Why Cities Go Socialist: Here comes a generation of DSA big-city mayors.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/2026/06/19/why-cities-go-socialist-zohran-mamdani-janeese-lewis-george-nithya-raman/


D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George speaks to the crowd after winning the primary election for D.C. mayor, during an election night party at the Howard Theatre, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, in Washington. Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

In the course of my roughly three-quarters-of-a-century-long life, I’ve lived in just three cities: Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. By year’s end, there’s a decent chance that all three of those cities will have a socialist mayor. Just to be clear, despite the fact that I’ve been an avowed democratic socialist in all three cities—for all of my adult life, in fact—I’m claiming no credit for their new socialist proclivities. Yesterday, the candidate running second in Tuesday’s D.C. Democratic mayoral primary conceded the race to the front-runner, city council and DSA member Janeese Lewis George. With three-quarters of the ballots counted, Lewis George has a 53 percent to 37 percent lead over the second-place finisher. (If she falls beneath 50 percent, the tabulators have to tally the results of the ranked-choice voting, but so far, she’s held steady at 53 percent and is sure to win even if her first-choice votes drop below 50 percent.)

As at least 90 percent of D.C. voters invariably cast their ballots for Democrats in partisan November runoffs, Lewis George is assured of becoming D.C.’s next mayor. As such, she’ll join New York’s Zohran Mamdani as a socialist atop city government—and as a candidate whose victory was made possible, in significant part, by the precinct walking and phone-banking of DSA members. That said, Lewis George’s ability to govern effectively will lag Mamdani’s, as D.C. is still under the sway of federal control, which Donald Trump will only intensify once a socialist is nominally in power. (For that matter, New York City was compelled to cede the power to enact taxes to New York state during its near-bankruptcy in the 1970s, an impediment to local control that Mamdani has been forced to navigate.)

In Los Angeles, the results of this month’s mayoral jungle primary pit DSA and city council member Nithya Raman against incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the November runoff. It’s not actually clear that Raman, if elected, would govern in a way that’s any more socialistic than the way Bass has been governing. Bass has brought her left values and her long history as a progressive community organizer to her subsequent political career (Speaker of the State Assembly, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and four years as mayor), and Raman was one of her leading allies on the city council. Raman’s three council colleagues who are also DSA members have endorsed Bass for re-election—as did Raman until it became clear that Bass, though widely unpopular ever since she was out of the country when fires swept the Pacific Palisades, would run effectively unopposed for re-election unless Raman jumped in. Los Angeles DSA has yet to endorse Raman, as it’s dissatisfied with her decisions to keep funding the police and limiting the scope of the city’s tax on the sale of high-value properties.

But the only real reason why Raman is a DSA member and Bass is not is generational. Raman is 44; Bass is 72. When Bass was young, there was no viable socialist movement in the United States and most of the New Deal’s guardrails against capitalism running amok were still in place. Raman came of age when capitalism’s amok-ness was plain for all politically and economically sentient to see, and when Bernie Sanders had put democratic socialism on the American political map. When Bass was Raman’s current age, DSA had roughly 5,000 members and didn’t play in big-city elections. Today, it has about 100,000 members—enough to make it a player in any number of cities.

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