OPINION:
In the race for mayor of Washington, Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George emerged as the Democratic Party’s primary nominee, part of a growing trend of establishment Democrats losing ground to DSA-backed candidates with momentum and enthusiasm on their side.
Defeated candidate Gary Goodweather calls it a warning sign for cities everywhere, and joins Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to share his own policy solutions on crime, housing, and energy that he says got drowned out by ideology.
[SADLER] You ran on a very pragmatic platform, a very reasonable, pragmatic platform to improve the city, to improve the safety of the city and its residents, and yet you lost.
[GOODWEATHER] Yes. Actually, my platform, it’s really based upon my 30 years of experience as a former Army officer, as a small business owner, as being a parent and raising two kids here in the city. And because of all that work and just my life, I’ve had the I’ve been able to work with so many different people here in the city.
And something I really believe is that Washington, D.C. has the highest educated workforce in the country. And we have elected leaders that are intellectually curious, that are the best and the brightest, that really look at and use all of that talent to be able to develop solutions. And that’s what I did. Everything that I proposed was based upon a lot of hard work and research and executable, because of what my life’s work and what I know that we could accomplish for D.C. I think I lost to an ideology more than just losing to ideas and solutions.
What I fundamentally believe in is that we need a net positive system. I believe that is how everybody succeeds. Individuals succeed, society succeeds, and D.C. government and the DSA, they believe in a zero-sum game, that other people, other organizations need to lose for others to win. And I just don’t believe that. I believe that everybody can succeed.
[SADLER] The DSA unveiled its platform earlier this week, which includes radical ideas like abolishing the Senate, abolishing the presidency, abolishing the Supreme Court, only having the House of Representatives and the House then would elect a president and a court. You know, it’s abolish the police. It’s abolish cash bail. It’s abolish prisons.
[GOODWEATHER] It’s abolish everything.
[SADLER] And it’s amnesty for all illegals, abolishing ICE. You know, a lot of it is untenable to the majority of Americans. And yet they’re still scoring victories within the Democratic Party using the Democratic Party’s apparatus to achieve their power. I mean, how do you feel about that? And do you feel like they are pariahs on the Democratic Party establishment?
[GOODWEATHER] Let’s be clear. They’re not Democrats. They use the Democratic system, the Democratic Party system, to put up candidates. But they’re not a party. They are, I guess the best way to say it would be an ideological organization, right, with litmus tests and that’s very exclusionary, that they decide who can participate and who can’t, who can succeed and who can’t.
But what I noticed in my race is that they are exceedingly well-organized and exceedingly well-funded, and that goes a long way. I recognized in my race, and I was just out and about today to talk to several different people who didn’t even really know that there was a mayoral race. And I think that that worked to the DSA’s advantage, is that they were very singularly focused on just promoting their candidates and it really was effectively a DSA sweep of all D.C. open seats.
You know, call ’em pariahs, I think that there is a struggle within the Democratic Party to know what the DSA, not incorporate them, but what they stand for. And I think that on a national scale, it’s a problem because they are a fringe organization. They are also, their goals may be different than MAGA, but the way they operate is very similar. They both are exclusionary. They both need an enemy to be able to thrive. I would say that’s not how I view government systems or economic systems. I believe that everybody can be successful.
I think that the Democratic Party now needs to make a decision on how to deal with an organization like DSA.
[SADLER] What do you propose the Democratic Party do? You’re right, in Washington, D.C., it was a sweep, but it was also a very low turnout election. We saw the same thing in New York City when Zohran Mamdani won. He wasn’t winning the Blacks or the Hispanics or the minorities. He was winning and he won largely by White, college-educated women and men, the progressive elites. The working class has rejected socialism by and large, but at these low-turnout elections where they can motivate this base, they’re proving they can win.
[GOODWEATHER] Kelly, that’s exactly right. They are proving they can win. The Democratic nominee will have won the mayor of D.C. effectively with 14% of the D.C. voting population. That is exceedingly low. And I think to your point about generally when we look at who voted for her, yeah, it’s the more White, affluent population here in Washington, D.C. Generally, the western part of the city.
Even I was just out talking to folks today, there is a vast misunderstanding. I hear all the time, I just didn’t know that this is what the DSA stands for.
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