The Socialist Mayors: Janeese Lewis George, Nithya Raman and Why Bowser and Bass Leave Differently

Two of the country's most watched cities chose democratic socialists for mayor this week. In Washington, Janeese Lewis George won the race to succeed Muriel Bowser. In Los Angeles, City Council member Nithya Raman unseated Mayor Karen Bass. NBC News notes that the results mean three major American cities will be led by democratic socialists, with Lewis George and Raman joining New York's Zohran Mamdani.

The two races ran on different roads. Lewis George won an open seat after Bowser's three terms. Raman beat a sitting mayor, the first challenger to defeat an incumbent Los Angeles mayor in more than two decades, according to the Los Angeles Times. Together they show voters in two very different cities asking the same question: can city government make housing, work and daily life affordable again?

In Washington, Lewis George has won the mayoral election, succeeding Muriel Bowser after three terms. NBC projects her victory; its November 4 count puts her at 84.3% with 81.6% of expected votes counted. That is a decisive result, not a certified final percentage.

The transition is more than one Black woman succeeding another. Lewis George's democratic socialism asks whether city government should do more to make housing, work and family life affordable. Bowser's public economic argument emphasizes growth, investment and rebuilding a downtown weakened by a changing federal footprint. Their disagreement is about how prosperity reaches residents—and who bears the risks while it arrives.

A Washingtonian's Different Starting Point

A third-generation Washingtonian and Ward 4 native, Lewis George attended D.C. public schools and Howard University School of Law and worked in the District attorney general's Juvenile Section. Her Council biography places her political roots in the neighborhoods she now promises to serve citywide.

That background matters without becoming proof of future success. A mayor must turn familiarity with residents' struggles into budgets, reliable services and an administration capable of delivering them.

Bowser Built; Lewis George Wants to Change the Terms

Bowser's housing record should not disappear in a generational-change narrative. Her administration set a goal of 36,000 new homes by 2025, including 12,000 affordable homes. In July 2024 the city announced 36,216 new housing units. Reaching the overall production target did not establish that the affordable-housing goal had also been met, or that every neighborhood benefited equally.

Lewis George told NOTUS she wants 72,000 housing units in five years, alongside lower child-care and utility costs. Her campaign proposes a stronger public role in housing and development. The difference is not “building versus refusing to build.” Both favor more homes. It is the scale, ownership, affordability and distribution of the benefits—and whether tenants can stay while neighborhoods change.

Her economic-development platform proposes a Downtown Development Corporation with bonding authority, more mixed-use development and activation of vacant city-owned spaces for small businesses. She is not categorically anti-development. She wants government to shape development more directly.

Two Economic Arguments, One Strained City

Bowser's September revenue statement argues that Washington cannot “tax and spend” its way back to prosperity and must prioritize job creation, diversification, tourism, hospitality, sports and entertainment. Lewis George emphasizes stronger public action, agency efficiencies and investment in working people.

These are not mutually exclusive objectives. The test is which investments are funded first, who gets the jobs and whether households experience lower costs rather than only improved development statistics.

The Network Behind the Ward 4 Campaign

Lewis George's mayoral run did not start from scratch. In 2020 she unseated a sitting Ward 4 Council member with an army of volunteers from Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America and the D.C. Working Families Party, alongside tenant, labor and faith groups. That same canvass carried her citywide in 2026. East of the Anacostia River, in majority-Black Wards 7 and 8, housing groups such as Empower DC have organized against displacement for years; those are the neighborhoods where her housing promises will be judged.

Public Safety Cannot Be Reduced to a Label

Lewis George's published safety platform combines prevention, intervention and enforcement. It proposes Community Hubs in all eight wards connecting residents with employment, mental-health support and other services, and cross-agency responsibility for reducing harm.

Calling that platform simply “defund the police” would substitute a slogan for the proposals. Equally, social investment must produce a credible response to immediate threats. Residents experiencing violence deserve protection now; young people need opportunities that reduce the conditions feeding it. She must demonstrate both, with clear responsibilities and measurable outcomes.

The difference examined here is her explicit organizing framework, not an unsupported claim that Bowser opposed all prevention or that either administration's full policing record fits one sentence.

A Mayor Under Federal Pressure

Washington's mayor is not a governor with the powers of a state. Congress retains authority over the District. The president's hostility therefore carries consequences beyond an ordinary partisan dispute.

NBC reports Trump attacked Lewis George after her primary win. Her response joined practical cooperation to a boundary: she would work with the administration to improve residents' lives, and stand up to anyone putting the city or its residents in harm's way.

That is a harder assignment than either unconditional accommodation or permanent rhetorical confrontation. She will need allies in Congress, legal strategy and relationships capable of protecting home rule and services. An electoral mandate cannot by itself remove federal authority. Cooperation should be judged by what residents gain; resistance by what rights and institutions it protects.

The Budget Will Test Every Promise

The mayor's September statement reports projected revenue down $155 million in fiscal 2027 and $144 million in fiscal 2028 compared with February estimates, linking the weakness to federal job losses. Those are forecast revisions—not interchangeable with an estimate of the full structural budget gap.

Lewis George told NOTUS she sees savings in wasteful spending, better agency management and more effective use of federal funds. Those possibilities require audits and documented savings. They are not already available money for 72,000 homes or lower child-care bills.

She also needs Council approval for major legislative and budget choices. A landslide for mayor does not automatically create a majority for every tax, appropriation or development proposal. Building that coalition, appointing competent leaders and keeping ordinary city services dependable will be as important as the campaign's ambition.

Los Angeles: Why Karen Bass Lost

The count Thursday showed Raman with about 52% of the vote to 48% for Bass, with roughly three-quarters of expected ballots counted, and Bass called Raman to concede. Los Angeles County's November 5 evening update listed Raman at 429,450 votes and Bass at 394,796. These are still unofficial counts.

Bass's defeat should be read with care. She came out of community organizing in South Los Angeles, founded the Community Coalition, served as the first Black woman to lead the California Assembly and spent six terms in Congress. Her record of service is long and real. But voters judged her on one term as mayor.

Reporting points to three pressures:

• The Palisades fire. NBC News reports that Bass faced intense criticism over her response to the January 2025 Pacific Palisades fire, the most destructive in city history, which broke out while she was in Ghana for a presidential inauguration.
• Homelessness and housing costs. Raman, a former urban planner, attacked Bass's signature homelessness program, Inside Safe. The 19th reports the program cost more than $300 million to house about 6,000 people, and that about 40% of them returned to the streets.
• A new coalition. Raman drew young voters with proposals on affordability and city utilities, and campaigned alongside City Controller Kenneth Mejia. Bass had the police union behind her; The 19th reports it spent more than $5 million against Raman.

Raman becomes the city's first Asian American mayor. Her win, like Lewis George's, was built by volunteers. "Thank you to the thousands of people who knocked on doors, sent texts, made phone calls," she said after Bass conceded.

Two Black Women Mayors, Two Different Exits

Bowser and Bass leave office in very different ways. Bowser stepped aside after three terms, with a housing production record her successor must build on. Bass was voted out after a single term, the first such defeat in Los Angeles in more than twenty years.

Both outcomes carry a hard lesson for Black political leadership in big cities. Historic firsts and long résumés open the door; they do not keep it open. Residents measure mayors by rent, response times and whether the city works when disaster strikes. That is the same test Lewis George and Raman now face.

Older Than the Label

"Democratic socialist" reads as new branding on cable news. In Black and Asian American communities it is an old conversation about who owns the economy, carried in churches, unions and mutual-aid societies long before the Democratic Socialists of America existed.

In Black America the line runs from Hubert Harrison, the Harlem soapbox orator who joined the Socialist Party in the 1910s, through W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones. A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, both democratic socialists, built the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; its demands included a federal jobs program and a higher minimum wage. By 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. was telling the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that the movement had to confront "the problem of the restructuring of the whole of American society." The Poor People's Campaign followed.

Washington holds that memory in its own way. The first majority-Black major city built mutual-benefit societies, tenant associations and cooperative housing as survival institutions, and home-rule activists fought for local power over housing and land. Lewis George's 72,000-home goal and Community Hubs speak to that tradition more than to any national brand.

Los Angeles has a parallel story. Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Korean workers organized farm, cannery and mutual-aid associations under exclusion laws. In the Black Power era, Asian American activists in Crenshaw and Little Tokyo built groups such as the Yellow Brotherhood and Asian American Hardcore, drawing openly on the Black freedom movement. Black Los Angeles carried its own line, from Biddy Mason, a formerly enslaved woman who helped found First AME Church in 1872 and gave to the poor, to the CIO coalitions of Central Avenue and today's community land trusts.

Raman's renter-and-worker coalition draws on that cross-racial history. Bass's career came out of it too: the Community Coalition she founded in South Los Angeles grew from the same organizing soil. Their race was a contest inside one progressive lineage, not between socialism and its absence.

Two Cities, Two Socialist Networks

The national label hides two different local machines. In Washington, the socialist network is small, tied to one ward and braided into the city's Black civic life: Ward 4 churches, tenant associations and unions. In Los Angeles, DSA-LA built a council bloc before it built a mayor. Eunisses Hernandez (District 1, 2022), Hugo Soto-Martinez (District 13, 2022) and Ysabel Jurado (District 14, 2024) joined Raman (District 4, 2020) with DSA-LA backing, alongside renter groups and UNITE HERE Local 11, the hotel workers' union where Soto-Martinez organized. Their seats run from the Eastside to Hollywood; South Los Angeles, the center of Black Los Angeles and of Bass's Community Coalition, sits outside that band. Whether the new mayor can carry South L.A. as well as the renter districts is one of the first tests of her coalition.

Raman won without the party's top names. Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi all endorsed Bass, as Al Jazeera reported. An Indian-born council member backed by DSA, Raman beat them with the renter-and-worker network her council allies had built. She inherits a city where about 44,000 people are homeless, by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority's 2025 count, and where ICE raids have shaken immigrant neighborhoods. DSA says 105 of its endorsed candidates were on track to win office nationwide this cycle.

What the Democratic Socialist Wave Means

The new mayors share a platform of affordability, a stronger public role in housing and skepticism of police-first public safety. They also share the limits of the office. Lewis George must work with a Congress that holds authority over the District. Raman inherits wildfire rebuilding, a homelessness crisis and a City Council that must approve her budget.

Neither win erases the Black political tradition that came before it. Lewis George is a Black Washingtonian rooted in Ward 4. Bass's career began in grassroots organizing much like the work this series has followed across the South. The question for both cities is whether a new generation of organizers can turn a campaign coalition into a government that delivers.

Whose Washington Will Come Next?

Lewis George inherits Bowser's production gains alongside affordability pressures and an economy exposed to federal decisions. Her promise is a city where development serves residents who might otherwise be displaced from its prosperity.

The historic succession deserves recognition. The substantive question is whether a Black progressive mayor can convert a broad vote into durable security: a home people can afford, work that pays, safe neighborhoods and a local government able to defend them. Washington will judge the difference in daily life.

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Further Reading from HistorianSpeaks

• Walter Washington, First Mayor-Commissioner of Washington, D.C.
• The Chicago Blueprint: Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun
• From Shirley Chisholm to City Hall: Barbara Lee and the Power of Mayors
• From Moncrief to the Senate Race: Angie Nixon and the Black Socialist Tradition