'It's time to be brave': Palestinian American Ruwa Romman runs for Georgia governor

Ruwa Romman, a young Palestinian American, is launching a bold campaign for governor, she says, "to build a movement."

The 32-year-old Democratic state legislator, who was elected to the state assembly in 2022, announced her bid on Monday, saying that "now is the time to be brave."

She believes being Palestinian is part of her strength as a candidate, giving her grit and tenacity.

"Me being Palestinian actually means that people are guaranteed someone who will fight for them and not back down from a fight, no matter how hard," she told The New Arab.

Romman made headlines around a year ago, when her name was proposed by the Uncommitted movement to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention. She was not allowed to speak (though it was later published by Rolling Stone), and leaders of the movement staged a sit-in near the arena in Chicago.

She's now ready to make waves again and run for governor after two decades of Republican rule in Georgia.

"Republicans have controlled our state for over 20 years, and that's why we're ranked low in education, our hospitals have shut down, and the minimum wage is at $5.15 an hour," Romman said.

"Right now, our governor works for corporations and special interests. The first thing we need to do to address a lot of these issues is to change who the governor is and who they work for," she said.

Romman was born in Jordan in 1993 and is the granddaughter of Palestinian refugees expelled from Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948. When she was seven, she and her family moved to the US, where she attended school as one of the few non-white children in her class. Although she was sometimes teased for her background, she often managed to overcome hostility through dialogue, a quality her mother instilled in her.

She became involved in community and political organising, including initiatives that would help turn Georgia blue with the elections of two Democratic governors in 2020.

In 2014, she knocked on doors for former State Senator Jason Carter, who was running for governor at the time. However, he didn't win, she remembers seeing the potential for a political shift in her state.

"The first door I ever knocked on was in 2014 for the Jason Carter campaign, and I remember very clearly going back to headquarters and saying: we can turn Georgia blue," she recalled.

"I remember people saying, very sweetly: bless your heart, it's really sweet, but that's just Georgia," she said, noting that four years later, the Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams came close to winning the race for governor, and 2020 saw the elections of two Democratic senators.

“When I tell people oftentimes, they are very dismissive of our state, they just see us as backwards, as ignorant, and as unable to do anything, when in reality our state has continued to be very progressive on a lot of things,” she said.

She is now running on a broad platform of raising the minimum wage, which currently stands at $5.15 an hour (compared with the federal level of $7.25), taking homes back from corporations, expanding healthcare, feeding children, and supporting small businesses.

Georgia has one of the lowest spending rates per pupil in the country, and the state was one of the hardest hit by the financial crisis, resulting in a surge of foreclosed homes being purchased en masse by corporations.

Romman is focused on issues she believes will unify voters, rather than what she sees as culture war flashpoints that many Democrats say are meant to distract from a lack of funding on education, infrastructure and social services.

"So what do we end up getting? We end up getting a lot of culture war issues that did not actually help anybody," she said.

"And they know that people are desperate, and they know that by using these issues they can drive these wedges, particularly because they cannot take the time to address the real things impacting Georgians," she added.

Though she is aware of the challenges that lie ahead, she is also launching her campaign in an era of political upsets and public discontent with the status quo and political dynasties.

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign as a junior senator from Illinois upended the general expectation that New York Senator Hillary Clinton would become the Democratic nominee. In 2016, Donald Trump, a real estate heir with no prior political experience, defeated Texas Governor Jeb Bush, who was part of a generations-long political dynasty.

More recently, the 2018 election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then a 28-year-old bartender, helped usher in the "squad" of young progressives, demonstrating a demand for grassroots politics. Currently, the New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, who started his campaign at 1% against incumbent Eric Adams and former Governor Andrew Cuomo, is once again showing a growing demand for grassroots politics.

In Georgia, the two senators, both Democrats, were able to win in a state that had long been red, through grassroots campaigning and without traditional political backgrounds. Jon Ossoff was a filmmaker, and Raphael Warnock was a pastor, though both had long been active in community organising.

"There are a lot of people who are understandably very sceptical of what we're trying to do, and what I tell them is: join the movement," she said. "What's the worst that'll happen? We build a team of volunteers that can then go and lobby their state reps and senators on important bills after elections, and mobilise with their communities and show up and be with each other."