Since D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced she wouldn’t seek reelection, congratulatory notes have poured in from numerous elected officials — including D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), one of the Bowser administration’s most ardent critics as of late.
Lewis George, a Democratic socialist and third-generation Washingtonian, has since launched her bid for the top spot in D.C. government. While she didn’t mention Bowser by name, Lewis George said she would take the District along an entirely different course if elected.
“You’ve got to be focused on being on the ground, talking to residents and then be focused on actually trying to solve problems,” Lewis George told The Informer. “It’s not the ribbon cuttings and the big major deals with billionaires. That’s what people are tired of. People want leadership that actually is going to be on the ground, who is going to listen and who wants to solve problems.”
In a campaign video that circulated on social media on Monday, Lewis George is seen walking along her stomping grounds of Kennedy Street in Northwest as she cites housing insecurity, income inequity, and federal attacks on District Home Rule as issues of concern.
Within hours of her announcement, Lewis George qualified for public financing, with her 5-to-1 match anticipated to reach $750,000.
For Lewis George, the decision to run was more than a year in the making— in advance of her vote in opposition to the Fiscal Year 2026 budget that didn’t fully restore Medicaid and rental assistance, and well before her name, and that of D.C. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (I-At large) popped up as possible contenders for the mayor’s office.
“We’ve got to have a government that works for all of us so that 250+ people aren’t standing in the freezing cold for rental assistance,” Lewis George explained. “A 911 call center [where] people’s call gets answered. The basic things, when our seniors say they need support in our services and they get it. It’s really about me seeing that this government, on a basic level, isn’t working for everyone, but also we’re leaving so many people behind.”
Lewis George said the same observation applies when it comes to District leaders’ relationship with the White House.
As the Bowser administration continues its post-surge relationship with ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies, Lewis George said that the D.C. mayor, despite having limited home rule, has tools and resources that should be used to protect D.C. residents.
“We have a good attorney general,” said Lewis George, a former assistant attorney general under Karl Racine. “We have some of the best lawyers in this country in our attorney general’s office, and we have legal levers that we utilize and should be utilizing…to fight against overreach, protect our residents and ensure that we are not exhausting our resources… and making our city a political tool and creating political theater.”
Lewis George also spoke about leveraging relationships with national partners.
“That’s not being done, so I’m going to work hand in hand with our partners, governors and mayors across the city,” Lewis George said. “I’m going to work and build relationship[s] in the halls of Congress, and I’m going to make sure I stand up and use the attorney general and every lever we have legally and process-wise to defend D.C. and make sure we stand in this moment.”
Mayor Bowser — and Some Community Members — Look Back on the Last Decade
By the time that Bowser revealed that she wouldn’t run for re-election, she had the vocal support of the local business community— as seen in a campaign launched by Opportunity DC.
Other than that, opinions about the mayor and how she’s engaged the Trump administration have run the gamut, with a considerable number of D.C. residents and elected officials critical of the mayor’s acquiescence to the president’s policies.
Last week, shortly after speaking to residents at Safeway’s 26th annual Feast of Sharing holiday celebration, Bowser told reporters that she would soon reveal details about how she plans to get the District to “ the finish line” during her last year in public office.
She went on to tell reporters that D.C. statehood is within the District’s reach, now more than ever, especially if Democrats take over both chambers of Congress.
“To get over 60 votes in the Senate is uphill, but… there could be a wave,” Bowser said.
In her third term, Bowser pointed out that, since Trump has reentered the Oval Office, people across the U.S. have gotten more of an intimate understanding of the District’s unique political position that primes it for attacks on the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973.
“The nation now sees the problem,” Bowser said. “I think the nuanced difference that I have witnessed in my tenure is that we’ve always talked about statehood, about how it hurts us in D.C. We don’t have representation. We don’t have autonomy. What the nation sees is we don’t have the two senators that would make our policy objectives nationally more palatable.”
In 2015, Bowser entered mayoral office after defeating a then-scandal-ridden D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray in the 2014 D.C. Mayoral Democratic primary, and later David Catania and Carol Schwartz during the general election.
Under her leadership, the District’s public and public charter schools experienced enrollment and graduation gains. Other feats include increased spending on certified business enterprises, the construction of the Frederick Douglass Bridge, the launch of a new hospital in Ward 8, and most recently, the Washington Commanders’ return to a newly constructed RFK Stadium.
A mother to 7-year-old daughter Miranda, Bowser also touts the infusion of food access grants in communities east of the Anacostia River, the launch of new libraries, recreation centers, and an infrastructure academy, and what she called a steady decline in unemployment in Wards 7 and 8.
“I think we’re still below 10% in Wards 7 and 8,” Bowser said. “We have more to do in this nation to close gaps between the haves and the have-nots, but I think we moved the dial where we make sure our systems are set up to help people get a good job, a life-sustaining job, and take care of themselves and their families in the District.”
While lifelong Ward 8 resident the Rev. Anthony Motley said that there’s more to be done for his community, he told The Informer that Bowser took to the next level what her predecessors prepared. He noted what he called the mayor’s commitment to improving the quality of education.
“There was a time [when] there was no after school programs in Ward 8… no summer enrichment programs, but we got all of that now,” Motley told The Informer. “The thing I appreciated about [Mayor Bowser] was that she let her people do their thing. She wasn’t hands-on, but she let her people do what they were supposed to do.”
For Motley, however, a blind spot in the Bowser administration centers on what he called its penchant for marginalizing divergent voices. He said that strategy didn’t bode well with a population seeking significant changes after decades of community underinvestment.
“They weren’t willing to bring everybody to the table,” Motley, a longtime civic leader, said about the Bowser administration. “Because some of the people in her administration didn’t like certain people, then they blocked certain people from participating in what I would call constructive dialogue.”
West of the Anacostia River, in Ward 1, policy analyst Ed Lazere extolled Bowser for what he described as her commitment early on in her mayoralty to investing in housing production, replacing D.C. General shelter with smaller, more humane shelters across the District, and revamping the local human services infrastructure.
Beyond that, Lazere said that Bowser hasn’t focused entirely on the needs of everyday D.C. residents as much as he would’ve liked— especially in recent years.
“To see Mayor Bowser go after tenant rights through TOPA, to work to reduce wages for tipped workers, after…the voters passed [the] initiative that just started to bump them up to something decent,” Lazere told The Informer. “To see the mayor try to bring back corporate tax incentives that had proven ineffective. The topper of it all is offering the largest professional football stadium subsidy in U.S. history. Those are the top-down approaches to making our economy succeed, but only at the price of sacrificing services and wages for average residents.”
In recent years, Lazere has counted among those who, in light of the District’s tenuous fiscal situation, demand that District leaders explore revenue generation via increased taxes on the wealthy. With the mayor’s seat now up for grabs, Lazere said he wants to see the next city executive tackle the education issues exacerbated by the pandemic.
“I think there’s so much opportunity to improve the well-being of kids in school,” Lazere told The Informer. “We need a vision for how to help youth cope. Five years after the pandemic, we clearly aren’t doing enough to really address the social, mental, educational needs of our youngest people.”
Lazere said the same stands for housing.
“I’m looking for a mayor who is really ready to tackle our affordable housing problems,” Lazere said. “not nibble at the edge, and not by creating ‘affordable housing’ for people who make more than $100,000, which is more than the median income. There has to be real affordable housing for the people who are really struggling.”
D.C. Council Chair Mendelson Weighs In on What the Future Holds
In the 2026 election cycle, voters will decide not only on the mayoral seat, but a bevy of positions on the D.C. Council.
Seats up for grabs are that of D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson (D), as well as the Democratic at-large seat, held by Anita Bonds, and the Ward 5 and and Ward 6 seats, held by D.C. Councilmembers Zachary Parker (D) and Charles Allen (D) respectively.
The Ward 1 D.C. Council race will also be one to watch, especially since D.C. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau (D) announced she’s not running for re-election. Meanwhile, D.C. Councilmembers Robert White (At-large) and Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) are immersed in their battle for the congressional seat currently held by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D).
With McDuffie yet to officially announce his candidacy for D.C. mayor, there remains the question of what will happen to his seat, and the Ward 4 D.C. Council seat once the smoke clears. For Mendelson, such conditions are the makings of what the late John A. Wilson often called the “silly season.”
“We’ll see how that plays out over the next few months with our legislative process,” Mendelson told reporters on Monday. “I’m hopeful that all the members will continue to approach council work focused on the best policy choices that are before us.”
While Mendelson declined to weigh in on his choice for D.C.’s next mayor, he outlined qualities he said that the next local executive needs to possess in order to run the D.C. government— an entity he likened to a $20 billion-a-year corporation.
“How good a manager is that person?,” Mendelson told reporters during a press briefing on Monday. “There’s a lot of public policymaking on a broad range of issues, from health to transportation to environment, just to fiscal stability, and how good is the candidate and aspect, that complexity, as well as being interested and open to… looking at alternative ways, and the best ways to affect policy and better government.”
The next mayor, Mendelson said, also can’t be a zealot for certain causes.
“Being ideologically stuck would be a problem,” Mendelson said. “There needs to be flexibility, openness to best approaches. There were some issues that Congress was trying to beat us up on, and the literature referred to the research and whether having cashless bail has actually decreased crime. That there are other ways to deal with crime, and it just speaks to the point that I’m making: being open to looking at research alternatives and better approaches at effecting better goals.”