"In the span of two years, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has gone from one of President Joe Biden’s most prominent surrogates — important enough to get vetted as a potential VP pick..."

"... to abandoning what once was considered a shoo-in re-election bid.... [A] 60% spike in homicides and accusations that she had become disconnected from the community seriously complicated her chances.... [Bottoms's statement] lacked... any sort of explanation about why she isn’t running. So her allies are filling the void. They say she genuinely believed she could have won a second term, but passed because she felt her motivation sapping.... Will she run for another office? Bottoms didn’t rule it out, and several statewide offices are up for grabs next year. Your Insiders are skeptical of this possibility. If she faced a tough citywide re-election bid this year, a statewide race with a more conservative electorate would objectively be an even heavier lift."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. 

Here's an AJC article from January: "Atlanta’s deadliest year in decades has city on edge and demanding change": 

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was hailed after her response to destructive rioting in May after protests over the death of George Floyd devolved into chaos. Glamour featured her in its Women of the Year issue....

Former APD investigator Lakea Gaither said Bottoms has “lost the confidence of the officers.” An 18-year veteran saluted as Officer of the Year in 2013 and Investigator of the Year in 2015, Gaither was one of 37 officers who either retired or resigned in a single month, August of last year. More than 200 officers quit in 2020. Many left after Erika Shields stepped down as chief in June, shortly after former Officer Garrett Rolfe shot Rayshard Brooks after a scuffle in a Wendy’s parking lot near downtown.

After Bottoms quickly announced that Rolfe had been fired and then-Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard announced criminal charges, hundreds of officers staged an unofficial “blue flu” in protest.... 

Bottoms says pinning blame on her for Atlanta’s historically high homicide tally is “misplaced frustration.” One 2020 shooting left a man dead near her southwest Atlanta home even as a patrol car sat outside her house, she noted. “Even if we had officers on every single corner — and in this instance an officer was literally on the block — homicides can happen,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Wherever people would like to place blame, (that) doesn’t get us any closer to the solution. This is a challenge across the country and we’re all trying to wrap our arms around it.”