Fani Willis was confident ahead of Tuesday’s runoff against her former boss Paul Howard.
“We thought we’d get a solid 60 percent,” she said Wednesday in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our polling had been very consistent.”
In fact, Willis captured more than 73 percent of the vote. Her landslide victory was a crushing defeat for Howard, who was seeking his seventh term in office.
Data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office show Willis dominated countywide, besting Howard in all but a handful of precincts. The teal areas illustrate the precincts Willis carried; the blue ones show the precincts where Howard prevailed. The tan areas were a tie. Even the precincts that favored Howard didn’t do so by much; he carried an Alpharetta precinct by one vote, for example.
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“I want Fani to know I will extend my every effort to ensure her transition is a smooth one,” Howard said in his concession speech Tuesday night.
Discussing their bare knuckles campaign, Howard said, “Politics is a contact sport. If you run for office you have to realize things happen. I’m hoping now that Ms. Willis has the job she’ll forget about that stuff.”
But as of late Wednesday afternoon, Willis had yet to hear from the man who hired her 17 years earlier.
“He’s not going out on a good note,” she said. “I’ll be praying for him.”
Reflecting on Howard’s legacy, Willis said she was proud to have worked for the first Black person elected as a district attorney in Georgia.
“He‘s a smart man. I always said he stood in line for brains twice and skipped that line of how to treat people,” she said. “He can look at cases and see things other lawyers miss. He made me a better lawyer. And I’m not the only lawyer he made better.”
The 49-year-old mother of two, the first woman to be elected Fulton’s DA, said she plans to recruit the “best and the brightest” from the legal community to work in the prosecutor’s office.
“I want legally conservative minds and legally liberal minds,” she said. “Let’s sit around the table and hash it out and find the best way to serve the community. I want to rely on the wisdom of other people and their experiences to lead the office.”
Check out Sunday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution for more about Willis’ plans for the prosecutor’s office, Howard’s legacy and the brutal campaign that gave Fulton County its first new district attorney in nearly a quarter century.
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