In this Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017, photo, Mary Norwood, candidate for mayor, gives supporters a double thumbs up making a final appearance at her election night party in Atlanta. Norwood is in a runoff with Keisha Lance Bottoms. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)The process of choosing Atlanta’s next mayor has come down to two candidates, one black, one white, after a campaign that laid plain the city’s sore spots of race, gender and political grudges.
Keisha Lance Bottoms and Mary Norwood square off Tuesday in a runoff that may give Atlanta its first white woman mayor ever if Norwood is elected. She would also be its first white mayor in 44 years. Aside from that, the ballot comes just after elections that gave New Orleans and Charlotte their first black women mayors ever, and amid infighting that severely tested Atlanta’s long-dominant black political machine.
Bottoms, 47, was endorsed by former mayor Andrew Young and current, term-limited Mayor Kasim Reed, who beat Norwood in a 2009 runoff by only 714 votes – a large share of them from the black, middle-class southwest quadrant where Bottoms lives.
Norwood, 65, is backed by the city’s last white mayor, Sam Massell, and two prominent black officials: the city’s first female mayor, Shirley Franklin, and former City Council President Ceasar Mitchell – endorsements that many perceived as a public rebuke of Reed, who hotly denigrated Mitchell and Norwood as “losers.”
Democrats have held the mayor’s office in Atlanta since 1879. As always, the race will come down to turnout, which has been historically low.