One was outraged by how long it took for D.C. to clean up after January’s snowstorm. Another says she’s seen firsthand how hard the city makes it for small businesses to survive; her parents run a men’s formalwear shop in Georgetown, after all. A third says he’s been planning his run for years, arguing D.C. needs “somebody with a different vision and vastly different experience.”
They’re the outsiders, the first-timers, the ones who at some point decided, “I’m sick of complaining about things, so instead I’m going to run for office.” Or, as one of them said at a forum in Ward 4 earlier this month, “This is my official way to bitch.”
Meet Hope Solomon, Rini Sampath, and Gary Goodweather.
Of the seven people who have qualified for the ballot in the mayoral race for the upcoming Democratic primary, these three have never held — or even run for — office in D.C. before. Janeese Lewis George is currently on the D.C. Council, while Kenyan McDuffie and Vincent Orange both served on the council (and Ernest Johnson unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2018).
Yes, there are write-in candidates, too, including Yaida Ford, a civil rights attorney. But Sampath, Solomon, and Goodweather qualified for the ballot, which takes collecting 2,000 signatures from voters — a significant effort itself.
The trio join a rich tradition of people who jump into the political fray because they’re sick of career politicians and are convinced they can do better. They say they represent change. But their ambitions may also blind them to the reality that running a citywide campaign — even in a city that’s as geographically compact as D.C. — is a grueling task, and not often one that results in victory.
Local political insiders say a mayoral bid can be a fool’s errand; instead of running for a citywide seat, why not try to represent a ward? “Don’t bite off more than you can chew,” counsels Chuck Thies, a longtime political consultant who has advised numerous candidates for D.C. office, including former Mayor Vincent Gray. (Full disclosure: He supports McDuffie.) “Most of our mayors started at the ward level. Start small.”
But ambition is as American a trait as there is, and Goodweather, Sampath, and Solomon, aren’t settling for small. They also know that the introduction of ranked-choice voting could change the dynamics of the mayoral race, giving them chances they may not have had before.
“I’ve had one comment on my Instagram that said, ‘Isn’t it pretty arrogant to think that you can just jump in and do all this when you have no government experience?’" says Sampath, 31, who entered the mayoral race shortly after the snowstorm snafu. “We have so much going on and we feel like we can’t do anything, and that’s the problem. By me jumping in the race I think I have already signaled to a lot of people that you should run for office; you should raise your hand and make what is a personal sacrifice.”
Gary Goodweather
The first piece of advice that Thies gives first-time candidates is a time-tested one: Get in the race as early as you can. And on that note, he gives Goodweather credit — the real estate developer launched his campaign in early 2025, roughly 18 months out from the primary.
“What you don’t have, unless you’re a celebrity, is name recognition,” Thies says. “Before you can convince anyone to vote for you, they have to know your name. Getting in early affords you the chance to build name recognition.”
Goodweather, 51, tells The 51st that he started planning for this run even earlier. “It’s been at least three years,” he says. “I thought, like a lot of D.C. residents, it was time for new leadership, somebody with a different vision and vastly different experience. We continue to elect the same leaders over and over again.”
He served in the U.S. Army, but his principal professional experience is in real estate development. Goodweather says he helped build the Constitution Square development that anchors a portion of NoMa, among other properties, and he has served on the neighborhood's BID.
“I am running because the mayor’s job is an execution job, it’s a vision job and an operations job, and I’m the only candidate who has experience,” he said. “I know what it’s like to start businesses, and D.C. makes it incredibly hard to do business here and to live here. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
With that resume, you’d expect Goodweather would run as the no-nonsense business candidate, a Michael Bloomberg of sorts. But his platform is eclectic; while he does pledge to cut down on permitting and approvals to speed housing construction, he’s also promising to make Metro free for residents, create a citywide civic organization he calls Capital Corps (think AmeriCorps or City Year), and even bring down D.C.’s utility costs by investing in a tiny nuclear reactor he’d work to get placed on federal land. (“We will have limitless energy,” he says.)
Goodweather, a Dupont Circle resident, also has an idea that could address D.C.’s vacant office building challenges and the lack of food access in some parts of the city: massive vertical greenhouses that would allow the city to produce, well, produce. “One of the narratives I always hear is D.C. doesn’t produce anything so we can’t have full representation,” he says.
And if elected, Goodweather promises not to become a career politician. He’s says he would introduce legislation that limits mayors to two terms in office.
Before Goodweather gets there, though, he would need to win the first term. He’s better placed, financially at least, than Sampath or Solomon. Because he got into the race so early, Goodweather managed to qualify for public financing. That means the $62,000 he raised in small donations from D.C. residents became $310,000. (The program matches each qualifying dollar from a contributor with $5 in public funds).
He’s also confident that the implementation of ranked-choice voting improves his chances, and Goodweather appears to be the only candidate who has actively been asking voters who don’t rank him first to consider him as their second choice.
Still, Thies says it is uncommon for first-timers to win in citywide races – Council Chairman Phil Mendelson didn’t win his first race many decades ago, nor did current At-Large Councilmember Robert White.
“More often than not, you’ll have to have a couple cracks at it,” Thies said. “It’s important to know how to lose, so when you come back you don’t seem like someone who’s running just because they want to run. You have to have a purpose in your loss.”
Goodweather, though, isn’t conceding the idea that he may not occupy the city’s top job come January 2027.
“We’re going to win,” he says.
Rini Sampath
Wherever Sampath goes, she delivers a crisp message about what her mayoralty would be about: “Fix the basics.”
“As a 10-year resident of D.C., I have seen that the D.C. government is fundamentally broken,” she tells The 51st. “The premise of my entire campaign is we need to focus on the basics. We need to fix municipal services and the basic services that affect everybody’s livelihoods before we start proposing any new programs.”
The U Street resident says her professional experience lends itself to delivering on her promise; she’s currently a director at a cybersecurity company, but has also worked on “change management” within federal agencies.
Sampath recognizes that D.C. faces big problems, but argues that it doesn’t necessarily need sweeping (and potentially expensive) solutions to solve them. Child care too expensive? Loosen regulations so that providers can more easily use their homes. Not enough affordable housing? Do a better job more quickly leasing up the units D.C. already has. Sidewalks take too long to fix? Change the city’s existing expectation that a fix can happen within 270 days to be considered successfully done.
"I see it as it’s the reality of our current fiscal situation," she says. "We are living in delusion if we think expanding to universal child care is possible when we are in a budget crisis."
Sampath says she’s also leaning into creative and data-driven solutions. She complains that D.C.’s 311 app is dysfunctional, so her campaign already built a new prototype. And given that the council is currently working on the budget for 2027, the campaign also built a dashboard to show exactly where all of D.C.’s dollars are being spent. ("I’m a bit of a nerd," she concedes, "and that’s the kind of energy you need if you’re going to bring an outsider into this.")
Still, Sampath’s campaign has faced its own growing pains. She didn’t raise enough money from D.C. residents to qualify for the city’s public financing program, cutting her off from what could have been tens of thousands of dollars. Thies says raising the money to keep her mayoral bid alive will be another challenge.
“You have to dedicate x number of hours a day raising money,” he says. “If you’re not going to do that, you’re only running a vanity campaign. Not enough people are going to know anything about you. You need money.”
And in politics, money can often mean access. One of Sampath's current fundraising pitches is that if she raises enough, she'll be eligible to attend a televised mayoral debate hosted by Fox 5 in May. (She'll need to show she's gotten money from 1,000 contributors.)
Regardless of those challenges, Sampath says she feels like she’s found a distinctive lane in a race that has so far been divided between Lewis George on one side and McDuffie on the other.
“Our whole mayoral race has become so polarized between two competing factions: you’re really far left and what seems to be a more moderate, establishment candidate,” she says. “The energy I’m trying to bring into this conversation is how can you reach a firm middle ground, a happy place where you have someone with deeply progressive values who’s focused on execution and is willing to look at things in a realistic, pragmatic way? That’s the lane I’m occupying.”
Hope Solomon
Solomon, 42, sells herself as the blunt, tell-it-like-it-is candidate. It was her, after all, who told a staid audience in Chevy Chase that running for mayor was “her official way to bitch.”
And the mayoral hopeful (get it?) says she’s got plenty to complain about. The daughter of parents who own a men’s formalwear shop in Georgetown, Solomon says she’s seen just how hard the city can make it for small businesses to survive. And she believes that kind of experience is as valuable, if not more so, than what current elected officials running for higher office have to show.
“When you live in a city and experience all the frustration of systems and red tape as a resident and small business owner, you get to a point where you say that the people we have elected — if they can’t fix or make things more efficient or speak truth to what the challenges are — then what is experience down at city hall? And why is that the only qualification to run for mayor?” she asks.
Running as a change agent is nothing new in politics; Thies says it’s often an effective message. But he says candidates leaning on the message may face more challenges this cycle than in the past.
“The election really is no longer a change election,” he says. “The council isn’t the bogeyman; Donald Trump is. So it’s hard for an outsider to say, ‘I’m going to fix things.' People started to like the council.”
Still, the Dupont Circle resident says her own professional experience — she was a 17-year federal employee and contractor in national security before being DOGE’d last year — makes her particularly sensitive to the affordability concerns that are top of mind for many in D.C. Solomon says addressing the city’s shrinking budget is “paramount,” but she’s not proposing new taxes. Rather, “we need an executive that’s going to prioritize.”
“We need a mayor in there who’s going to open the kimono and find out what the hell is going on,” she said at The 51st’s mayoral forum last week.
Solomon may be new to the political game, but she’s already throwing some elbows. She unsuccessfully tried to have Sampath thrown off the ballot, alleging she committed fraud in collecting signatures to get on the ballot. The Board of Elections disagreed, as did the D.C. Court of Appeals.
Still, like many first-time candidates, money is an issue. According to a March 10 campaign finance report, Solomon had just over $3,500 to spend (Lewis George and McDuffie, by contrast, each had about a million a piece). Solomon concedes she’s running an “all-volunteer” campaign, relying on her network of D.C. contacts for help spreading the word.
“It gets to a point where enough is enough,” she says of her decision to jump into the mayoral race. “I’ve testified in front of [the council]. Then what? This was the next logical choice.”
Martin is a longtime reporter and editor in D.C. He formerly worked for WAMU 88.5 and DCist.com, and has contributed to the Washington City Paper and other publications. He's been in D.C. for 25 years, and tries to ride his bike everywhere he can.
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