Socialists Are TAKING Over 3 Big Cities

Voter at a polling booth with an American flag backdrop — Photo: vesperstock / Shutterstock

Three American cities, one ideological label, and a result that national Democratic strategists cannot wave away: democratic socialist candidates won mayoral power in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and captured the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, all within the same election cycle — a pattern that has not played out at this scale in more than a century of American municipal politics.

Key Points

Nithya Raman, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, unseated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in Los Angeles, becoming the first challenger to defeat a sitting L.A. mayor in over twenty years
Janeese Lewis George, described by NBC News as a democratic socialist, won the Washington, D.C. mayoral race decisively
Zohran Mamdani won the official Democratic primary for New York City mayor under the city’s ranked-choice system
The three wins are geographically distributed and differently sourced — one general-election upset, one primary victory, one ideological label attached by press coverage — which matters for how “movement” claims should be read
Municipal socialism has a documented American precedent dating to 1900–1940, when more than 1,000 socialist officials held office in 348 cities, suggesting a recurring pattern rather than an unprecedented rupture

What Actually Happened, City by City

In Los Angeles, Raman — a sitting City Council member who first won her seat in 2020 with backing from the DSA’s Los Angeles chapter — defeated Mayor Karen Bass by a margin reported at roughly 52% to 48%, according to the Los Angeles Times, which also noted it was the first time in more than two decades that an incumbent L.A. mayor had been unseated by a challenger. The Associated Press called it an upset that would reshape governance in the nation’s second-largest city. NBC Los Angeles later reported an updated tally of 429,450 votes for Raman against 394,796 for Bass.

In Washington, D.C., Lewis George’s win carried a wider margin in early reporting: NBC Washington’s results page showed her at 84.34% of counted votes against two opponents, Robert L. Gross and Rhonda Hamilton, with over 81% of the expected vote tallied. In New York, the official Board of Elections record for the 2025 Democratic primary shows Mamdani winning the final ranked-choice round with 573,169 votes to Andrew Cuomo’s 443,229 — a primary victory, not yet a general-election mayoralty, but the decisive step in a city where the Democratic nomination has historically been close to determinative.

How Municipal Socialism Actually Wins

None of these campaigns ran on abstract ideology. Raman built her coalition in Los Angeles around homelessness policy, tenant protections, and criticism of Bass’s handling of city services — the same terrain that elevated her to the council in the first place. Lewis George’s campaign in D.C. and Mamdani’s in New York similarly centered on housing affordability, cost-of-living pressure, and administrative competence rather than a referendum on socialism as a philosophy. This is not incidental. Socialist and socialist-adjacent candidates have historically won American cities by campaigning as capable managers of sewers, transit, rent, and payrolls — not as emissaries of a national platform — which is precisely why the label “socialist” so often undersells what actually wins these races.

That mechanism has a name among historians: “sewer socialism,” coined to describe the pragmatic, services-first governing style of early-twentieth-century socialist administrations, most famously in Milwaukee. It is a useful corrective to the instinct — visible in national cable coverage — to read every local win as evidence of an ideological tidal wave, when the underlying campaigns were fought and won on garbage collection, zoning, and rent.

The Historical Precedent Is Real — and Larger Than People Assume

Between 1900 and 1940, more than 1,000 socialist officials were elected or appointed across 348 American cities and towns, and 146 of those cities elected socialist mayors. Milwaukee alone elected three socialist mayors between 1910 and 1960, with Daniel Hoan holding the office for 24 consecutive years, governing a major industrial city through fiscal management and public works rather than revolutionary rhetoric. Socialist candidates also won mayoral races in Buffalo, Minneapolis, Reading, Schenectady, and Berkeley during the movement’s peak years around 1912 and 1913. The 2025–2026 cycle, in other words, is not creating a new phenomenon; it is reviving a dormant one that American cities have hosted, successfully, for well over a century.

Where the Current Wave Differs From the Label Attached to It

The three wins are not interchangeable evidence of a single, coordinated organizational surge, and conflating them risks overstating what the record shows. Raman’s relationship to the DSA is the most formally documented: the Ventura County Star reported that DSA-LA endorsed her campaign and that a national DSA panel even debated rescinding that endorsement shortly before the election — a reminder that the organization’s internal consensus was not unanimous. Lewis George is described by NBC News as a democratic socialist, a characterization of her politics rather than confirmation of formal DSA membership or endorsement. Mamdani’s victory, meanwhile, is a Democratic primary win certified by New York’s Board of Elections — a critical and newsworthy result, but distinct from winning the general mayoralty, and the official record does not itself establish any DSA organizational role. Treating these three outcomes as one undifferentiated “socialist sweep” compresses real differences in affiliation and electoral stage that matter to anyone assessing the movement’s actual institutional reach.

What It Means Going Forward

The more durable question is not whether these candidates won — they did, by margins reported across multiple outlets and, in New York’s case, certified by the city’s own election authority — but whether they can convert office into governing success that outlasts a single news cycle. Certification of the Los Angeles and Washington results was still pending in the earliest reporting, a routine administrative step that does not typically alter outcomes of this size. The harder test, as Milwaukee’s four-decade run shows, is whether socialist-aligned mayors can manage budgets, housing policy, and public safety well enough to be reelected on competence rather than ideology alone. That verdict will be written in council votes and city budgets over the next several years, not in an election-night tally.