Tuesday’s elections extended the Democratic Socialists of America from protest politics into city government at scale. In Washington, D.C., council member Janeese Lewis George, a DSA member, won the race to succeed retiring three term Mayor Muriel Bowser and will become the city’s first new mayor in more than a decade. In Los Angeles, council member Nithya Raman, also a DSA member, is projected to have defeated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. Decision Desk HQ called that race for Raman on Wednesday; the Associated Press had not called it in the reporting read for this story, and the full Los Angeles count could take another week. Raman led 51.7 percent to 48.3 percent with 72 percent of the vote counted on Wednesday morning.
Counted with the two DSA aligned mayors already in office, New York’s Zohran Mamdani and Seattle’s Katie Wilson, the result is four of the twenty most populous US cities under socialist mayors, home to roughly 14 million people in total, about 3.87 million of them in Los Angeles and about 694,000 in Washington on Census Bureau estimates. Los Angeles and New York are the country’s two largest cities. Raman takes office in December in Los Angeles, and the new mayors generally take office around the turn of the year.
The wins were not isolated. Tuesday also elected DSA members and self described democratic socialists as mayors of Providence, where David Morales took 80.6 percent after beating the incumbent in a September primary, and Ann Arbor, and sent eight DSA members to the House, six of them newcomers alongside the re elected Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. The common policy ground in the city races was housing: tenant protection, rent and homelessness programmes ran through the Washington and Los Angeles campaigns, and Lewis George closed her campaign with a tenant town hall in a northwest Washington church.
The discipline point is the Los Angeles status. Washington is decided, Providence and Ann Arbor are decided, and Los Angeles is a projection with a two point margin and a slow count still running. If the projection holds, the four city claim stands as Fox News framed it on Saturday. If it reverses, the story is three cities and a near miss in the second largest. Either way, the governing test starts in December and January, when these administrations publish budgets rather than platforms.