Keisha Lance Bottoms faced an empty podium as Rick Jackson skipped the Atlanta Press Club debate

Keisha Lance Bottoms participated alone in an Atlanta Press Club debate after Republican nominee Rick Jackson declined to attend.

The podium beside Keisha Lance Bottoms stayed empty Monday night, and she spent part of her opening remarks explaining why that mattered.

Newsweek reported that Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee appeared alone at the Atlanta Press Club’s Loudermilk-Young Debate Series after Republican nominee Rick Jackson declined to participate. The event ran under 30 minutes, with two journalists directing questions to the only candidate present, and landed on the eve of early voting across the state.

Bottoms used the absence as material. “Rick Jackson is the first gubernatorial candidate not to stand here in 32 years,” she said, according to the outlet, accusing him of preferring to “hide behind his billions than explain to you his record of making billions off the taxpayers of Georgia.”

The line does double duty, pairing a procedural complaint with the central argument of her campaign against a wealthy businessman whose fortune she has repeatedly tied to government contracts.

Jackson’s campaign attributed the decision to a scheduling conflict, telling WSB-TV he was campaigning near Savannah. He spent Monday moving through Atlanta, Macon, Columbus and Savannah before continuing to Columbia County, a full day of retail politics across the state’s population centers.

Pressed by reporters on skipping the stage, Jackson offered a blunt assessment of the format’s value. “Out of probably 10,000 people I’ve talked to, not one of them has mentioned anything about a debate because that’s not important to the people,” he said.

The two did share a stage once before. On Oct. 6, they took questions from undecided voters at a town hall hosted by Atlanta News First, an event described at the time as likely their only joint appearance of the cycle.

The Atlanta Press Club series Bottoms addressed alone carries institutional weight in Georgia politics, which is what gives the 32-year framing its force. Candidates across both parties have treated it as a standard obligation, and declining it registers as a departure rather than a scheduling footnote.

Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor who served in the Biden administration before launching her gubernatorial bid, now has a line of attack that required no opposition research. Jackson’s calculation appears to be that four cities in a single day reaches more Georgians than a half-hour televised forum, and that debate attendance ranks nowhere on most voters’ list of concerns.