After New York, democratic socialism comes to D.C.

Last week, a member of the City Council of the District of Columbia, Janeese Lewis George, 38, won the district’s Democratic mayoral primary. Her victory means that she is all but guaranteed to win the mayor’s race in November—and that yet another major U.S. city is in the process of electing a democratic socialist as leader.

Lewis George celebrated her primary win Thursday night last week at Busboys and Poets, a D.C. restaurant and bookstore that frequently serves as a gathering space for the metro D.C. chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Framed by a backdrop of royal purple balloons, Lewis George expressed gratitude to her family, staff, and supporters. “Campaigns are hard work and it’s a lot of sacrifices for everyone who runs,” said Lewis George. “So to culminate this hard work and be successful, and to be the Democratic nominee in my hometown, it just means so much to me.”

Lewis George beat Kenyan McDuffie, an independent, to secure a front-runner position in the general election to succeed three-term Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser. Green Party candidate Robert Gross will challenge Lewis George in November. Since it adopted home rule in 1973, Washington has only elected Democratic mayors.

In contrast to Bowser’s moderate politics, Lewis George galvanized her base by promising universal childcare and a “Green New Deal for D.C.,” alongside DSA ​​canvassing efforts that the mayoral candidate called an integral part of her ground game to reach voters. Her strengthened support in the District of Columbia, accompanied by DSA candidates winning primaries for two congressional seats in New York, reveals the surge in popularity democratic socialists are enjoying in the United States.

Lewis George was elected to the D.C. Council in 2020 after graduating Howard University School of Law and serving as the district’s assistant attorney general in the Public Safety Division. According to The Washington Post, Lewis George officially joined DSA in 2018. Since then, her association with the organization has in some respects been subtle.

The mayoral-hopeful’s platform, ideology, and campaign make it hard to avoid drawing parallels to New York City’s new democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani’s rise to power, from assemblyman to mayor, was preceded by well-known democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and occurred in a city with the largest chapter of DSA nationally at around 13,000 members. By comparison, Lewis George is among the first wave of socialists to take elected office in D.C., and the metro DSA chapter hovers at just about 3,400 members.

But in D.C., Lewis George seems to be adopting a more subtle stance on socialism during her campaign. Stu Smith, investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said that during an ecosocialism call he attended Sunday night with Metro D.C. DSA, the chapter spoke to the fine line it walks in the nation’s capital

“One of the things that they brought up was the political wonk aspect of being inside D.C.,” said Smith. “They have to be good with their messaging.”

Mamdani’s assemblymember campaign championed the red rose, a symbol of socialism, and in his mayoral acceptance speech last year, he refused to apologize for being a democratic socialist. But Lewis George’s campaign opted for a purple theme, and she did not spotlight her ties to DSA in her acceptance speech.

Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University and supporter of Lewis George, met the mayoral candidate at a campaign event before the primaries. According to Kazin, Lewis George has acknowledged her membership in DSA but emphasized that she’s more concerned with the kinds of issues that most Democrats are talking about, like affordability.

Despite her apparently muted posture toward DSA on the campaign trail, certain pieces of Lewis George’s campaign indicate her leanings, Smith said.

Smith said that the endorsements Lewis George received are telling. “She’s definitely tied up with all the big activist groups in D.C.,” said Smith. “People are very complimentary of [Lewis] George locally in terms of Metro DSA.”

The first time Smith heard of Lewis George was at a rally for Free D.C., a nonprofit activist organization that works to protect D.C. home rule. The group also calls for the district to become a 51st state, among other causes.

The issue took center stage earlier this month, when President Donald Trump told reporters that if Lewis George were to win in November’s general election he might “take back Washington and run it on a federal basis.”

David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, a nonpartisan D.C. nonprofit dedicated to defending First Amendment rights, said Trump has no authority to do so. “I’m sure [he] can cause difficulties for the city in some fashion, but no, there are all kinds of laws that have been adopted by Congress and so on,” he said.

“He likes to come on tough,” added Kazin. “I don’t think it’s ever going to happen.”

The White House threat wasn’t the only hurdle Lewis George had to clear before the election. Four days before the primaries, the district’s Office of Campaign Finance fined Lewis George $16,000, citing violations of campaign finance requirements—including accusations that she improperly shared five staffers with a local labor union. Both Lewis George and the union denied the claims, and her campaign filed a motion to reconsider.

Kazin compared Lewis George’s ties to activism and DSA to that of other political nonprofits like Turning Point USA or the American Civil Liberties Union, the “kind of organization we have a lot of in this country.”

A member of the metro DSA chapter, Kazin says he stopped paying his dues (standard rate around $15 a month) to the organization a while back, though he still receives the group’s newsletter. “It’s not like being a member of a disciplined party,” said Kazin. “It basically just says you’re in sympathy with the general aims of the organization.”

Kazin said socialism’s heyday in U.S. politics and culture stretched from the founding of the Socialist Party of America in 1901 to around 1920 when former President Woodrow Wilson began to stamp out its flame. During that period, there were over 1,000 socialist elected officials at different levels of government. “But none was ever elected to an office as powerful and representing as many people as the mayor of New York City,” said Kazin.

Now, over 100 years later, socialists rarely run as a third party. Instead, they primarily run on the Democratic ticket as members of DSA.

Smith called it the party surrogate model. “They use some of the infrastructure, they use the battle lines, and they can grow their socialist power from within the Democratic Party, and maybe take it over one day,” he said.

DSA membership is currently estimated at around 100,000, just 13,000 short of becoming the largest socialist organization in U.S. history. If Lewis George wins the November election, she will become the ninth democratic socialist currently in mayoral office in the country.

But not everyone believes the wave hitting major East Coast cities means major strides for socialism.

“I do not see any reason to think this will lead to democratic socialists becoming a major third party,” Caleb Verbois, a professor of political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, told me in an email. “The more likely scenario is that the Democratic Party absorbs some of their policy proposals.”

Smith still warns about the ideology gaining traction, though. “Marx has this great quote: History happens twice, first as tragedy, then as farce,” he said. “Even though America has already experimented and did not like socialism, we’re doing that same experiment again.”