Five years ago, Keisha Lance Bottoms stood before news cameras, pulled off her mask and tearfully told her city that a single term as mayor of Atlanta would have to be enough.
Over the half-hour news conference, she touched on just some of what had afflicted Atlanta under her watch: The upheaval of the pandemic had fueled fights with state and federal officials. Protests had escalated into violent unrest, including one episode where an 8-year-old girl was fatally shot. The ranks of the city police had shrunk as violence spiked.
“Leadership is sometimes about gracefully passing the baton,” she said, adding that she trusted that a plan for her future would reveal itself in time.
That turned out to be a run for governor of Georgia this year as the Democratic nominee. She has mounted a robust campaign, holding her own in polls that are deadlocked heading into Election Day. But Ms. Bottoms has had to devote considerable attention to pushing back against harsh perceptions related to the biggest job on her résumé.
Her Republican opponent has portrayed her as a disastrous mayor who left behind a city in flames. Her supporters have condemned that depiction as an exaggerated distortion of a challenging period, yet some have expressed reservations of their own, faulting her as much for her decision to walk away as for her performance in office.
Those were tough years to be a mayor anywhere in America, with cascading crises and an electorate fed up with all of it. In cities and towns of all sizes, incumbents were ousted by voters. Plenty more evicted themselves.
Now, Ms. Bottoms’s campaign has been a test for what happens when one of those leaders attempts a comeback.
“She had a tough go,” Trevor Parssinen, a retired lawyer, said as he voted this month in Atlanta. “But I thought she should have stuck around to try to improve the job that she did. I wasn’t sure why she left.”
Mr. Parssinen, an independent, voted for Democrats on nearly every line on the ballot, except for the governors race. He left that blank.
Other voters were willing to extend Ms. Bottoms a measure of grace. “Keisha Lance Bottoms did the best she could with what she had,” said Ashley Green, who works in recruiting.
Ms. Bottoms has tried to make the governors race a referendum on President Trump and voter frustrations with inflation, fuel prices and health care costs.
By some measures, the strategy appears to be succeeding. She won the Democratic primary outright when many of her critics and some political analysts believed a runoff was inevitable. And in the general election, she has closed a gap in the polls, even as she goes up against a billionaire opponent with his fortune at his disposal. If elected, she would be Georgia’s first Democratic governor in roughly two decades. She would also be the first Black woman elected governor in the country.
But she has also had to be on the defensive as her Republican opponent, Rick Jackson, has filled the airwaves with ads showing clips of burning vehicles and ominous local newscasts.
“I balanced the budget for four years,” she said in one podcast interview, repeating an argument she has made in campaign stops and television appearances. “I didn’t raise taxes. I gave police and fire the largest pay increase in the history of the city.”
Her campaign contends that not only are voters’ concerns elsewhere this season, but that they can see the Republican attacks for what they are.
“Covid is a whole different factor in the minds of voters,” said Cornell Belcher, her campaign pollster. “The idea they’re going to blame for her the bad things happening all over the place — for the average voter, it’s a bridge too far.”
Ms. Bottoms, the daughter of the R&B singer Major Lance and a native of Atlanta, was elected mayor after serving as a judge and on the City Council. She took office in 2018 after a federal corruption investigation had engulfed the administration of her predecessor, Kasim Reed.
Her tenure was relatively quiet for the first two years. Then the coronavirus hit. In the early days of the pandemic, she defied moves by the state to roll back precautions, projecting what her supporters saw as a steely resolve as the dispute turned into a legal battle with the governor.
As protests touched off by the murder of George Floyd led to demonstrators in Atlanta burning police vehicles and vandalizing downtown businesses, Ms. Bottoms was catapulted to national prominence for her response. In one defining speech, she acknowledged the generations of resentments that were boiling over while condemning the people causing chaos and destruction. “If you care about this city, then go home,” she said, her voice strained but forceful.
Suddenly, she was discussed as a possible presidential running mate for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But the luster started to wear quickly as the city’s problems intensified.
Not long after the first wave of protests, a Black man named Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by an Atlanta police officer in a fast-food drive-through. Unruly crowds took over the area around the restaurant, which officials said arsonists had burned down. A man armed with an AR-15-style rifle also opened fire on a vehicle, killing an 8-year-old passenger, Secoriea Turner.
Efforts to punish the officer who shot Mr. Brooks backfired; a criminal case against him collapsed, a civil service board overruled his firing, and the rank-and-file inside the Police Department were demoralized.
Conversely, Ms. Bottoms disappointed some social justice activists who saw the policy changes she had put forward — like overhauling rules on the police using force — as falling short of the structural reforms they demanded.
By the end of 2020, homicides were up by nearly 60 percent in Atlanta compared with the year before, fueling an impression the city was spiraling out of control.
Similar struggles were rankling cities across the country. Protests and debates about what public safety should look like were overtaken by outrage and concern over rising crime and police staffing. Coronavirus precautions upended routines, leaving many people isolated and fearful. The atmosphere became a hothouse for disinformation and anger. Mayors were thrust into the middle of it.
“It was a lot of pressure, a lot of disappointment,” said Frank Scott Jr., the mayor of Little Rock, Ark., who took office in 2019. He and his counterparts were navigating crises, he added, “all while making certain trash is picked up on time and potholes are being filled.”
And as those mayors considered their political futures, they faced an electorate that had been wading through the confusion and the turmoil.
“You can’t disentangle the pandemic from someone who was serving at that time,” said Kendall D. Funk, a political science professor at Arizona State University who researched mayoral responses to the pandemic.
In Seattle and St. Louis, mayors decided to not run again. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot sought re-election and did not even advance to a runoff. In Baton Rouge, La., a high school football coach with a bare-bones campaign ousted the city’s two-term leader. And in San Francisco, London Breed openly bristled at her successor reaping credit for a turnaround she believed she had laid the groundwork for.
Ms. Bottoms has argued her position was almost enviable compared to some others. Her poll numbers were strong enough, she said, that she believed she had a strong likelihood of being re-elected. She was not pre-empting defeat, she said; she was leaving on her own terms. In 2022, she took a job in the Biden administration as a senior adviser.
Mary Hooks, a social justice activist and organizer, had been a harsh critic of Ms. Bottoms as mayor, particularly her support for building a city police and fire training center that spurred years of sustained protests.
But concerns about the current political climate overruled any desire to litigate what Ms. Bottoms did or did not do as mayor. “I’m not interested in the conservative right gaining any more footing,” she said.
Some believed that Ms. Bottoms owed voters more of an explanation for her leadership then and her decision to walk away. “Folks are disappointed with the lack of ownership of some of those missteps,” said Tammy Greer, a political science professor at Georgia State University.
But Ms. Bottoms contended that her experience as mayor reflected her resilience and her decision to not seek a second term showed she was willing to follow her instincts.
“I was the woman in the arena,” she said in one television interview. “I was making very tough decisions there was no blueprint for.”
And this time, she has said, if she wins, she has every intention to run again.
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