Georgia Governor 2026 Odds: Jackson Overtakes Bottoms

Rick Jackson's 22-session run as Kalshi's Georgia favorite ended on October 20, after two polls in two days put the race inside the margin. The trade that called it came six sessions early: at 10:10 a.m. ET on October 14, the morning after Georgia set a midterm early-voting record, five fills in one second bought 282,000 Keisha Lance Bottoms contracts at 46 cents, the biggest block this board has ever seen, three days after her low close. Georgia's first open governor race since 2018 pits Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, against Jackson, a billionaire healthcare executive who has never run for office. Bottoms was the favorite when this board was scored: she traded at 58.5 cents on August 7, and a seven-model AI panel that never saw that price put her at 60.4%. Jackson passed her on September 28 and closed ahead for 22 straight sessions, until October 20, when two polls that put the race inside their margins landed within a day of each other and her side closed two cents above his. As of October 21 the board is a coin flip with Bottoms at 51.5 cents, down 7 cents in 11 weeks. The gap to the panel's number is about 9 points, moved entirely from the price side, because the 60.4% is frozen as scored and cannot move. The reason the panel stopped at 60 in the first place is the state itself.

The Quick Answer

Keisha Lance Bottoms is back to 51.5 cents on Kalshi

as of October 21, with Rick Jackson at 50.5, a coin flip that leans her way for the first time since September 27. The panel still has Bottoms at 60.4%, scored price-blind in August and frozen since: it threw out a duplicated poll and a partisan outlier, then weighed a small, real Bottoms lead plus a midterm running hard against the president's party, set beside a state that has not elected a Democratic governor since 1998. What moved the price since, and what did not, is below the board.

The Board

The two sides of Kalshi's GOVPARTYGA-26 board on October 21, beside the panel's frozen August 7 blend.

Candidate	Party	Kalshi	AI Blend (after revision)
Keisha Lance Bottoms	Democratic	51.5¢	60.4%
Rick Jackson	Republican	50.5¢	39.6%

Kalshi prices as of October 21, 2026, 3:30 a.m. ET, shown as the midpoint of each side's bid and ask (Democratic 51¢ bid, 52¢ ask; Republican 50¢ bid, 51¢ ask). On August 7, when the panel scored the board, the sides traded at 58.5¢ and 42.5¢. Panel verdicts generated August 7, 2026, price-blind, and frozen since.

Georgia votes November 3. Georgia requires a majority, so a December 1 runoff is possible if a third candidate holds both nominees short of one; either way the contract pays on the party inaugurated in January 2027, with Kalshi's expected settlement on January 14. What happens when a contract settles is its own page.

More live boards from the same panel: Georgia Senate, Democratic side 95¢ · Ohio Senate special · Michigan governor, Democratic side 92¢ · California governor · Florida GOP governor primary

What Moved Since October 18

Two polls inside their own margins landed a day apart and ended Jackson's run. He had closed ahead for 22 straight sessions, September 28 through October 19, and on October 20 Bottoms closed two cents above him, her first session in front since September 27. At 3:30 a.m. ET on October 21 her side is 51¢ bid and 52¢ asked, his is 50¢ bid and 51¢ asked. That is a coin flip with a lean her way, 7 cents under where the panel found her on August 7 and about 9 points under its 60.4%. The sessions, in order:

Session (ET)	What happened	Bottoms close	Jackson close
Oct 17	The day after Jackson stood with Trump in Dalton	49¢	53¢
Oct 18	Sunday	49¢	52¢
Oct 19	Quantus poll (Jackson 49.0-47.5) published 1:40 p.m.; Bottoms prints 50¢ for the first time since Oct 1	49¢	51¢
Oct 20	AJC/UGA poll (Jackson 46-45) published before 7 a.m.; Bottoms closes ahead for the first time since Sept 27	51¢	49¢

October 20 is the one to read closely. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and University of Georgia poll has Jackson 46%, Bottoms 45% and 8% undecided among 1,000 likely voters surveyed October 7 to 15, inside its 3.1-point margin, with independents breaking 43-38 for Bottoms and 18% of them still undecided. The number in it I keep coming back to is not the topline. Sixty-eight percent of Democrats told UGA they were "very enthusiastic" about voting, against 48% of Republicans, and it is the first Georgia read I have seen of the environment input the panel leaned on in August, the one input the market never marked down. By 8:54 a.m. Jackson had printed 47¢, his lowest fill since September 24; Bottoms traded 51¢ at 2:55 p.m. and 52¢ at 4:57 p.m., her first fill at 52 since September 28.

The day before had set it up. Quantus Insights polled 755 likely voters October 15 to 17 and found Jackson 49.0%, Bottoms 47.5% with 3.5% undecided after leaners, inside its 3.8-point margin of error, and Atlanta News First published it at 1:40 p.m. on October 19. Thirty minutes earlier, at 1:09 p.m., one second of buying had taken about 4,300 Bottoms contracts at 49¢ and 50¢, her biggest fill since the October 14 block. The trades do not say why, and the side still closed the session at 49¢. Six straight polls since September 23 now have Jackson ahead and none by more than two points; 270toWin's five-poll average, linked below, reads Jackson 48.2%, Bottoms 46.6%. The market read the two newest as a tie and priced one.

Off the poll pages, the week was about how close Jackson wants to stand to the president. Trump rallied in Dalton on Friday, October 16, with Jackson and Senate nominee Mike Collins on stage, and the Democratic side closed that session at 47¢, a cent under the day before. On Monday, October 19, Jackson's campaign said he would skip Trump's Saturday, October 24 rally in Macon to work a separate Republican event in Cherokee County, in suburban Atlanta. Jackson's side printed its session high of 54¢ at 12:29 p.m. that day and closed at 51¢; the announcement's time is not public, so I do not tie the two. My read of the Cherokee County choice is that his campaign already sees what UGA's crosstab, published the next morning, put a number on, independents leaning Bottoms, and would rather work a metro Atlanta county than a Macon stage the week the race went back to even. Early voting kept its record pace: more than a million Georgians voted in person in the first week, 12% ahead of 2022, with 13 days to November 3.

None of it touches the panel's number, which stays at 60.4% as scored. What it touched is the gap: 12 points at the October 17 bids, about 9 now, closed from the price side in three sessions on two polls that put the race inside the margin, closer to even than anything since Bottoms' August lead.

What Moved Since September 23

The favorite changed, and the trade log says the slide started in one second. For three weeks after the panel scored it the Democratic side went nowhere, closing between 59¢ and 62¢ every session from August 11 through September 2 and printing as high as 64¢ on August 18. Then it wobbled, 53¢ closes on September 16 and 17, and snapped back to 60¢ by September 21, closing there again on September 22.

One Sale On September 23

At 11:05:10 a.m. ET on September 23, seven fills in the same second sold 175,000 Bottoms contracts into the book, 174,324 of them at 56¢ and the rest at 57¢, and the side closed that session at 54¢ on 184,063 contracts, its biggest day to that point. The trades do not say what the seller was reacting to. The day before, Jackson had formally declined the 11Alive debate, and an hour after the sale Atlanta News First published YouGov's Georgia numbers: Jackson 45%, Bottoms 44%, 9% undecided, among 3,447 registered voters polled September 15 to 18. From there the slide was steady. The Republican side closed above the Democratic side for the first time on September 28, 52¢ to 51¢, and did so every session through October 19; the low close of the slide for Bottoms was 45¢ on October 11, and Jackson's high closes of the run were 56¢ on October 10, 11 and 12.

Session (ET)	What happened	Bottoms close	Jackson close
Aug 7	Panel scores the board (bid-ask midpoints)	58.5¢	42.5¢
Sept 22	Last close before the sale	60¢	42¢
Sept 23	175,000 Bottoms contracts sold at 11:05 a.m.; YouGov poll lands an hour later	54¢	47¢
Sept 28	Jackson closes ahead for the first time	51¢	52¢
Oct 11	Bottoms' low close of the slide	45¢	56¢
Oct 14	282,000 Bottoms contracts bought at 10:10 a.m., the day after early voting opened	47¢	54¢
Oct 17	Bottoms back to 49¢	49¢	53¢
Oct 20	Bottoms closes ahead for the first time since Sept 27, the day the AJC/UGA poll lands	51¢	49¢

Closes are Kalshi's daily candles for each side, so a close can sit a cent off the last fill of the session. The August 7 row is the bid-ask midpoint the panel was scored against, not a close.

The row to sit with is October 14: the largest block in the board's history, bought the morning after a record early-voting opener and three days after Bottoms' low close, and the block was a buyer.

The Other Way: 282,000 Contracts On October 14

At 10:10:31 a.m. ET on October 14, the morning after early voting opened, five fills in one second bought 282,000 Bottoms contracts at 46¢, the biggest block of trades this board has seen in either direction, and the side closed at 47¢ or 48¢ in each of the next two full sessions, was back to 49¢ by October 17, and crossed above Jackson on October 20. The block was early, by six sessions, and it was right about the direction.

The Polls The Panel Never Saw

The first bullet under "What Moves This Price Next" named the post-Labor Day polling wave as the most repriceable event on this board. It arrived, and every poll published since September 23 has Jackson ahead.

Poll	Field	Sample	Result
YouGov	Sept 15-18	3,447 RV	Jackson +1 (45-44), 9% undecided
InsiderAdvantage	Sept 22-23	1,200 LV	Jackson +2 (48-46)
Wedgewood Polls	Oct 2-3	600 LV	Jackson +2 (51-49)
InsiderAdvantage	Oct 12-13	800 LV	Jackson +2 (49-47), 4% undecided
AJC/UGA	Oct 7-15	1,000 LV	Jackson +1 (46-45), 8% undecided
Quantus Insights	Oct 15-17	755 LV	Jackson +1.5 (49.0-47.5), 3.5% undecided

The row that matters most is YouGov's: by far the largest sample, fielded before the September 23 sale, and still a one-point race with nearly a tenth of voters undecided, with independents splitting 43% Bottoms to 37% Jackson. The panel discounted a raw Bottoms +5.6 feed to +2 to +4 in August; 270toWin's average, which at this writing rests on the UGA, Quantus, both InsiderAdvantage and the Wedgewood polls, reads Jackson 48.2%, Bottoms 46.6%.

Debate, Early Voting, Endorsements

The newest InsiderAdvantage survey was fielded October 12 and 13, the day of and the day after Jackson skipped the Atlanta Press Club debate on GPB while he launched a five-city tour with Gov. Brian Kemp, an absence the debate's organizers said was the first by a major-party nominee for governor since 1994, and its author Matt Towery's read was that "his absence from the debate had no impact on his numbers." Early voting had opened that Tuesday morning, October 13, pushed off the usual Monday by the holiday, and the Secretary of State's office counted more than 188,000 ballots on the first day, a midterm record and 53,000 more than the 2022 opener.

The two candidates shared a stage once, at the Atlanta News First town hall on October 6, where Jackson's line was "Bad mayors don't make good governors" and Bottoms' was that her opponent "is running to enrich himself and be Trump's favorite governor." Barack Obama endorsed Bottoms by video on October 8. Neither day moved the Democratic side more than a cent on a closing basis: it closed at 47¢ on October 6, one cent under the session before, and at 46¢ on October 8, unchanged from the 7th.

The Money And The Ads

The second bullet was Jackson's money, and the reports public so far, which WRDW wrote up on October 13, run only through July: Jackson had spent nearly $114 million and put $50 million of his own money in during a single month, against about $5.2 million spent for Bottoms. The fall reports are still to come.

The gap is already on the air. Jackson's ad "Disaster" began running statewide on September 10 and leans on Atlanta's 157 homicides in 2020, the most since 1996 by Atlanta News First's count, and 158 in 2021; the Bottoms campaign's answer to the station was that she "delivered historic pay raises for police officers and firefighters, and balanced the city's budget without raising property taxes, laying off employees, or furloughing workers." What Atlanta News First called Bottoms' first true attack ad of the general election aired September 17 and its line is "Rick Jackson's made his fortune off a broken healthcare system and is still profiting off your pain." A lawsuit in Jackson's own business gives that line its context: immigrant nurses recruited by Avant Healthcare Professionals, a Jackson Healthcare company, accused it of substandard wages, rigid multiyear contracts, threats to report them to federal immigration authorities, and five-figure fees for leaving early, and on June 22, days after Jackson won the Republican nomination, Avant agreed to a settlement of more than $3 million covering more than 5,000 current and former workers, as International Business Times reported from the court filings. Avant denied wrongdoing throughout the litigation, and the Jackson campaign's answer was that Avant's nurses "come to America legally."

Which Panel Input The Market Repriced

My read of the gap, 12 points on October 17 and about 9 now, is that the market has repriced exactly one of the panel's two inputs. The polling input, a Bottoms lead of two to four points, is gone: six straight surveys have Jackson ahead by one or two. The environment input, a generic ballot near D+5 and presidential approval near minus 20 when the panel scored it, is the one the market has not repriced; the one Georgia read of it I have seen, UGA's 68-to-48 enthusiasm gap, points the panel's way, which is my best explanation for why the gap is 9 points and not wider. The size of the first repricing is checkable: the panel's cleaned record read Bottoms +2 to +4, the 270toWin average now reads Jackson +1.6, a swing of four to six points of margin, and the market has taken seven cents off her price for it. Which of those two inputs you trust more is the whole trade on this board. The panel's 60.4% stands as scored, to be graded on the inauguration this contract settles on, like every other number on this page.

What The Polls Actually Say

The feed the panel read carried six head-to-heads with a raw Bottoms +5.6 average, and the panel did not believe it. Two entries are the same April Echelon poll listed twice. Another is a Democratic-partisan Concord survey at +15, a number no other pollster has come close to.

The cleaned record, as of August 7:

Poll	Field	Result
Fabrizio/Impact (AARP-sponsored)	mid-July	Bottoms +2
Wick	late June	Jackson +0.5
Fox News/Beacon	—	Bottoms +5
Echelon	April	Bottoms +6

Call it Bottoms +2 to +4, with the most recent reads the tightest. Nothing from the post-Labor Day polling wave was in the record the panel saw.

Why The Panel Stops At 60%

Georgia was the narrowest state in the 2020 presidential race, and Democrats have won three of the last four statewide Senate contests there. Yet no Democrat has won the governorship since Roy Barnes in 1998, and the last open race, in 2018, went Republican by 1.4 points. Brian Kemp is term-limited this time, which removes the incumbency shield that carried Republicans through 2022.

The national card pushes the other way: a generic ballot of D+5 to +6 and presidential approval near minus 20, in a midterm cycle where the president's party almost always loses ground. That environment led nearly every rationale:

"Trump approval near -20 net and a D+5-6 generic ballot in a midterm where the out-party has gained in 18 of 20 postwar cycles, with neither 1998- nor 2002-style rally conditions present." (Claude Fable)

The polling came second, with the caveat the whole panel converged on:

"The raw Bottoms +5.6 average should be discounted for the Democratic partisan Concord outlier, duplicated/stale April Echelon result, and mixed pollster quality, but the cleaner read still looks around Bottoms +2 to +4." (ChatGPT)

And the reason nobody printed 70 is the state's own ledger:

"Despite federal competitiveness, Georgia has elected only Republican governors since 2002." (Gemini 3.1 Pro)

Barnes won in 1998 and lost in 2002, so the two dates describe the same drought. Kimi K3 supplied the calibration point that ties it together: midterm-era polls "have been nearly unbiased (2018: -0.3, 2022: +0.9), so I trust them more than priors." A small, believable state lead plus a large, measured national tailwind, against a gubernatorial drought running since 1998, nets to 60%.

Every Seat's Number

Both rounds shown; the headline blend averages the revised column.

Seat	Round 1: Bottoms wins	After revision
Claude Fable	65%	62%
Claude Opus	57%	62%
Claude Sonnet	56%	60%
ChatGPT	62%	61%
Gemini 3.1 Pro	72%	59%
Grok 4.5	58%	59%
Kimi K3	63%	60%

Every seat is graded against certified results on the public model verdict scoreboard, and this board landed in that ledger the day it was generated.

What Moved Between Rounds

Round one ran from 56 to 72. Round two ran from 59 to 62. The biggest mover was Gemini 3.1 Pro, down from 72 to 59 after adopting the cleaned polling and the governorship drought it had underweighted.

Claude Opus went the other way, 57 to 62, crediting the environment case at full strength once the exception-year conditions were checked and found absent. Claude Fable trimmed to 62 and named the specific defect: "the +5.6 feed average double-counts the April Echelon poll." The blend barely moved, 61.9 to 60.4; what changed was seven seats agreeing on which polls deserved to count.

What Moves This Price Next

Written August 7 and kept as scored; the polling wave in the first marker has since arrived, as the section above shows.

• A Fresh Nonpartisan Poll. The newest poll in the panel's record was from mid-July. The post-Labor Day wave, with the general-election field settled, is the most repriceable event on this board.
• Jackson's Self-Funding Scale. A first-time billionaire candidate can reset an ad market overnight; the Q3 filings in October are the checkable marker.

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Verdicts generated August 7, 2026, price-blind. Prices as of October 21, 2026, 3:30 a.m. ET. Panel: seven of the panel's eight seats ran this board (ChatGPT, Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4.5, Kimi K3), each revising in an anonymized cross-read; the blend is the simple mean of the seven revised numbers. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money. The panel's numbers on this page are estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

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