ORLANDO, Fla. – In the storied history of the United States spanning 250 years, only a trio of elected governors have been Black — all Democrats and men, including the sitting Maryland Governor, Wes Moore.
However, this may soon change, as Moore could see more joining his ranks.
Florida Republicans recently selected U.S. Representative Byron Donalds, adding to the list of seven Black major party gubernatorial candidates, both men and women from the Democratic and Republican parties, who are gearing up for the November elections alongside Moore.
“We are witnessing a unique moment,” expressed Moore, who now helms the National Governors Association. He often notes that his historic position should not just be a point of celebration but rather a stark reminder of the broader societal hurdles that remain to be surmounted.
Generally, these Black nominees steer the focus away from the historical implications, centering instead on their seasoned backgrounds and detailed policy agendas.
“Florida is a great meritocracy in America,” Donalds told reporters Tuesday night after not mentioning his race at all in his victory speech. “I’ll let you guys write about that,” he added.
But many said that more reflective representation matters given the nation’s history, from slavery to Jim Crow and the lingering effects.
“It’s not a secret that some issues in the African American community get ignored and don’t have a voice,” said Aaron Ford, Nevada’s first Black attorney general and now the Democratic nominee for governor. Ford said he brings a focus to issues ranging from voting rights and civil rights to the economy.
Republican Lisa Demuth said she “has never led with any type of identity politics” as Minnesota’s first Black House speaker and now her party’s nominee for governor. “But I recognize the historic state we are in right now,” she said. Michigan Republicans also chose U.S. Rep. John James, who is Black, as their gubernatorial nominee.
Former New York Gov. David Paterson, a Democrat who was not elected but ascended when Eliot Spitzer resigned in 2008, celebrated that the slate crosses party lines. “This is one day when maybe the Democrats and Republicans could stand in front of a statue of George Washington and let him know that we’re finally getting it right,” he said.
Democrats, meanwhile, emphasized that their Black candidates – who also include Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Jermaine Johnson in South Carolina and David Crowley in Wisconsin – are especially important after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for states to redraw legislative districts that are majority or plurality nonwhite. That was compounded by President Donald Trump’s attacks on diversity initiatives and push to rewrite how the U.S. tells its history of the slave trade and Jim Crow segregation.
“Governors, in many ways, are becoming the last lines of defense against what we’re seeing in Washington,” Moore said.
A challenge for Black politicians, even more so than reaching the US Senate
Karen Finney, who helped push Democrat Joe Biden to select a Black woman as his vice presidential running mate, said Black politicians often are the first and loudest advocates on issues that acutely affect Black constituents. She and others cited health disparities such as maternal and infant mortality and sickle cell disease, and Finney noted that an inflationary economy hits harder in Black communities that, on average, have lower income and net worth than the wider population.
She said it is important for legislators to raise those matters and even more impactful when it is an executive.
“These are people who have the power to shape our lives, and they shape the agenda,” Finney said.
But the governor’s seat has been notoriously hard for Black politicians to reach, even more difficult than the U.S. Senate. Democrat Douglas Wilder of Virginia took office in 1990 as the nation’s first elected Black governor.
“I didn’t become Maryland’s first Black governor because the Democratic Party said, ‘I think it’s time for us to put Wes Moore up in the seat’,” Moore said. “I had to run against the party.”
“I don’t think that the party is doing enough,” Moore added, specifically bemoaning a “negligence” in Southern states where Black voters anchor Democrats’ base.
Stacey Abrams, who lost two Georgia governor’s races, recalled white Democratic power players raising money for her primary opponent in 2018, although she disputed that explicit racism was the issue.
“We do what we’ve done because it’s what we did,” she said. “Black women have not been executives, and the absence of that proof point becomes a self-reinforcing philosophy.”
This time, she noted, Bottoms already has been an executive as mayor of Atlanta.
Democrats and Republicans talk about ‘identity politics’ differently
In Minnesota, history will be made in November when the state elects its first female governor as Demuth competes against Democrat Amy Klobuchar, a U.S. senator. Demuth said she looks forward to a day when such distinctions seem less notable.
“One of the things that I really do look forward to is where it’s already done, where it no longer makes history,” she said. “So I think of young women, little girls that are looking at you, could I ever be governor of Minnesota? I hope when I win, they’re able to look at, point to that and say she’s already done it.”
In Georgia, Bottoms told the National Association of Black Journalists last week that she does not “give a lot of talk … about the historical nature” of her campaign. Yet she notes her family’s Georgia ties go “back at least five generations through a plantation in Crawfordville” and that her grandfather had to “walk through these back doors” when he moved to Atlanta. She never mentioned slavery or segregation but said her ancestry “is always present with me.”
Abrams, who has campaigned for Bottoms and other Democrats this year, was more direct, arguing that all politics is identity politics of some kind — and that Republicans’ version is simply more coded.
“When your Constitution specifically strips a race of its humanity, you cannot then later on say identity doesn’t matter and has no effect, and we’ve spent 250 years trying to reckon with that identity” with social, political and legal fights, she continued. “So, it’s deeply disingenuous, if not woefully naive, to say that identity does not matter.”
Race shapes many decisions, but not all of them
Deval Patrick, whose tenure in Massachusetts overlapped with Paterson’s in New York, said his race mattered especially to his Black constituents and what they wanted from him. It was “just different than the expectations of my predecessors,” he said, recalling criticism after he did not visit a Boston neighborhood where a teenager had been killed by gun violence.
“His mother was on the news grieving, and at some point she said while the cameras were rolling, where is Gov. Patrick?” he said. “Nobody had ever asked one of my predecessors to come to a crime scene in a neighborhood. Never.”
In Nevada, Ford said being governor still means recognizing how many core issues – jobs, housing and healthcare – cross demographic lines.
“It could be a white man, a Latino woman. It could be a person urban, suburban or rural Nevada. It could be someone from northern Nevada, southern Nevada. These are the issues that are important to them,” he said.
Patrick, who talks regularly with Ford and Moore, agreed, saying that is not just how a governor does the job, but how a candidate wins it in the first place.
“The successful candidates are the ones who present themselves as candidates for everyone,” he said, “and not candidates for just some.”
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Sloan reported from Washington.
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