How Janeese Lewis George Won D.C.'s Mayoral Primary

Weeks before either candidate entered D.C.’s mayoral sweepstakes, Kenyan McDuffie and Janeese Lewis George sat down together over coffee at Lost Sock Roasters in Takoma. The private meeting, Lewis George later recounted, was intended to set a civil tone for a high-stakes race.

“It was important for us to both make our case to the District of Columbia,” Lewis George recalled in a December radio interview. “But also not make it about attacking one another.”

Their coffee shop pact didn’t survive the spring.

What followed was one of the most hostile and expensive political slugfests in modern D.C. history. And while both candidates eventually threw heavy punches, it was Lewis George’s boisterous campaign that seemed better suited from the onset to handle a contentious race. That left McDuffie — a more measured candidate who relied on traditional politicking, and whose instinct to exercise restraint wound up working against him — playing perpetual catch-up against a political machine.

Lewis George had two additional factors working in her favor as she clinched the Democratic nomination, putting her in line to be the city’s next mayor: a much stronger volunteer operation, and a message that fit seamlessly with the change voters were looking for.

“Four years ago, people were afraid of something different,” said D.C. Council member Robert White (D-At Large), who unsuccessfully challenged Mayor Muriel Bowser in 2022 and won the primary for D.C. delegate to Congress last week. “Right now people realize that the same thing is failing us. That’s why Trump was elected, that’s why [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani was elected, that’s why Janeese Lewis George was elected. People are so tired of the status quo, tired of falling behind, tired of doing the right things and still failing, and they want somebody who’s going to shake things up.”

‘Stand Up and Fight Back’

When Bowser announced in late November that she wouldn’t run for a historic fourth term in office, she seemed to understand what voters eventually decided on June 16: D.C. residents wanted something different.

“It was obvious that change was the order of the day,” said Tom Lindenfeld, a longtime campaign operative who for years worked with Bowser and worked on successful mayoral campaigns for two of her predecessors, Anthony Williams and Adrian Fenty.

Lewis George had always been something of an iconoclast; she was a self-identified democratic socialist, and often stood alone on controversial votes in the D.C. Council. She was also more passionately critical of Bowser, especially over her management of the city’s complicated relationship with President Donald Trump.

Then-D.C. Council members Janeese Lewis George, from left, Brooke Pinto and Robert White Jr., in 2026. Jose Luis Magana/AP

McDuffie, on the other hand, was a studious and mild-mannered longtime member of the council. While he had pushed forward progressive policies earlier in his career, in recent years he had chaired the council’s economic development committee, which often coincided with Bowser’s broader agenda for growing the city and its economy. While that endeared him to business and real estate interests, which overwhelmingly supported his mayoral campaign, Lindenfeld said it limited McDuffie’s ability to be the change that many residents seemed to want.

“We’re living in a change time, nationally and in D.C., and after three terms to say, ‘I’m going to be like the incumbent but better,’ wasn’t a good message,” Lindenfeld said.

A Washington Post poll conducted just weeks before the election showed how much residents were pushing for something different: 55 percent of respondents said the city was on the wrong track. The last time public opinion was that bad was in the late 1990s.

Those numbers revealed a disconnect between the electorate’s shifting mood and the traditional indicators the McDuffie campaign had relied on.

“Up until that Washington Post poll, people didn’t see any data to suggest people thought D.C. was really heading in the wrong direction,” said a source close to McDuffie, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “If anything, voters were saying they were looking for experienced leadership, to keep costs low and so forth. But I think that that was wrong.”

Both Lewis George and McDuffie initially read the electorate’s mood the same way when they launched their campaigns, putting a heavy emphasis on addressing what many called an affordability crisis in D.C. But Lewis George was also quick to turn the issue on McDuffie, accusing him of being too close to Pepco and not doing enough to rein in the Public Service Commission, which approves rate increases requested by the utilities.

McDuffie’s mayoral platform pitched him as the experienced choice, offering steady economic stewardship without the disruption promised by his democratic socialist rival. Kainaz Amaria/NOTUS

She did the same on the issue of how the new mayor would stand up to Trump, accusing McDuffie of accepting campaign contributions from “Trump donors.” Only about two dozen contributions, out of thousands to his campaign, came from people who also donated to the president, but it became a regular attack line at debates.

Even in the latter weeks of the campaign, when McDuffie pivoted toward public safety and attacked Lewis George for opposing a bill that would allow the city to use expanded teen curfew zones over the summer months, Lewis George managed to position herself as the candidate more likely to stand up to the federal government – citing Trump appointee U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s desire to implement the curfew zones.

“People wanted to take a real stance against where we are in our city,” Lewis George said at a press conference two days after she emerged ahead in the mayoral race. “What you saw is a community stand up and say, ‘We want a leader who has moral clarity and the courage to stand up and fight back.’”

‘People, People, People’

On paper, Lewis George and McDuffie seemed evenly matched: Her campaign had raised some $3.3 million, his just over $3.1 million. But even more important than money was manpower, something Lewis George’s campaign seemed to have no shortage of.

“People, people, people. That’s the clue,” said Shannon Talbert, a senior advisor to Lewis George, when a NOTUS reporter asked the day before the June 16 primary what one of the deciding factors in the race might be.

By Election Day, Lewis George’s campaign said it had had at least 1,000 volunteers over the campaign, who helped knock on the doors of 200,000 D.C. voters. One of those volunteers was Yadiel Meléndez, a Ward 5 resident who’s lived in D.C. for a decade.

Lewis George speaks to reporters outside a polling station in southeast D.C. Kainaz Amaria/NOTUS

“This was the first campaign in a very long time, since maybe Obama’s presidential campaign, that I have been activated and this emotional and this excited about positive change to come,” they said during a brief rally with Lewis George outside the Benning Stoddert Rec Center polling place in Ward 7 on Election Day. “I appreciate so much how this campaign has been very accessible. There’s a million different ways to get involved. … They’re making it easy to show up and show out.”

On McDuffie’s side, the options seemed more limited. As a week-long period of early voting kicked off in early June, a Lewis George supporter circulated an image of his website showing no scheduled volunteer events. Lewis George, by comparison, had 48.

“What she was able to do was to demonstrate that there was true grassroots enthusiasm, something that seemed more manufactured by Kenyan’s campaign,” Lindenfeld said.

Lewis George’s advantages in drumming up excitement among voters also seemed evident in how many of them were giving her campaign money. A campaign finance report filed June 10 showed that 1,139 D.C. residents gave money to Lewis George’s campaign in the month prior; 555 gave to McDuffie’s. It was much the same in an April report: She got contributions from 1,290 residents, he got money from 587.

Lewis George also had another advantage: the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose volunteers knocked on the doors of 100,000 D.C. voters during the campaign. (They also worked on behalf of other candidates who ended up winning their races, including Aparna Raj in Ward 1 and Oye Owolewa for an at-large council seat.)

Missteps From McDuffie

Political insiders say one deliberate calculation imperiled McDuffie’s candidacy before his campaign could even get off the ground: his timing.

McDuffie delayed entering the race until mid-January so the special election to fill his council seat could run on the same track as the primary. (McDuffie, who was on the D.C. Council as an independent, had to resign so he could change his voter registration to Democratic for the mayoral primary, a challenge Lewis George didn’t share.) While the timing was designed to align the city’s voting calendar, it also effectively handed Lewis George a 45-day head start in the public square as the only significant candidate. She seized on the early momentum by securing endorsements from five unions.

“[Lewis George] had the unions and the progressive movement, they’re strong — they feel if they can just get out there and show strength, then it will pay off,” said outgoing Council member Anita Bonds (D-At-Large), a McDuffie supporter. “And I think that’s what we witnessed.”

The delayed start was at times compounded by the campaign’s internal culture. A source with direct knowledge of the campaign said there was a detrimental level of hubris among some of McDuffie’s closest aides, who also acted as gatekeepers — blocking him from receiving feedback from longtime supporters and constituents.

The result was a campaign that relied heavily on biographical talking points early, particularly the fact that McDuffie was a mail carrier 20 years ago. That, plus McDuffie’s choice to sit out several mayoral forums in the spring, paved the way for Lewis George to define him as a candidate.

“You can’t claim to run a campaign for the people if you refuse to meet them where they are,” the person said. “People are telling you, ‘People don’t see you, we don’t know where you are’ — and yet there’s no clear effort to build a level of support besides the people who have already supported you.”

McDuffie speaks to supporters at his election watch party. Torrie Herrington/NOTUS

McDuffie’s mayoral platform pitched him as the experienced choice, offering steady economic stewardship without the disruption promised by his democratic socialist rival — a strategy that assumed most voters wanted a realist to handle the city’s looming billion-dollar shortfall. But it later became clear that public sentiment had shifted toward a desire for robust change.

The campaign similarly struggled with how to respond to Lewis George and her progressive labor allies when they went on offense, including flooding residents with ads and mailers. In many cases, McDuffie, an introvert by nature, chose restraint — betting that his 14-year career on the council and composed demeanor would cancel out any noise.

“We wanted to show Kenyan as tempered and measured, that he would not agitate or trigger Donald Trump,” said a third person close to McDuffie’s campaign. “He demonstrated restraint, but in the campaign, it also hurt him.”

Their stylistic divide often played out publicly over the course of the campaign, including during a Free DC candidate forum in March, where McDuffie made headlines after walking off the stage during a back-and-forth with Lewis George.

While McDuffie’s team saw the walk-off as a calculated way to distance himself from an unstructured shouting match, some critics instead cast McDuffie as a candidate losing control of a room.

“As a Black man, in certain situations of chaos, you disengage,” the source close to the campaign said. “Kenyan is a strategic thinker. He’s a methodical person who doesn’t react. He processes things a little differently.”

The dynamic sharpened further when, days before the primary, Trump threatened to “take back Washington” if Lewis George won the election – with the campaigns’ clashing reactions capturing the fundamental mismatch of the primary.

Lewis George followed up with a video response in a matter of hours that sent a clear message and gave anxious voters an immediate, unambiguous target to rally against: “We’re not going to protect our rights, or home rule, by complying in advance,” she said. “The people of D.C. elect their mayor, and they want someone who will stand up to Donald Trump.”

“People wanted to take a real stance against where we are in our city,” Lewis George said. “What you saw is a community stand up and say, ‘We want a leader who has moral clarity and the courage to stand up and fight back.’” Kainaz Amaria/NOTUS

McDuffie similarly pledged to protect the city from federal overreach. But in his statement, he chose to ground his resistance in local economic anxiety, arguing that national politics had already decimated the District’s economy. In doing so, he missed out on a crucial opportunity to contrast his steady leadership style against his opponent’s.

“They got a jump on us. I think they hammered it home, I think they tackled and tapped into every public sentiment that people don’t like what’s going on nationally,” the third source close to McDuffie’s campaign said of the Lewis George campaign’s response. “They did a really good job with that.”