As a brutal primary begins to fade in the rearview mirror, D.C. Democrats are now trying to hash out who will lead the local party into a new era of city politics. But with leadership elections less than two weeks away, the party can’t even agree on a basic question: who gets to vote in them?
Party insiders have been going back and forth for weeks on the matter, arguing over arcane questions around bylaws that govern the party, formally known as the D.C. Democratic State Committee. A newly empowered crop of progressives, riding high after major victories in June, are pressing to include a new batch of voters who are in line with the primary results, which has frustrated some established members. The more moderate old guard, intimately familiar with the party’s inner workings, have chafed at the pressure and drawn accusations they’re trying to game the system with procedural moves of their own.
At the moment, just about nobody is happy with how all this has played out.
“There’s a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes right now about how to manipulate the rules,” says Elizabeth Mitchell, a longtime progressive member of the state committee representing Ward 3. “It’s been revelatory to see the old, entrenched power structure coming up against groups of people who have managed to get things changed and get people elected outside of that power structure... The question becomes: how do we reconcile these new groups with the people who have been there for decades?”
The spat points to a central tension emerging in city politics: The District’s left flank is ascendant, with Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George poised to become mayor and a slate of progressives set to join the D.C. Council, but the establishment isn’t backing down without a fight.
Lewis George and her fellow primary victors still need to get through the November general election, even if they may be pro forma contests in the heavily Democratic city, so that means the fights within the local party have been the first to bubble to the surface. A slate of younger, progressive activists won a sweeping victory in the down-ballot contests to control the state committee, a group that doesn’t hold policymaking power but does determine the party’s direction and organizing strategy.
The progressive candidates, who ran as the “Free D.C.” slate to seize on the momentum generated by a similarly named group protesting President Trump’s interventions in city affairs, have pitched broad reforms of the party’s operations. And they now also hold the cards in perhaps the party’s most consequential decision of the next few months: picking an interim replacement for At-Large Councilmember Robert White after he wins the race for D.C. delegate in November.
When Democratic at-large members leave the Council, D.C. law gives the party the power to choose a stand-in until a special election is held. Not only does that person hold the seat for months, but the candidate has a huge leg up in the ensuing race if they run. This has heightened the stakes of the intraparty dispute and played a huge role in ramping up tensions between the two camps.
“I'm all for finding unity and building bridges and relationships, but this extended period with all the mistrust and the lack of clarity on authority figures to go to if there's disputes about the rules, it doesn't breed that environment,” says Sam Bonar, who won an at-large seat on the committee as part of the Free D.C. slate. “The extended leadership vacuum creates a lot of that disunity.”
Chair controversies
It took weeks to even agree on the basic matter of when to hold elections for the committee’s new chair.
Some on the incoming slate of committee members argued for a vote in early August, in order to send a full delegation to the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Austin. Others argued for a more deliberate pace to accommodate for challenging summer schedules, prompting a round of bickering over bylaws and competing opinions from parliamentarians. (The two sides ultimately struck a compromise, sending some members to Austin but holding off on picking a new chair until September 10.)
As for what’s next, whoever the party picks as its new leaders will set the course. The Free D.C. slate, which won 36 of the 48 committee seats up for a vote, already has its main candidate: Ward 7 committee member Chioma Iwuoha is gunning for chair. (Bonar considered but ultimately abandoned a run for vice chair after he says his past advocacy for ranked choice voting became too much of a lightning rod among the moderate faction.)
It’s unclear who will oppose the Free D.C. bunch from the party’s existing establishment, if anyone. Current chair Charles Wilson, who has led the party for more than a decade, is the most logical choice, and several committee members tell The 51st he’s made calls gauging support for another bid. (He didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Wilson has tried to pitch himself as an experienced hand at the wheel and a bridge builder after a contentious election season. But he faces serious suspicion from many on the Free D.C. slate, who framed their bids as an effort to shake up what they see as the party’s lethargic, sclerotic management. Wilson’s decision to use party resources to challenge Initiative 83, the ballot measure that brought ranked choice voting and semi-open primaries to D.C. elections, particularly peeved many of the same activists who now sit on the committee.
“Charles wants to run, but I’m not sure he has the votes,” said Tim Thomas, a longtime Ward 5 activist who recently lost his committee post after running alongside Wilson on the more establishment-friendly “Democrats United to Free D.C.” slate.
A committee member on the Free D.C. slate, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly about internal deliberations, is more blunt: “If he thinks he can win, he’s delulu.”
Iwuoha, meanwhile, is a broadly respected Ward 7 activist who has inroads with both the left and some moderates (she also happens to be a longtime supporter and friend of Lewis George.)
But just because her slate won the majority of the committee seats doesn’t mean she’s a shoo-in—dozens of other party activists representing affiliate groups, such as the Capital Stonewall Democrats and the DC Federation of Democratic Women, also get to vote for the new party leaders. And it’s not clear whether those groups’ current representatives to the committee will get to vote, which could benefit a well-known figure like Wilson, or if the new committee members can select a fresh crop to account for the party’s changing composition.
“Our bylaws are a freaking mess; that’s part of what we ran to change,” Mitchell said, noting chair elections have been similarly chaotic over the course of her decade of service on the state committee.
Yet longtime party leaders like Thomas are equally wary of these newly elected committee members, who he sees as new arrivals unfamiliar with the party’s customs. Some Free D.C. members are longtime D.C. activists, but he questions whether others share the deep roots (and accumulated wisdom) of the establishment figures they’re hoping to replace. And as a Lewis George supporter himself, he sees the conflict as generational as much as it is ideological.
Thomas is not alone in this feeling, with the city’s establishment persistently complaining that progressive activists who arrived during D.C.’s population boom of the 2010s have elbowed out natives with roots in the Marion Barry era. Someone like Iwuoha might have strong D.C. bona fides, but there’s a sense that anyone who wasn’t born in the city is fundamentally coming from “somewhere else.”
Consider the letter that his fellow Ward 5 activist, the unrelated Hazel Thomas, wrote to party leaders in the wake of the election. She called Free D.C.’s win a “hostile takeover” of the party, with new members that are “largely East Indians and Euro-Americans” and therefore unrepresentative of the city’s many Black Democrats. (The letter itself became a subject of a heated state committee meeting earlier this month, according to several attendees; Thomas didn’t back down from the letter’s contents, echoing her defiant comments to the Washington Post on the matter.)
Tim Thomas has a more literal complaint about a Free D.C. member potentially not being truly “from” D.C. He’s become convinced that one woman to win a slot representing Ward 5, Yolanda Corbett, doesn’t actually live in the Truxton Circle home she listed as her residence on campaign filings. He says he has spotted vacant property notices and snapped photos that appear to show no one’s been inside for some time. Thomas raised these concerns with the Board of Elections, but the board told him it doesn’t have the resources to do an investigation. (Corbett didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Convening a convention?
Plainly, there will be some fences that need mending in the coming months. Phil Pannell, a longtime Ward 8 activist who just won a spot as the party’s national committeeman, is hopeful that can start after the leadership election is over.
He’s particularly optimistic that members of both factions have warmed up to his ambitious plan for picking an interim councilmember once White wins the delegate race, a near-certainty in the deep-blue District. Pannell hopes to convene a massive, 1,200-member convention to hold a vote recommending someone to fill White’s seat.
He envisions pulling in a broad swath of Democrats from all eight wards to make the decision, including current city officeholders, Democratic party leaders, candidates who ran in the June primaries, advisory neighborhood commissioners, even high schoolers. The party has never really attempted something like this—the last time the party ran this process, 71 people voted, ultimately picking Anita Bonds for an at-large seat in 2012.
“We were really inspired by what Democrats did in Maine when they needed to replace Graham Platner [as the party’s U.S. Senate nominee],” Pannell said. “They ran a huge process in just a week or two. D.C. can do the same, and we have more time to do it.”
It could prove to be a heavy logistical lift, but Pannell says he’s already made preliminary plans to hold the confab at the Walter Washington Convention Center. Some Democrats have grumbled that his plan to choose a date between the election and Thanksgiving is too quick a turnaround, or perhaps that it’s not even necessary to begin with.
“The state committee is already an elected representative body,” Ward 7 activist Dexter Williams wrote in a blog post widely circulated among committee members. “So why create another representative layer to advise the representatives voters already chose to make the decision?
Indeed, the results of such a convention vote likely wouldn’t be binding—even Pannell admits he probably can’t convince party leaders to agree to that—leaving the final decision in the state committee’s hands. But he hopes a vote from such a broad swath of Democrats would prove too difficult to ignore, and help assure the process plays out without too many hurt feelings (something that could not be said for the D.C. Council’s appointment of Doni Crawford to fill the at-large seat Kenyan McDuffie vacated to run for mayor.)
But with interest in the seat sure to be sky-high, Pannell might be a bit too upbeat in that regard. Committee members have already been fielding calls from people interested in the appointment, including some current ward councilmembers contemplating a jump up to a citywide office.
“People are absolutely going to be lined up for this, and the line is gonna run from the Wilson Building to my house [in Northeast],” Thomas predicts.
Alex (he/him) is a senior reporter for The 51st who has spent his career covering local government, politics, the criminal legal system and more in the D.C. area. He was raised in Northern Virginia, graduated from Virginia Tech, and lives in Shaw.
With your help, we pursue stories that hold leaders to account, demystify opaque city and civic processes, and celebrate the idiosyncrasies that make us proud to call D.C. home. Put simply, our mission is to make it easier — and more fun — to live in the District. Our members help keep local news free and independent for all:
