Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren weren’t the only pols to suspend their campaigns this week, it turns out. Left-leaning community activist and Northwest neighborhood commissioner Renée Bowser dropped out of the Ward 4 D.C. Council race Wednesday, leaving behind two Democratic challengers vying for the seat held by incumbent Brandon Todd, who’s seeking the position for the third time.
In a written statement Wednesday, Bowser (who isn’t related to Mayor Muriel Bowser) said her decision flowed from a number of factors, including the “fact that there is another candidate challenging the incumbent who has amassed a significant head-start in fundraising and endorsements.” She didn’t specify who but said she hoped to avoid “dilut[ing] the resources available” to elect a new councilmember for her ward.
Bowser confirmed in an interview with DCist Friday that she meant political newcomer Janeese Lewis George, a former staffer at D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine’s office who’s running to unseat Todd. However, Bowser—a trained labor lawyer and member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 4D, which covers parts of Petworth—made clear that she’s not endorsing anyone yet.
“I’ve not been asked to endorse anybody,” she said. “But I’m gonna tell you, I think we’ve got to have somebody else [in office] that’s willing to make real change.”
George entered the race in August. Since then, she’s raised more than $270,000 through the city’s new public elections financing program, according to her campaign, and received multiple endorsements from progressive groups, like the D.C. Working Families Party, the Washington Teachers’ Union, D.C. for Democracy, and Black Lives Matter D.C.
Bowser’s bowing out is expected to give a bit of an additional boost to George’s campaign because some of their supporters overlap ideologically. But without polling available, it’s hard to say how close George and Todd, who has the backing of the political machine associated with Mayor Bowser, really are in the contest. (At least at this point: The June 2 Democratic primary is less than 100 days away.)
Between joining the race in November and quitting Wednesday, Renée Bowser raised nearly $11,500, according to her Jan. 31 campaign finance report. Like George, she was participating in the public financing program. But her fundraising didn’t take off in the same way—she says she should have launched her campaign at least one month earlier—and so she didn’t receive matching public funds until the very end of January.
“It’s not like in a regular campaign, [where] you can expect to get maybe $15,000 to $20,000 in donations in two months [and] you could borrow against that, you could even get a loan from someone down the street,” she says, citing the program’s restrictions on personal and private fundraising. At the outset of her campaign, Bowser adds that she had anticipated collecting about $200,000 total through small-dollar donations and start-up and matching funds provided by the program. (Bowser also ran unsuccessfully in the Ward 4 special election, held in 2015, that originally won Todd his seat.)
Community activist Marlena Edwards, who’s also running in the Ward 4 race, had raised more than $5,600 as of Jan. 31 through the traditional campaign finance program, her latest fundraising report shows. These older rules allow D.C. candidates to accept donations in higher individual amounts than does the public financing program, which caps donations at $50 per person in ward races and prohibits corporate contributions altogether.
Meanwhile, Todd had raised more than $421,000 over the course of his campaign as of Jan. 31, with over $366,000 in cash on hand, through traditional fundraising.
In addition to the three Democratic candidates, Statehood Green Party member and ANC 4B commissioner Perry Redd is also running in the June 2 primary for the Ward 4 race. There are also D.C. Council races for two citywide at-large seats and in Ward 2, Ward 7, and Ward 8 this year.
