000 homes. He spent nearly $2 million to win, most of it surviving a bruising three-way primary, and told his victory crowd: "When you call, you will get an answer. And when the work gets difficult, you can trust that I will pursue, I will persist, until I can deliver a return on the hope you have invested in me." The formula does not end at the ballot; it is tested in the governing.

Generations at the Table

Across these races the same coalition appears: Boomers who anchor poll watching and church turnout, millennial and Gen Z organizers who work campuses and social media. Executive campaigns that fund both, rather than renting turnout in the final six weeks, keep the coalition intact after Election Day.

The 50-State Question

The battleground map treats executive races in the South as long shots. Georgia and South Carolina argue otherwise. The test for the national party is whether it treats 2026 as an exception or as a map. Part 3 turns to the state where that test was failed most expensively: Florida.