One way or the other, the winner of today’s D.C. mayoral election will break precedent.
Janeese Lewis George and Kenyan McDuffie, the two leading candidates, both embody familiar mayoral-wannabe archetypes. McDuffie is Mr. Next-in-Line, the candidate with the long record of service who seems due for a promotion. And Lewis George is Ms. True Believer, the candidate who vows to yank D.C.’s government back to the side of justice.
Over the city’s half-century of mayoral elections, we’ve seen examples of each — and neither one tends to win.
McDuffie follows in the footsteps of former Councilmembers Linda Cropp, John Ray, and Sterling Tucker, all of whom seemed to deserve the job. Lewis George’s campaign channels some of the spirit that animated candidates like her D.C. Council colleague Robert White and the Rev. Willie Wilson, both sharply critical of Washington’s unequal status quo.
Instead of picking these folks, D.C. voters at moments of transition have a habit of turning to candidates of fuzzy ideological definition — but a sense of newness and personal energy to get the city moving again: Adrian Fenty, Anthony Williams, Sharon Pratt, and the late Marion Barry.
None of them was the best-known in their race, nor the most ideological. But, as different as they were, and as different as their mayoral fortunes turned out to be, each managed to sell themself as the person of the moment.
As the underwhelming 2026 campaign reaches its end, it’s pretty clear that neither of the leading candidates has done that. And yet, unless the polls are wildly wrong, one of them will win.
McDuffie’s low-energy campaign has struggled to look like anything other than a fourth term for Mayor Muriel Bowser — or a ninth term of the centrism that has held sway since D.C.’s Barry-era insolvency. In the last weeks, McDuffie also resorted to red-baiting his democratic socialist rival and monomaniacally focusing on teen curfews, something that was never a big part of his political identity before now.
Lewis George’s campaign, meanwhile, has reflected the strident style of the college-educated, new-to-D.C. progressives who are her most ardent supporters. The campaign casts McDuffie as a corporate stooge whose 1990s priorities are useless in today’s overpriced Washington. But Lewis George often talks as if the city’s main industry weren’t contracting and its builders weren’t fleeing — which also seems pretty detached from the District of 2026.
The drag of it is that there’s actually a number of huge issues that await the next mayor — and explain why other District political heavyweights opted against running.
For one, there’s the regional economy, which has been sent into a tailspin by drastic cuts to the federal workforce. The DMV lost 103,900 jobs in the first year of the Trump administration, 43 percent of them in D.C. A City Cast poll found that eleven percent of Washingtonians, and 15 percent of Black Washingtonians, had someone in their household who lost a job as a result of Trump’s cuts. It’s a moment that invites a conversation about what new industries the city might lure in order to create some new jobs for. But we didn’t hear much of that during the campaign.
Another set of recent headlines has focused on something the candidates have spent a lot of time talking about: housing. Construction in D.C. is in a deep freeze. Operators of subsidized housing are fleeing because, they say, residents’ chronic non-payment of rent means there’s no way to stay in business. And builders of regular condos are staying away because the lousy regional economy has put a damper on would-be buyers. Yet the candidates kept on talking about whose target number of new housing units — 12,000 for McDuffie, 72,000 for Lewis George — was better.
One of them is going to have to face down these problems, and others, soon enough. And when they do, they will likely need to look beyond their basic political bases for answers.
McDuffie, who is largely supported by corporate interests and political veterans, will be reckoning with the fact that the pro-business politics of the past generation really do seem played out to a lot of Washingtonians. They brought the city back from the brink, spurred amazing population growth, and made the District more dynamic — but also turned it into a much more unequal, unaffordable place.
Lewis George, riding a wave of support from people who weren’t here for the bad old days, wants to address the affordability problems by marshaling government to do things like underwrite daycare and build housing. But the fact that the government even has the resources to do that is a function of the fiscal prudence of Muriel Bowser and the other old-line pols they disdain. There’s also no guarantee that the city’s population boom won’t go into reverse, something worth remembering as allies push for tax hikes.
Finally, there’s the Trump of it all. The president’s 11th-hour decision to inject himself into the campaign, threatening to take over D.C. if the socialist wins, seemed like a big favor for Lewis George, who within hours had produced a digital ad vowing to fight back. But the reality is that both are going to have to deal with the president and his administration. And the dealing is going to involve some stuff other than just resistance. In a city that doesn’t hold many cards, it’s going to also involve charming or cajoling or manipulating the president — and messaging the broader American public in ways that help the cause.
In other words, they’ll need to do some of the things they’ve been doing on the campaign trail, too. Sometime soon, when the ranked-choice votes are finally counted, we’ll find out who did it better.
