Did Republicans just hand Keisha Lance Bottoms a ticket to November?

Two things happened this week that seemed to add momentum to former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ already dominant primary campaign for Georgia governor.

First, Bottoms launched a statewide tour on Wednesday to roll out her plan for a new Voting Rights Act in Georgia. With the U.S. Supreme Court gutting a key portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Bottoms said it would be up to the next governor of Georgia — hopefully her — to protect the rights of voters in the state.

“We may not be able to control what happens in the Supreme Court,” she said at an event in Atlanta Wednesday. “But the fight that is within our power is in the state, and that is why this election is so important.”

It would have been just another one of the policy roundtables that the Bottoms campaign has been holding around the state this election cycle. But moments later, Gov. Brian Kemp announced that he would call a special session of the Georgia Legislature to not only address the state’s soon-to-be-outdated voting machines but also to redraw Georgia’s congressional and legislative maps ahead of the 2028 elections.

The announcement seemed to validate the premise of the event Bottoms was holding in the first place, warning that Republicans would stop at nothing to erase Democratic — and specifically Black — power, without Voting Rights Act protections in place.

Kemp’s redistricting announcement also gave Bottoms’ campaign an urgency and a reason for being that it hasn’t clearly had to this point.

Although she rose to prominence as the mayor of Atlanta, Bottoms isn’t campaigning based on her experience at City Hall. She did not mention being mayor in her first campaign ad for governor nor in her opening statement in GPB’s televised Democratic candidate debate last month.

Talking about her tumultuous years in office reminds some Atlanta voters of a time they would rather forget. But talking about the future of voting rights is something that she and many Democratic voters connect to personally.

As she announced her plan, Bottoms described voting with her mother and 18-year-old son recently, and being reminded that when her mother was 18, she was not allowed to vote.

“My son is now facing fighting battles that my mother’s generation fought and won on behalf of all of us,” she said.

Republicans’ plans to push through redistricting for 2028 this summer also puts Bottoms in a place to lead on the issue. It certainly did this week.

“Thank you for putting a plan together,” Shawn Harris, the Democratic nominee in the 14th Congressional District, told Bottoms Wednesday. “That is a sure sign of leadership, because a lot of people talk about things, but very few people have put anything on paper.”

The proposal Bottoms announced Wednesday would create an independent Georgia voting rights commission, eliminate and replace what she called “the dysfunctional” Georgia State Election Board, and create harsher penalties for threatening poll workers. Bottoms said she’d also work with lawmakers to increase early voting hours and days, make Election Day a state holiday, and expand the kind of identification that Georgians could use for voting.

“This is not about trying to rig the system,” she said. “It is about fairness and making sure that we have fair, free access to the right to vote.”

It was all enough to make her potential Republican rivals pay attention and punch back hard.

“Sounds like the Lance-Bottoms Election Theft Act,” Lt. Gov. Burt Jones wrote on social media.

“I trust Keisha Lance Bottoms with election integrity as much I trust Burt Jones to put anything before his family’s bank account,” Rick Jackson added.

Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia GOP, called her plan “insane but honest.”

In an interview after the event, Bottoms drew an even sharper contrast between her and Republicans, painting a picture of what voting rights would look like with her as governor instead of someone like Jones or Jackson.

“I’d veto anything that’s diluting fair representation in this state,” she said of the map likely to be presented to Kemp during the special session, which is expected to eliminate U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop’s majority-Black 2nd Congressional District and create another GOP district instead.

As for her voting rights plan, “We’re going to see what we can and should do administratively through executive order,” she said. “Then everything else, we’re going to go through the process of trying to get support in the Legislature.”

And what if she’s working with a Republican General Assembly, since they hold large majorities in both chambers?