With her recently announced run for governor, state Rep. Ruwa Romman, D-Duluth, hopes to start a progressive movement in Georgia that centers on economic issues important to Black voters.
Raising the state’s minimum wage, limiting corporate home buying to make rent and homeownership more affordable, and expanding Medicaid coverage to spur the reopening of rural hospitals, are some of her top policy ideas.
“Every single one of those things have disproportionately impacted the Black community,” Romman told Capital B Atlanta. “The unemployment rate right now in the Black community is double what it is for other communities. When you look at which hospitals are shutting down and which counties don’t have a single physician, they tend to be predominantly Black counties. If you look at, for example, who is being paid less, it’s usually Black workers.”
The 32-year-old, two-term representative acknowledged her policy ideas may seem unrealistic to veteran lawmakers in the Republican-controlled General Assembly, but she’s committed to pursuing them anyway.
“I’m somebody who does not back down from a fight,” Romman said. “There have been too many people in power who say the right things, but when it comes down to [negotiating] on our behalf, as soon as it comes down to actually having those fights, suddenly a political expediency overcomes all other considerations.”
Romman is charting a progressive, populist path to the Democratic nomination in Georgia’s 2026 governor’s race amid an increasingly crowded field of primary candidates that includes former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, and former GOP Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan who switched parties in August to become a Democrat before officially declaring his own gubernatorial ambitions last month.
Other Democratic candidates include state Sen. Jason Esteves, D-Atlanta, state Rep. Derrick Jackson, D-Tyrone, and retired faith leader Olu Brown, the former pastor of Impact Church.
A slew of Republican contenders are also vying to succeed GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, who is term limited from seeking reelection. Attorney General Chris Carr, acting Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are among the list of GOP challengers running for governor, along with real estate executive Clark Dean, National Guard Sgt. Ken Yasgar, and former state Senate candidate Leland Olinger.
Romman is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Jordan and the granddaughter of Palestinian refugees whose parents settled in metro Atlanta when she was 8 years old. She earned a degree in political science from Oglethorpe University in 2015 and a master’s in public policy from Georgetown University in 2019 before pursuing a career in politics.
Prior to her first successful state House run in 2022, she worked at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. She also serves as a senior consultant for Deloitte, the London-based professional services network.
Romman discussed her campaign priorities with Capital B Atlanta on Monday. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Capital B Atlanta: When and why did you decide to run for governor?
Ruwa Romman: [My team and I] really started having these conversations a couple of months ago as we were reviewing the field. A lot of people were looking for a candidate who could build a movement that would end the over 20-year Republican rule [in the Georgia General Assembly]. The reality is that Republicans have controlled our state for over 20 years, and in that time, we’ve ranked lower in education. Hospitals have shut down. Minimum wage has stayed on our books at $5.15 an hour. And our governor has been working for more corporations, billionaires, and special interests than the rest of us.
In order for us to change that, the first thing we gotta do is change who’s in power. And that’s the governor. And as a result, we decided, now’s the time to build a movement to change the power dynamics in our state.
What [would be] your top three policy priorities as governor, and how would you enact them?
It’s raising the minimum wage. Take homes back from corporations. Reopen hospitals. Feed hungry kids and invest in small businesses. Anywhere we go, that’s sort of been our pitch, that these are specific policy asks.
Georgia is on track to open the largest ICE facility in the country. We recently deployed members of the National Guard here to support ICE officers throughout the state. Do you agree with using the National Guard to bolster immigration enforcement?
One of the bills that we had was House Bill 1105, last year. … It basically almost mandates local police departments detain people they suspect of not having citizenship, and they have like 48 hours to confirm their citizenship. To me, that’s absurd.
These kinds of bills should have never been signed to begin with. I would veto them if they ever came before me. Taking some of this money to expand our ICE facilities, we’re actually not seeing a lot of deportations out of the country. We’re seeing a lot of detention happening of immigrants because it is very financially lucrative for their billionaire benefactors, and that, to me, is unacceptable. I would much rather have that money go towards, for example, our schools, our roads, whatever the case may be. Last but not least … you asked about the National Guard. Of course, I would oppose that. I think that we have seen, for example, Governor Pritzker in Illinois and others that have really said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Our governor should have done the same. Our governor should have never allowed for our National Guard to be used in any way.
What are your views on President Trump and Georgia Republicans’ anti DEI policies?
I believe that if we do not know our history, we are doomed to repeat it. I think that this attack on DEI is nothing more than a distraction. Because if an elected official came to you and said, ‘Oh, this is the only way that your child can get access to education. I’m actually going to take that away from them,’ you’ll never say yes to that. But if you drum up this, sort of, using buzzwords and whatever the case may be, whether it’s on culture war issues or DEI, etc., now you’re able to essentially trick people into giving up what little our governments already provide for us willingly.
I actually think it is a dangerous attack on all of us. … I would veto any [DEI ban bill] that comes to my desk.
Gov. Brian Kemp has encouraged tech companies to acquire property here in Georgia and open data centers. What’s your view on the issue, and how would you address it as governor?
We need to remove the tax incentives for these data centers, because it came up my first year, and at the time, they weren’t this prolific. They weren’t this much of a problem. I remember very clearly a lot of folks coming to us saying, “This is a job maker for us,” and this was before the same individuals realized, “Oh no. We’re actually here to build it, and then we lose our jobs.” I think we should also be imposing restrictions so that these data centers are not within a certain distance of people’s homes.
Other states have mandated that a portion of all energy is renewable energy to reduce the stress on our own systems. We have seen other states that limit the size of them. There’s so many different regulatory tools that we can use on these data centers, and I think we should be using them to protect Georgians.
[Today] is the anniversary of Oct. 7, the two-year anniversary of the attacks on Israel by Hamas. What is on your mind as we reach this anniversary, and what do you want Black readers to know about this?
What continues to be on my mind is that this is no longer a war. This is now a genocide. Entire families have been wiped out. Entire family lines have been wiped out.
My hope is that at least now people have started to see what has been happening slowly for a long period of time, that has now significantly escalated over the past two years. My grandparents, three of them, have now passed away without ever seeing their homes again. They were not political officials. I mean, we got ourselves involved in something that we should have never been involved with to begin with. Nobody knew my grandparents’ story. Nobody knew anything about Palestinians, and yet we had a whole foreign policy that never took them into consideration.
When folks ask, “What does that have to do with me?” I remind them that our police force trains with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], that a lot of the surveillance technology that we see today is perfected on Palestinians, that a lot of the same sort of protest tactics that they are using to go after protesters were perfected on Palestinians. That’s why that stuff matters to us.
The reason we should always be very careful about what our government does to others or enables, is that it will inevitably do [the same] unto us. That is something that I take very seriously in my job. I actually don’t see a lot of elected officials talking about it, but it’s true. What we enable to be done unto others, governments then somehow find a way to do it to us. I don’t think the way that we have approached this is OK. I don’t think it’s acceptable. Too many people have died, and I just want the killing to stop.
