PSL Statement: Janeese Lewis George’s Win, What it means for D.C. and the Movement for Socialism

Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George's victory in the District of Columbia Democratic primary for the mayoral election signifies a rupture from the pro-business, Trump-collaborationist agenda of outgoing Mayor Muriel Bowser. Lewis George’s campaign has shown that D.C. residents are hungry for a far more confrontational stance to Donald Trump.

Socialism Grows Amid Billionaire Attacks on Workers

The campaign of Lewis George, a former juvenile prosecutor and D.C. Council member, has risen to success on a popular nationwide rejection of Trump’s billionaire agenda - and of the Democratic Party establishment’s failure to oppose it. Candidates espousing democratic socialist principles have won midterm primary races in cities across the country. A historic rebirth of socialism in the United States, where 62% of people under 30 and 43% in total have a favorable view of socialism. Here in the District, residents have seen Trump deploy masked federal agents and armed soldiers on our streets as our public space has been closed off and destroyed for Trump’s vanity projects.

Amidst these attacks, D.C. has only seen Mayor Bowser bow to Trump again and again. Bowser ordered out the D.C. National Guard and the curfew to suppress the people’s anger after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020; the mass eviction of homeless encampments; violent arrests of GWU student anti-genocide activists; and ultimately permitted the destruction of BLM Plaza at Trump’s behest. But, what will ultimately stain her legacy forever will be her collaboration and total subservience to Trump’s federal takeover beginning in August of 2025.

Yet the election of a democratic socialist cannot be understood as simply a protest vote against Trump. Hundreds of thousands of D.C. residents have only seen their lives made more difficult by the pro-business, pro-developer agenda that Muriel Bowser promoted. When she took the mayoral office in 2014, a 2-bedroom apartment cost around $1,469 - in 2025, the average rent was $2,770 for the same-sized apartment. In 2025, Pepco increased rates for the third consecutive year, with the average D.C. residential customer's monthly electric bill jumping to $114. Rental assistance funding has been slashed dramatically to its lowest level since 2020, despite evidence of overwhelming need that far exceeds available resources. Tens of thousands of Black residents have been driven out of D.C. with affordability being a major documented factor. Faced with decades of destructive gentrification and overpolicing, D.C. residents clearly desire a complete overhaul approach.

Janeese Lewis George's administration will face deep challenges making the institutions of D.C. government work for the people. These institutions are inherently structured to prevent progressive policy for working and oppressed residents. D.C.'s bureaucracy, federal overreach, powerful lobbying groups, police union, and even Democratic Party machinery will seek to obstruct any reform that she - or any other mayor - intends to pursue. She must navigate the impact of the draconian SECURE Act of 2024, which intensified punishments for existing crimes and escalated previous racist "tough-on-crime" laws. Doing so requires her to confront the error of her vote for it.

Democrats Neuter a Radical Movement

Unlike her democratic socialist predecessors like Julius Hobson and Hilda Mason in the D.C. Council — whose political home was the DC Statehood Greens — Lewis George carrying out her program within the confines of the Democratic Party will only impede her efforts. Declaring herself a "proud Democrat" leaves an agenda for the people of D.C. at risk of being another casualty of the Democratic Party, a graveyard of peoples’ movements.

Regardless of who is in the Wilson Building, District residents are well aware of the colonial bondage that limits the agenda of any mayor, congressional delegate, or councilmember. Channeling the fight for a free D.C. into an electoral campaign, as many liberal non-profits and organizations have done over the last year, neuters the fight for true expanded democratic rights in the District. No one mayoral candidate, regardless of how well-intentioned and popular their program is, can implement such an agenda within the Jim Crow-inspired confines of D.C. government institutions. Only a mass movement that directly demands D.C. Statehood can truly and earnestly achieve this.

Today, the Democratic Party has largely co-opted the fight for D.C. statehood from its radical, grassroots origins in the Black liberation movement that confronted and defeated Jim Crow apartheid. The D.C. Statehood Party, founded by civil rights movement veterans like Josephine Butler and Julius Hobson in 1971, emerged to confront the racist control Congress has exerted over the District for more than 150 years - control enforced and maintained by the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party.

In 1993, legislators introduced the first statehood bill in a Democrat-controlled House with a Democrat president. The House defeated it 277-153, with 105 Democrats voting against statehood. After this vote, Congress did not discuss D.C. Statehood for nearly three decades. During the Obama Administration, when Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress and the White House, they never even considered the statehood issue. In 2021, the House finally approved a bill for D.C. Statehood, but Democrats allowed their own Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to kill it. Three times now, the liberal wing of the capitalist class has either ignored the popular demand for statehood or killed it outright themselves.

There are some Democrats that still push simply for "full voting rights", or the allowance of one congressmember and two voting Senators to the District without full statehood. That would give D.C. three votes in any dispute over D.C. affairs, but statutorily, D.C. would still be under the colonial rule of Congress. It would not afford D.C. the ability to levy a commuter tax, have control over its court system, zoning, or as is most currently apparent – its ability to recall the National Guard in times where the federal government enacts martial law on D.C.

Statehood and Revolution

In all questions of democratic processes relating to and regarding Washington, D.C. the fight remains incomplete without D.C. Statehood. In questions of home rule, martial law, and budget autonomy, the fight for statehood is the only answer.

Yet, for socialists and progressives alike, statehood cannot be an “end goal” we settle for. Statehood must be at the forefront of our fight, because it exposes the most deeply anti-democratic nature of the U.S. capitalist system: D.C. residents are denied control over the forces that govern their lives, like so many under the thumb of the U.S. empire. We have the means to meet the needs of every single resident in Washington, D.C. in terms of resources and rights, but are denied the power to do so by a racist system that is wholly opposed to Black self-determination.

What we need is a fundamentally new system, one that puts the needs of the people first and isn’t built to defend the interests of a tiny minority of billionaires. That isn’t something we can win through a ballot box they built to contain and restrain our demands as working and oppressed people, however well-intentioned the people we elect may be. As Janeese Lewis George said in her victory speech on Tuesday: “The history tonight is not being made by me.” Only the people free themselves, and we can only take what we are organized to defend. If we only organize to defend an office in a racist, oppressive system, that’s all we’ll ever get. But working people make this whole world run - there’s no reason we can’t run the world.