Washington, DC Swings Far Left

It took a couple days but Washington, DC has finally counted enough votes that Janeese Lewis George’s opponent in the race has conceded.

The leading challenger to Washington, D.C., City Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist, conceded the Democratic primary for mayor Thursday, putting her in line to lead the capital city and manage its relationship with President Donald Trump.

NBC News has not yet projected a winner in the primary. With roughly three-fourths of the expected vote tallied, Lewis George has 53% to 37% for Kenyan McDuffie, a former city councilmember, in the ranked choice contest.

“Earlier this morning, I called Councilmember Janeese Lewis George to congratulate her on her victory and wish her success as she prepares for the general election,” McDuffie said in a statement.

Lewis George still has to win the general election but in Washington that race is basically a foregone conclusion. I wrote about Lewis George’s background here but she’s being called DC’s Mamdani. She came in on a wave of anti-police sentiment in 2020 and is still a believer in defunding the police. She is also against the curfews that DC has been using in an attempt to control street takeovers by large crowds of young people.

Like Mamdani, Lewis George is promising affordability and seems to be focused on rent freezes and building more affordable housing. Can she actually pull that off in DC? Kimberley Strassel thinks not.

On the latest episode of the Potomac Watch podcast, @KimStrassel highlights some of the costly ideas Janeese Lewis George has planned for Washington, D.C. if she becomes mayor. @kyleopeterson https://t.co/BjmkSm6H16 pic.twitter.com/UHzvHlxCXe

— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) June 16, 2026

If you’re wondering where Lewis George came up with a plan for 72,000 new homes, she took outgoing Mayor Bowser’s plan and doubled it.

To hit that 72,000-unit target, Lewis George’s plan calls for legalizing high-density, mixed-use buildings near Metrorail and bus stops and on publicly owned land to encourage transit-oriented development. She would also legalize small apartment buildings of up to six units and ease setback and side-yard requirements to make it easier to actually build, not just permit. And she would end parking requirements, with minimal parking encouraged near Metro stations. On the process side, she has proposed a “shot clock” — a maximum timeframe for development reviews — and a one-stop shop for permits, consolidating what is currently a fragmented, multi-agency application process into a single online portal…

Whether Lewis George can deliver on those ambitions is an open question. Developers and analysts have flagged high interest rates and construction costs as headwinds, and affordable housing builders in particular have grown wary of the District.

Her plan to cut red tape actually seems like the right approach but may turn out to be easier said than done. In any case, she seems to be copying Mamdani’s strategy of promising the moon. Her opponent in the race said her numbers were impossible.

“There’s no way that she’s going to build 72,000 units of housing,” McDuffie said in a debate earlier this spring. “It costs too much to build in Washington, D.C.”..

Liz DeBarros, CEO of the District of Columbia Building Industry Association, said her team is not endorsing a candidate, but whoever is chosen should look at “rigid, mandatory regulations that offer no flexibility” and can be “cost-prohibitive,” such as those on bird glass and moving heritage trees.

The city’s going to have to formally invite investors back. There are too many moving parts and too many hurdles to build,” DeBarros told Homes.com News in a statement.

“Collectively, these issues make it incredibly difficult to get a shovel in the ground for commercial development and most certainly for new housing in this rewired DC market. If we want more housing, we have to address the stability of the process itself.”

All of these plans seem dependent on the idea that DC’s population will begin growing, but that’s not the recent trend. DC lost about 20,000 residents during the pandemic and still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels (about 700k).

Finally, President Trump has been making an effort to clean up DC over the past year and he is not a fan of Lewis George. So it’s possible she could see some serious opposition at the federal level. Of course the same thing was possible in New York City after Mamdani won but Mamdani seems to have somehow charmed Trump and made him…an ally? Or at least not an opponent. 

The situation in DC is different however both because Trump is already invested there in efforts to beautify and bring down crime and because the feds have direct control of DC in a way they don’t of NYC. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

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