Welcome to the dawn of a new D.C., Washingtonians, and a country swimming in the midterm’s blue wave.
Last night around 10 p.m., Janeese Lewis George stepped up to the mic at her election party to give her acceptance speech at Sycamore & Oak. (Just a short time later in downtown Baltimore, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore did the same.) Though her win was all but official after June’s primaries, she called her victory a new day in D.C., “one where we don’t make excuses and we don’t retreat.”
“I’m not the only one making history—we are,” she told a cheering crowd that broke into chants of “Si se puede.” With last night’s landslide win, Lewis George becomes the first democratic socialist to lead D.C. and the city’s third woman mayor. She graciously named the mayors on whose shoulders she now stands—Walter Washington, Marion Barry, Anthony Williams, Vincent Gray, and Muriel Bowser (“who led us through a global pandemic”). But she made it quite clear: The work begins today. “We don’t wait till January, we keep doing exactly what got us here: Listening in every ward the way we did all fall.”
“I’m not naive, none of us are naive,” she said. “Anyone who has ever organized a workplace … or a neighborhood knows that no victory is ever final. Our vision will face doubts, our legislation will face roadblocks, our city will face threats to our autonomy. There will always be another fight, y’all, and another campaign. And just like I didn’t win this fight alone I’m going to need you rested and ready for the next one. It’s what our ancestors call ready to do the unfinished work. But together, no one can bully us.”
Among her long list of promises, the mayor-elect declared “we will win D.C. Statehood.” Luckily for her, yesterday’s blue crush at the polls across the U.S. could make that promise more likely to come true. Before midnight on Nov. 3, analysts projected that not only did the Democrats take back the House, they also managed to flip the Senate—marking the first time since 2023 that the Dems took control of both chambers of Congress. (They also managed to turn Texas a beautiful shade of blue.)
Closer to home, wins range out across the DMV. In D.C., where the June primaries wereare the nail-biter election, there were no big surprises in races for D.C. Council seats: Aparna Raj, another democratic socialist, will replace Brianne Nadeau (who’s vacating the seat at the end of this year) as the Ward 1 Councilmember; meanwhile Democrat Oye Owolewa and former CM Elissa Silverman are the projected winners for Council’s two At-Large seats. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, very unsurprisingly, has more than 92 percent of the vote as of this morning, and now-former Councilmember Robert White has been elected to replace Eleanor Holmes Norton as the D.C. delegate to Congress with more than 87 percent of the vote.
In Virginia, voters went hard for equal rights: 62.4 percent voted to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution and 57.4 percent voted to repeal a state constitutional provision declaring marriage could only be between a man and a woman. The change will prohibit Virginia from denying marriage licenses to adults due to sex, gender, or race.
In Maryland, Moore was reelected, and voters agreed to fight fire with fire—a ballot measure was passed that will make it easier for Democrats to redraw congressional districts. Though it might be worth noting that the Trump administration’s efforts to gerrymander eight states backfired last night: “Republicans lost most of the Democratic-held seats they had targeted to flip, lost others they had banked on retaining and got swept out of power by a Democratic surge fueled by voter dissatisfaction with Trump, the economy and the war with Iran,” reports AP this morning.
As Lewis George said last night, this was “never about just an election—it was a declaration. A declaration that working people deserve a government that works as hard as they do. A declaration that this government belongs to the people. A declaration that nobody in this city should ever have to fight alone.”
