Non-white female governors: colors finally known

Stacey Abrams, a black representative from Georgia and a Democratic veteran there, did not appear publicly in the federal capital Atlanta on Tuesday evening. But then she let herself be carried away with a tweet: She wholeheartedly congratulated Keisha Lance Bottoms on her victory in the gubernatorial election. She thanked the voters for taking a “brighter direction for our state”.

Lance Bottoms made history on Tuesday. She was the first black woman to be elected governor of a US state, and one of the central states of the American South. In her victory speech, Bottoms recounted how the previous day she had driven to the small town of Crawfordville, where her great-great-grandmother had lived as a slave. “I don’t know what she dreamed for her descendants,” she said, overcome by emotion, “but I know that I stand on shoulders of steel.”

Keisha Lance Bottoms stands on the shoulders of her ancestors – but also those of Stacey Abrams. Abrams ran for governor twice, in 2018 and 2022. In 2018 it only lost 1.4 percentage points. She was subsequently able to prove that she had been the victim of election manipulation by her opponent.

The fact that these events took place less than ten years ago shows how rarely seen it is in the USA and even in the South that a black woman is elected to political office. But Lance Bottoms had a lead of almost 9 percent, a margin that could not be tricked away by constituency cuts, the famous gerrymandering, for example.

She benefited from the fact that black voters have enormous anger against Donald Trump. Not since Barack Obama was elected in 2008 had so many African-Americans gone to the polls to give a lesson to the man who had tried to steal their vote through creative redistricting.

Lance Bottoms was exactly the right person for this. As mayor of Atlanta, she made a name for herself in 2020 by handling the protests following the murder of George Floyd more sensitively than any other city government. She spoke to the demonstrators at the time, listened to their concerns and was able to successfully de-escalate.

Just as historic as the election of Lance Bottoms was the election of Gino Hinojosa as governor of Texas on Tuesday. She also made a breakthrough - she was the first Latina to be elected governor of the state and is the first Democrat to hold office there in more than 30 years. The daughter of Mexican immigrants comes from the border town of McAllen in the southernmost tip of Texas, where a huge wave of immigrants triggered a crisis in 2021. In the 2024 election, Trump was able to exploit these events politically.

Hinojosa fought against the criminalization of migrants and the “lawlessness” of the immigration police ICE. At the same time, it stood out in the fight against data centers and for strict regulation of AI. In doing so, she took on Elon Musk, whose company Space X has its rocket building headquarters in her district.

Around 1,000 kilometers further west, another woman made a breakthrough in this historic election. In Albuquerque, Deb Haaland was elected as the first indigenous governor of the United States. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, who have settled in New Mexico for 800 years. Haaland describes herself as a 35th generation New Mexican.

Politically, however, Haaland is not a blank slate. After serving as a state senator in New Mexico, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, he named her secretary of the interior. She distinguished herself in the office with an initiative to combat the murder of indigenous women and to protect historically significant places for indigenous peoples in the West. As governor, she now wants to focus on higher minimum wages, renewable energy and improving health care in her state.