A democratic socialist candidate in the mold of New York’s Zohran Mamdani is poised to win the Washington, D.C., mayoral election, setting the city on a collision course with the Trump administration’s plans to remake the nation’s capital city. 

After results began pouring in after the election on Tuesday night, the democratic socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George appeared poised to clinch the Democratic nomination, and thus secure the mayor’s seat in a general election with no opposition. D.C. is employing ranked-choice voting for the first time this year, and therefore the results are still not final as votes from the lagging candidates are reallocated. At the time of this writing, Lewis George leads her main opponent, Kenyan McDuffie, by about 53% to 37%. 

Under President Donald Trump, Washington has become ground zero for his administration’s efforts to boost immigration enforcement, reduce urban crime, and beautify federal buildings and parks. 

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who announced last year that she would not seek reelection, has been remarkably cooperative with the administration, especially when the federal government offered resources to bolster the city’s Metropolitan Police Department.

Progressives vs. centrists

Bowser’s departure after a more than two-decade tenure as mayor set up a battle that pit business-friendly centrists against progressive Democrats, creating uncertainty in the White House about what kind of leadership it will contend with when the dust settles.

Lewis George has been a vocal critic of Bowser’s more centrist leadership of the city, especially her approach toward Trump’s crime-fighting and immigration enforcement efforts in Washington. With her likely victory, she could very quickly move to make federal operations in the city very difficult for the Trump administration. 

President Donald Trump said last week that a Lewis George election victory would be bad for the city and warned that it may prompt him to take a more direct role in running the nation's capital. 

"I wouldn't like it," Trump said of a potential Lewis George victory. "And maybe we take back Washington, run it on the federal basis. We won't put up with it. We're not going to lose our businesses.” 

Back when Lewis George’s campaign for mayor was only speculation, Axios reported the D.C. council member’s closest advisers were prepping a campaign to mirror the successful effort by Mamdani in New York, who challenged the city’s Democratic Party establishment and shifted the city’s politics far to the left. Other “democratic socialist” candidates have also found success across the country in recent years, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. 

Lewis George is undoubtedly one of them. She openly describes herself as a democratic socialist and has championed many policies shared with Mamdani from her seat on Washington, D.C.’s council. She has supported social housing, stripping “military equipment” from the police, and minimum wage increases. 

“Housing is too essential to leave solely to the private market,” Lewis George said in 2022, years before Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign. She introduced a bill that year called the “Green New Deal for Housing” that would authorize the D.C. government to buy properties and convert them into social housing. 

Public reversal of promise to defund police

Now, Lewis George contends that she will not defund the police, but earning the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America during her original D.C. council run meant vowing to defund the police, and she had a vocal history of promising to do just that, Just the News has extensively documented. 

Lewis George was first elected in 2020, at the height of the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests. During the campaign, Lewis George said that she believed in stripping funds and taking away military-style equipment from D.C.’s police department.

In her council campaign, she called for reducing police presence in schools and said she would reject endorsements from unions that represent police officers. Lewis George also said that she supported eliminating cash bail and spoke at the June 2020 “Fund Care, Not Cops!” rally sponsored by the DSA. 

Since launching her campaign for mayor last year, Lewis George has sought to downplay her past pledges to defund the police, Just the News reported last week. Lewis George’s current mayoral campaign platform makes no mention of her prior repeated pledges to Defund the Police, but instead claims she will support the police.

Trump has made a crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C., a centerpiece of his second-term effort to remake the nation’s capital city. Last August, the president announced a temporary federal takeover of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department and deployed National Guard troops to assist. He described the effort as “a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse.” 

Though federal control of the police department eventually ended, National Guard troops still remain deployed in the capital. D.C.’s former Police Chief Pamela Smith last year praised the federal assistance that the Trump administration provided her department, helping make up for the chronic manpower shortage affecting the city’s police force. 

Mayor Bowser originally opposed Trump’s decision to assume emergency control of the Metropolitan Police Department this summer, but changed her mind after crime rates began to decline. By September, she had thanked the president for the extra resources.

President Trump also deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the capital city to make arrests during the takeover. The federal agency quickly ramped up the number of arrests and cooperated closely with both the Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Park Police. 

Unlike Bowser, who took a more practical position, Lewis George expressed firm opposition to President Trump’s federal takeover of the city’s police department and the ongoing National Guard deployment. If elected mayor, President Trump could face a city government more opposed to his plans for the capital. 

A mayor who would “stand up to Trump” 

Lewis George has strongly criticized the city’s cooperation with federal agents and the Trump administration takeover, making it likely she would strive to limit any collaboration if elected next year. 

"I have been horrified and outraged by the conduct perpetrated by federal law enforcement officers, including ICE agents, targeting our most vulnerable neighbors – especially unhoused and undocumented residents who are simply trying to live their lives,” Lewis George wrote in August. 

After President Trump threatened to again take over Washington, D.C., Lewis George responded by saying that the people of the city wanted a mayor who would “stand up to Trump.” 

“We are not going to get ICE off our streets or protect Home Rule by fearing this President,” Lewis George said in a post to X. “Threatening DC because you do not like how our residents vote is an attack on democracy itself.”