Tuesday was runoff day in Atlanta and a host of other municipalities and counties around Georgia. Roswell elected their third mayor since 1967. Georgia Senate District 6 chose a replacement for Republican governor candidate Hunter Hill. There were four legislative seats up total, two in the senate and two in the house.
Jen Jordan, a Democrat, will replace Hunter Hill in the state senate and Nikema Williams, longtime Planned Parenthood Southeast executive and also a Democrat, will replace Vincent Fort. Kim Schofield won to replace Keisha Waites, who resigned to run for Fulton County Commission Chair, and Bee Nguyen won a tight race to replace now-governor candidate Stacey Abrams. She becomes the first Vietnamese-American elected to the Georgia House of Representatives.
The most high profile race of the night was undoubtedly the Atlanta mayoral runoff election. Keisha Lance Bottoms ended up edging out Mary Norwood by nearly the identical amount which Kasim Reed beat Norwood in 2009’s runoff. As Norwood refused to concede shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning, the Bottoms campaign claimed victory. Breaking down the returns by precinct in the “City Too Busy to Hate” can be a depressing affair.
Matthew Isbell, a Florida-based political consultant who runs MCI Maps, put together these maps of the divide in Atlanta along race and income.
Now here’s the Fulton County breakdown with 100% reporting.
Perhaps it’s not surprising but race is clearly still a good indicator of which way someone probably voted on Tuesday.
Norwood’s election night party was a very diverse crowd, black and white, and Norwood clearly had strong support from the LGBT community. A host of Atlanta or Georgia politicos, besides the other former mayoral candidates that had endorsed Norwood, turned out for the evening’s party. Former Atlanta state representative and Democrat Margaret Kaiser, 2010 Democrat Attorney General candidate Ken Hodges, and newly elected Atlanta city councilman Amir Farokhi. Despite the overwhelming effort from the
Democratic Party of Georgia (DPG), there were clearly Democrats supporting Norwood.
But it appears the DPG’s efforts paid off, barring a change after a likely recount, with Bottoms winning by less than 1%. With the margins so tight, there are still a few items that could make a change. There are still absentee ballots from the military that are outstanding and there are provisional ballots that will be tabulated on Thursday. Norwood said on Tuesday night she will be officially asking for a recount.