Uh Oh: DC May Be Poised to Elect a Mamdani of Its Own
Democratic Socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George, 38, has emerged as the frontrunner in the city’s mayoral primary race.
There was a time in America when even the faintest hint of socialist sympathies could end a political career. As recently as six years ago, Democrats so feared the potential nomination of openly socialist presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that they moved heaven and earth to ensure that Joe Biden emerged as the nominee instead.
But it did not take long for the Left’s affinity for socialist governance to become not merely acceptable, but intellectually fashionable, particularly among the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Candidates and politicians aligned with this growing movement were soon celebrated as the party’s rising stars. Before long, New York City elected Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as its mayor.
At the same time, voters in Seattle, Washington, elected Democratic Socialist Katie Wilson as mayor. And suddenly, the floodgates were open. The Democratic Socialist label that candidates used to run from has since become all the rage.
And now, it appears that Washington, D.C., may be poised to elect a Democratic Socialist mayor of its own.
Democratic Socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George, 38, has emerged as the frontrunner in the city’s mayoral primary race. A recent City Cast DC poll showed Lewis George leading the field with 39% support.
Her closest rival, Kenyan McDuffie, 51, a more centrist Democrat, finished with 34%. The next highest vote recipient received just 7%, and 24% of respondents remain undecided.
The primary will take place on June 16.
[City Cast noted that because D.C. uses ranked-choice voting, it is too early to count McDuffie out. When voters were asked to identify their second-choice candidate, 27% selected McDuffie, compared with 15% for Lewis George.]
Political analyst Geoffrey Ingersoll provided brief descriptions of the two candidates:
McDuffie was a postal worker [who worked] his way through school. He graduated from Howard University, then got his JD, and was a trial attorney for Obama’s civil rights division before entering local DC government in 2012.
He supports beefing up police and installing stricter curfews for juveniles in the city. His approach to housing is more builder- and investor-friendly.
He supports cutting “red tape” and pragmatism.
Regarding Lewis George:
JLG was the daughter of a postal worker. She also got her JD and served briefly as a juvenile prosecutor in the district before entering local politics.
JLG is yet another self-styled “Democratic-socialist” who believed at one point DC Metro Police should be defunded in favor of a “community approach,” ie, social workers. She’s also in favor of wealth taxes and government-controlled housing.
She supports “bold, systemic change,” which is a euphemism for historically terrible, top-down socialist impositions.
She’s basically a black Zohran Mamdani. She’s also winning for similar reasons.
The City Cast poll of 735 District residents, conducted between May 12 and 17, offers fresh insight into the race and reveals striking parallels with polling from New York City’s mayoral contest. Chief among them is the extent to which age shapes voter preferences. Younger voters, in particular, appear far more receptive to socialism. This is likely a reflection of how few have firsthand experience with or a clear understanding of its historical failures.
The poll identified a stark “generational divide” in the race. Among baby boomers and older voters, McDuffie holds a commanding 27-point lead. By contrast, Lewis George leads by 24 points among Gen Z voters and by 19 points among millennials.
Lewis George holds a six-point advantage among white voters, while McDuffie leads by nine points among black voters.
The survey likewise revealed major differences between lifelong District residents and newer arrivals. Among respondents who grew up in D.C., McDuffie leads by 17 points. Among residents who have lived in the city for fewer than ten years, however, Lewis George holds a staggering 41-point advantage.
The DC mayoral race boils down to rooted residents, who support Kenyan McDuffie, vs newcomers, who favor Janeese Lewis George. @CityCast_DC poll shows that Nats and Commanders fans are for McDuffie; fans of out of town teams for JLG https://t.co/rmr23nYl1I
— Marc Fisher (@mffisher) May 20, 2026
Taken together, the numbers point to a broader political realignment underway within the Democratic Party. The old stigma once attached to socialism has faded dramatically, especially among younger voters and newer urban residents who increasingly view Democratic Socialism not as a political liability, but as a badge of political virtue.
Whether that shift ultimately proves durable remains to be seen. But if the trajectory from New York City to Seattle is any indication, Washington, D.C. may soon become the next major American city to embrace a movement that, until very recently, existed far outside the political mainstream.
The DC I know is worth fighting for.
I’m Janeese Lewis George, and I’m running for Mayor. pic.twitter.com/7ZI3dojxxh
— Janeese Lewis George (@Janeese4DC) December 1, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn.
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Comments
There’s old, stupid, and aware of it. There’s also young, stupider, and totally clueless.
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That situation is further amplified in a city where 75% of registered voters are Dems (20% independent/other, 5% Republicans)! 😕
And if that ends up giving the win to McDuffie, will people here still complain about it and claim that it’s some sort of ruse to help the left?!
Irrelevant. It’s DC. There’s only left, farther left, and even farther left.
Nonetheless, if there is a majority for whom this communist is a step too far, and that would prefer any other viable candidate to her, then preferential voting will ensure that she can’t win, whereas the common first-past-the-post voting could easily give it to her.
Yes, even if in one case ranked choice voting happens to give a better result it’s still a massively bad idea that tends to allow candidates that otherwise couldn’t get in to get in. The fact that it avoids disaster in one case does not make it a good idea suddenly.
It’s not in one case. It’s in every case in which the public isn’t genuinely against you. It always gives the result that the majority prefers to any other feasible result. Always. Sometimes that result isn’t what we like, but in such cases we should lose, it’s right and just for us to lose, and it’s wrong for us to win. We shouldn’t want to win in such cases, where the majority of voters are against us. And if we have any belief in the justice of our cause, then we have to believe that in more cases than not the majority will support us, or at least will prefer us to any realistic alternative. Otherwise what are we doing? Trying to impose our way on people by force?!
Why are you so addicted to arguing that black is white and getting run over at the zebra crossing?
That is not what is happening. You are simply wrong. Preferential voting is obviously superior to every other method, and always yields the right and just result. Insisting that it helps the left is means saying that the left deserves to win elections, and the only way we can win is by cheating, which is the exact opposite of the truth.
Being aggressively and assertively wrong doesn’t make your point better.
Well it’s DC. After all the losers they’ve elected what’s one more.
He sits DC, but it’s NYC, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, LA,
It just goes on and on
In regards to your list. You beat me. I would note that those cities [and to be honest more] are really not part of our country anymore. We can do nothing to prevent them from destroying themselves. All we can do is not save them from their own actions.
Subotai Bahadur
Good news:
Congress can pull the plug on the D.C. city government at any time.
Bad news:
The American taxpayer will be on the hook for any bailout of the District due to its nature as a federal enclave. (Not that other American cities and the States won’t be bailed out too. But bailing out these others will be a mistake, not an obligation.)
Yeah,but the problem is, it’s where it starts for the rest of the whole country.
May I suggest that DC is incapable of self-governance?
We’re talking about people whose level of civic education rises to the level of putting “Taxation without Representation” on their license plates.
It’s not that DC isn’t already an embarrassingly dangerous place (until Trump activated the National Guard at least) witness the shooting at the White House yesterday.
No, the one thing we need no more of is socialists pretending they have better ideas.
They don’t.
I think people want change when you keep voting in the same corrupt Democrats; then it feels like a “newcomer” no matter how foolish their ideas, sounds interesting; it sounds like change. Since these people would never consider voting for a Republicab; there you go. They won’t like the mamdani treatment once they get it; but they are determined to vote for it; what can you do? The Democrats should have let Bernie run all those years ago and that horrific campaign might have exorcised them of this socialist fashionability. But since they corruptly blocked that; now their party has fractured and the reckoning never came. Whether we like it or not, too many Americans fooloishly think socialism is like “wicked awesome,” so people are going to have to learn the hard way.
Liberal playbook: NOTHING comes before party.
A Republican Congress can fully revoke DC’s home rule if its voters get too far over their skis.
Only if it can overcome a filibuster in the senate.
I’m surprised that the Democrats haven’t repealed home rule. With their opinion of black people being so stupid. They can’t even get a photo ID, how do they expect them to run the capital city of the United States?
Why would they repeal it? They control DC government absolutely, while they don’t always control Congress. With home rule they get their way in DC all the time; with direct congressional control they’ll only get it sometimes. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Something even AOC could understand.
This Republican Congress can’t even get together its lunch order before bedtime.
Pick your flavor of poison, from among these incompetents “of color.”
“And I know I’ll win, because I’ll promise you twice as many goodies as any other candidate — an outrageous list of benefits that only the brain-dead could possibly believe.”
Every election more Marxists are gaining seats.
That slow march through Culture Marxism Seminaries is paying off.
Please stop allowing the Left to control the use of language and terminology a la Orwell’s “1984,” where words are manipulated to deceive and misinform. There is no such thing as a “Progressive,” or a “Democratic Socialist,” or any of these other names they use for these people. They are all COMMUNISTS, plain and simple, and that is what they should be called. The Left invented all these pretty names to call themselves in order to deceive and misinform. The sooner we start calling these people what they are, the sooner and more effectively we can deal with them properly, as enemies of this nation and of all for which it stands.
“Please stop allowing the Left to control the use of language and terminology a la Orwell’s ‘1984,’ where words are manipulated to deceive and misinform.”
You sound like an unhoused cisgender birthing person who has been chest feeding too long.
😃 (sarc) 😃
Exactly. A communist is a communist is a communist. Period. And this is the USA, 250 years strong.
Return DC to federal jurisdiction.
With which votes? How does such a measure pass the senate?
If anyone happens to know how to get to Galt’s Gulch, please contact me by P.M.
Ranked choice voting doesn’t address how much more a voter prefers their first choice over their second. If a voter sees two candidates as a toss up, their second choice is treated the same as that of a voter who loves their first choice and despises their second.
It doesn’t matter how much a voter prefers their first choice to their second. So long as they do prefer their first choice, their vote should be counted for that person so long as they are a viable candidate. If their first choice is no longer viable, then their vote should obviously be counted for their second choice, since that person is now their first choice. That’s why it’s called the Single Transferable Vote.
It does matter to the voter.
No, it does not matter to the voter. Given this list of candidates, he prefers one over all the others. Given this smaller list that doesn’t include the one he liked, he prefers one of the remaining candidates over all others. Etc. At every stage the voter has a preference, until you get down to people he honestly has no preference among, at which point he can stop voting and accept whatever the rest of the voters give him. At no stage does the strength of his preference matter, to him or to anyone else.
Janesse needs a salad. The city who elected Marion Barry twice is corrupt shithole.
Janeese — it’s all in a name. Janice sounds too white, what?
Janice is stressed on the first syllable. Janeese looks like it should be stressed on the second syllable.
Oh no! That means I’ll have to change my name to Pauleese. Or Paulika. Or Paulesha.
Keep in mind, this is the same electorate who re-elected Marion Barry AFTER he was arrested and charged with three felony counts of perjury, 10 counts of drug possession, and one misdemeanor count of conspiracy to possess cocaine. He was convicted of one count of possession. The predominantly black jury did not convict on the other charges believing he was the victim of a racist conspiracy.
Always keep in mind that Providence RI — a city full of old white people in a state much the same — did exactly the same thing with Buddy Cianci. The biggest difference is that Cianci was guilty of actual violence, not just smoking dope.
Ranked choice requires a computer to count. Built for Fraud.
It doesn’t REQUIRE a computer to count, any more than “normal” ballots do. It’ll just take longer to do by hand, just like “normal” ballots will. Australia has been using it for elections to its federal House since 1918, some states even earlier.
Of course, this leaves open the question of whether a society that can no longer make change without a cash register cheating them the answer could count ballots as effectively as people could in 1920… but still.
No, it doesn’t require a computer. Australia still counts by hand. The way most Americans vote does require a computer, or some sort of device.
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