Kenyan R. McDuffie, who spent more than 13 years on the D.C. Council, has entered the race for D.C. mayor, promising a vision of “economic growth with guardrails” and to protect home rule during a precarious time for the nation’s capital.
McDuffie’s entrance into the race Wednesday sets up a competitive contest for an open mayoral seat for the first time in two decades after Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) opted not to seek a fourth term. Now, the District is slated for fresh leadership amid major challenges as it faces ongoing pressure from President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress, and as Trump’s federal job cuts have put the city’s unemployment rate at an all-time high.
McDuffie, a former prosecutor, will face off against council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), a democratic socialist — and also a former prosecutor — seeking to leverage her liberal bona fides to energize voters in the deep-blue city.
McDuffie argued that he had the right blend of legislative experience on the council and life experience — a fourth-generation Washingtonian who grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood — to reverse that economic trajectory and fight back against harmful federal actions. His bid for higher office had been highly anticipated since he announced last month that he would resign from the council.
“I love my city, and there’s nobody who’s going to fight harder and spend more time trying to usher in the sort of change that we need right now,” McDuffie said in an interview Tuesday at his rowhouse — his childhood home, where he now lives with his wife and two daughters — in Northeast’s Stronghold neighborhood.
“Our city has been really negatively impacted because of decisions made by the federal government, both this federal administration as well as members of Congress, and we need to turn things around,” he said.
The mayoral race is the marquee event in what is likely to be a sea change year in D.C. politics: There are three open seats on the D.C. Council, including McDuffie’s; several other council members will seek reelection; and D.C.’s longtime delegate to Congress is being challenged by several rivals including two council members.
McDuffie, who brought criminal justice chops and a focus on economic development to the council, said his campaign will focus on spreading economic prosperity more evenly across D.C., while easing property tax burdens and continuing to expand affordable housing to prevent displacement. The former chairman of the council’s business committee said he would aim to cut red tape that can be a barrier to starting a business. He also wants to attract both big and small new businesses to the city to create job opportunities.
“When I think about some of the challenges that we face with the federal government — the mass layoffs of federal workers, the reductions in federal spending — it takes us back 30 years to think about the challenges we faced then,” McDuffie said, referring to the economic turmoil of the 1990s. “And the worst thing we can do today is to go backwards. And so we need to focus on economic growth, but with guardrails, so that everybody across the city can participate in the growth of the District of Columbia.”
Questions about the next mayor’s approach to Trump and the federal government are likely to loom large in the campaign, given the escalated challenges to D.C. home rule, including through Trump’s temporary take over of the police department last year and the ongoing surge of federal law enforcement.
The D.C. police department is in a time of transition, with a new interim police chief who began just days ago and a new normal of patrolling jointly with federal officers, including from immigration-focused agencies.
McDuffie said that if elected, he would focus on rebuilding community trust in the department that he said had been severely damaged by the federal intervention. He said his approach to the White House would be driven by a desire to protect home rule — echoing Bowser — and fighting strategically. Residents “want somebody who’s going to be smart about the fight,” he said.
But he also signaled he would go further than Bowser, particularly in pushing back more vocally on immigration enforcement and joint patrols with local police. Lewis George has been one of the mayor’s most outspoken critics on that issue.
“When I think about where we are today, there is extreme federal overreach,” he said, lamenting that families are “being torn apart” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The ICE raids have to end. It is really producing a level of mistrust that I have not seen in this city in quite some time. And it is not making it safer at all to allow those types of things to play out right here in our city. And so I would push back against that.”
McDuffie spent years working as a lawyer, including as a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, before being elected as a Democrat to represent Ward 5 on the D.C. Council in a 2012 special election. A decade later, he lost a run for attorney general, then switched his affiliation to independent to run for an at-large council seat. That meant to run in the June 16 Democratic primary for mayor, he had to resign from the council and switch his affiliation back to Democrat.
During his tenure on the council, McDuffie became known for his work on public safety issues and business while chairing the judiciary and economic development committees.
He led major legislation that expanded the use of police body-worn cameras and public access to the footage; established alternatives to incarceration in the juvenile justice system, particularly for young children or those accused of minor offenses like running away; and focused on a public health approach to violence through the NEAR Act, which created initiatives such as the District’s violence intervention program.
On the economic development committee, McDuffie worked on small business aid while also serving as a key ally for Bowser on major initiatives. Those have included downtown revitalization efforts after the commercial office market was battered during the pandemic, and major sports arena developments at Capital One Arena and the decrepit RFK Stadium, now undergoing a nearly $4 billion makeover in a public-private deal so the Commanders can move in.
He and Lewis George are likely to compete aggressively on labor and affordability issues, especially as the city’s economy takes hits due to job losses that have exacerbated housing and food insecurity in a city that has long been divided into one of haves and have-nots. Lewis George, who last month became the first high-profile candidate to enter the mayoral race, has gotten a jump on McDuffie, securing endorsements from five labor unions with large organizing networks.
McDuffie said that as a former union mail carrier, he had the “lived experience” to advocate for strong benefits, wages and protections for workers. “But what I’m not going to do is to pit business against workers,” McDuffie said. “We’ve seen too much of the politics that divides, and I’m going to be a bridge-builder to make sure that our city can advance with workers thriving, but also making the investments that allow businesses to create more jobs and hire more workers.”
Lewis George is expected to begin rolling out policy proposals after a campaign launch Wednesday night. Her campaign has nearly $1 million in the bank thanks to the District’s public campaign financing system. In the first 10 days of her campaign, she raised about $180,000 from about 2,500 D.C. donors, an amount then dramatically multiplied by public matching funds.
A number of lesser-known candidates are also running for mayor. One, Gary Goodweather, a real estate investment professional, had raised $65,000 as of Dec. 10 and qualified for public matching funds, which raised his total to nearly $300,000.
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