This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 20 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. This episode is part of Right Now’s ongoing coverage of the midterm elections. Other recent episodes have covered the gubernatorial race in California, the U.S. Senate race in Texas, and the U.S. Senate contest in Maine.Perry Bacon: We’re going to focus Right Now on Georgia, and I have a great guest. Tia Mitchell is the Washington bureau chief for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Tia, welcome.Tia Mitchell: Thank you for having me back, Perry.Bacon: Yes. So let’s talk about—I’ll start with the governor’s race there, and what I thought was a surprising result, but I’ll be curious what you think. There was a multi-candidate field for the Democratic primary. The most prominent candidate, I would say, is the former mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. I expected there to be no one to reach 50 percent, but it looks like she’s apparently got over 50—won the primary, no runoff there. So I want to ask: One, are you surprised by that, that she got over 50 percent? And then two, how important was the endorsement from Joe Biden—who we’ve been talking about as being unpopular for a long time but is actually fairly popular among Democratic voters, particularly older Black folks? So talk about her win.Mitchell: So I am surprised at how commandingly she won. She always was leading in the polls. We always knew she was very likely to get the most votes on primary night—if there was going to be a runoff, she was going to be in it. And we always knew there was a chance she could win outright. But I thought it was going to be more of a nail-biter if she won outright, whereas she won handily. It wasn’t even close. It wasn’t even a question, really, for most of the night—would she win without the need of a runoff.And I do believe that what really helped her was her name recognition away from metro Atlanta. However, she did very well in metro Atlanta, which was a question in the weeks leading up to the election during early voting. There was a lot of online discourse about her record as mayor, her decision not to run for a second term, and a lot of people on social media were talking about why they were not supporting Mayor Bottoms. And then even beyond that kind of anecdotal evidence, my colleague Riley Bunch did an article about how many of the people who served alongside Mayor Bottoms when she was mayor or on the Atlanta City Council—so these are the people who know her governing style best—were not supporting her race for governor. And that also speaks volumes.But her name recognition—and I do think the Biden endorsement—really was a signal to older Black voters. The fact that she’s a Black woman who has this brand as being a strong, accomplished Black woman—that means a lot to Black voters. And so she was able to overcome some of those weaknesses. The question now is: Does she work to mend those gaps? Not because these people aren’t going to support her—because it’s not like they’re going to vote Republican—but does she say, I want people to be enthusiastic about me. I have some work to do.Bacon: I don’t want to liken them, but the person who was last the Democratic nominee for governor in Georgia, Stacey Abrams—another Black woman. We’ve never had a Black woman governor in the history of the United States, horribly enough. So talk about how Bottoms might be better or worse politically compared to Abrams, and if her chances of winning are better, worse, the same. Talk about where she stands compared to Abrams.Mitchell: Yeah. So I covered both of Stacey Abrams’s campaigns. She ran in 2018 and 2022. She was, in 2018, a rock star. Keisha Lance Bottoms is not Stacey Abrams 2018. Keisha Lance Bottoms—her personality is a little bit more subdued. She’s more soft-spoken. She does well when she needs to, but she doesn’t have that natural way of connecting with people just in general. She’s just a shyer person.Stacey Abrams literally went to all 159 Georgia counties. She was packing out rural counties and getting out the vote, and it paid off—she got so close in 2018. Even four years later, in 2022, Stacey Abrams wasn’t the same candidate—wasn’t as enthusiastic, didn’t come across as connecting as well—and struggled as a result against then-incumbent Brian Kemp.So I would say, I’ve talked about the personality differences, but I think it’s going to be interesting to see how Keisha Lance Bottoms campaigns statewide. She and Stacey Abrams are not known to be particularly close, but does she get in touch with Abrams’s team? Is there conversation about what did and didn’t work, particularly in 2018 when Stacey Abrams got so close? There’s also no evidence that she’s particularly close to Raphael Warnock, who is the only Black Democrat to win statewide in Georgia in recent elections. Does she reach out to his team?