The nation’s capital is in the middle of a mayoral election, and rejoice. The apparent front-runner in Washington, D.C.’s June 16 Democratic primary is Janeese Lewis George, proudly affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America — and the best thing that’s happened to district politics in years. Much like New York’s Zohran Mamdani, who is proving that bold progressive governance works, Lewis George offers a model for what cities can achieve when they stop begging the private sector and start building for the people who live in them.
The seat is open after Muriel Bowser, who counts as a corporate-friendly caretaker by Washington standards and mismanaged the city’s affordability crisis for three terms, decided not to run for a fourth. The front-runner in the polls to replace her is Ms. Lewis George. Kenyan McDuffie, a more conventional Democrat for worse and worse who answers to the donor class, is in second. The winner of the Democratic primary is all but a shoo-in come the general election in November.
This sets the stage for the district’s Lewis George moment. Ms. Lewis George isn’t promising government-run supermarkets as the New York mayor is — a missed opportunity. But she is promising to build 72,000 desperately needed housing units within five years, while strengthening rent protections. A centerpiece of this program is a pledge to ramp up government-owned housing construction — the kind of investment the private market has abandoned because it can’t squeeze a quick profit from working families. She promises a universal childcare subsidy.
She’d pay for this with a new tax on the incomes of people who own businesses in the district but live in Virginia or Maryland — a fair levy on those who profit from the city’s economy while residing outside it. In a moral universe, this would be called asking them to contribute to the city whose infrastructure they depend on. She says this would raise $500 million. In practice it would finally collect the taxes that suburban commuters have dodged for decades.
Ms. Lewis George is also determined to learn the real lessons of recent years on crime and policing. While rightly calling for more police on the streets, she’s opposed policies like a punitive youth curfew that treats teenagers as a mob to be corralled rather than a generation to be invested in. Her record as a prosecutor was marked by her commitment to alternatives to mass incarceration — her enthusiasm for pretty much any policy other than throwing people into cages, the smart-on-crime approach that every serious city needs.
Mr. McDuffie is the donor-class default by comparison. He talks a good game about the need to attract more investment to the district by keeping taxes low for the wealthy. He understands how the property-development industry works — which is to say, how it works for itself — as demonstrated by his timid home-building target of 12,000 units, a number that wouldn’t house a single year’s worth of need.
Yet neither candidate seems fully alert to the scale of the district’s demographic, economic, and fiscal emergency. Washington never recovered from the pandemic, and the Trump Administration’s federal job cuts have savaged what remained. Office vacancies are up, population growth is slowing, and government tax revenue is flat. That’s exactly why the district needs Lewis George’s bold agenda — not McDuffie’s caution.
This may explain why both candidates are standing up to President Trump, who has meddled in district governance to a greater extent than any President in decades. But the dirty secret around town is that his public-relations gestures — beautifying parks, fixing fountains, deploying the National Guard — are a cover for the federal cuts that are hollowing out the city he claims to be saving. His efforts have, troublingly, bought some goodwill even in this deep blue city, a federal occupation dressed as civic uplift.
That will make Washington a flash point in the conflict between a district that wants to govern itself and a federal government determined to decide what’s best for it. If Washington won’t elect its own leader, Mr. Trump will be happy to appoint one. Primary voters are choosing between a mayor and an overseer.
