With less than two months to go until D.C.’s primary, over the weekend the four candidates running for mayor appeared together at their first debate since early March.

Standing in front of a raucous crowd of more than 100 people in the basement of a church in North Michigan Park, the contenders — Mayor Muriel Bowser, Councilmember Robert White (D-At Large), Councilmember Trayon White (D-Ward 8), and James Butler — pitched their own candidacies while sharpening their attacks against the others.

Not surprisingly, it was Mayor Bowser who was most often put on the defensive, with her challengers accusing her of failing to tackle some of D.C.’s most intractable problems — from the cost of housing to traffic safety. But she batted many of those arguments away by arguing that only she has the experience to run the city, even more so as it struggles to regain its footing after the pandemic.

“I am a battle-tested leader, and in the last couple of years we’ve been through a battle. We’ve been tested by a pandemic, we’ve been tested by a bully in the White House, we’ve been tested by a racial reckoning and an economic crisis, all at the same time,” said Bowser to the crowd. “Now is not the time for untested leadership, but the time for a mayor who knows how to get the job done.”

It’s not an unexpected pitch to voters; many an incumbent argue that only they are properly placed to take on whatever challenges come. But Robert White — in his second term on the D.C. Council — sought to turn that experience on its head.

“Mayor Bowser has been promising for eight years that she’s going to solve problems, but eight years later these problems aren’t solved,” he said. “We have had seven consecutive record-breaking budgets, but we haven’t moved ahead. The people who were ahead eight years ago are still ahead now, and the people who were struggling are still struggling.”

“We are dying in this city. Every disparity you name, we have it,” added Trayon White, another second-term lawmaker.

The contenders didn’t just leave it at that, though; over the course of the 75-minute debate, Bowser cited specific examples of what her experience in office had produced while Robert and Trayon White called into question whether what she had done was actually enough.

On tackling homelessness, Bowser touted her move to shutter the D.C. General family homeless shelter and replace it with smaller shelters located across the city. She also said that her focus on family homelessness had led to a 78% decrease since she took office. Robert White focused instead on chronic homelessness, noting that the council had increased taxes on the wealthy in 2021 in order to fund enough housing vouchers for more than 2,000 people experiencing chronic homelessness.

“But the mayor still hasn’t been able to get them in housing,” he said. “That’s a leadership problem. As mayor I’m going to show up with mental health and addiction specialists. I’m not going to show up with police, bulldozers, and dump trucks,” he said, referencing encampment clearings that started in the fall as part of a new pilot program launched by Bowser.

Both Robert White and Butler went after Bowser on Vision Zero, the five-year-old initiative to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024. They both noted that traffic deaths have actually increased, and said it was because Bowser has been too timid and too slow in making changes to D.C. streets. But their attacks prompted a passionate retort from Bowser.

“I have put down more bike lanes [and] more bus lanes, I got the streetcar running, I made the Circulator free, I started Kids Ride Free that gets kids to school for free. So you want to talk about Vision Zero or public safety issues? The truth is this pandemic has upended every part of our life. Traffic deaths aren’t just up in the District, they’re up everywhere in the United States and and you know it,” she said.

Bowser also promoted her moves to increase the number of grocery stores east of the Anacostia River — a new Lidl is being built at Skyland in Ward 7, and the mayor says another grocer is likely at the former site of a planned Walmart in the same ward — while Robert White said it has been too little, too late. “We can’t open one new grocery store every 15 years and expect to solve the problem, so we need to change our strategy,” he said.

Both Robert and Trayon White similarly took aim at Bowser over affordable housing, arguing that not enough has been done for people at the lowest end of the income scale — many of whom have been displaced over the last decade. “The government doesn’t control development in D.C. Developers control it,” said Trayon White.

Bowser countered that she is proud of her efforts to build more workforce housing for teachers, nurses, police officers. She is increasing spending on affordable housing to $500 million next year, but an audit on spending during her time an office found that city agencies had underspent on building and preserving housing for the lowest-income residents.

Bowser also turned the experience argument back on the two lawmakers, saying that they have significant power over rewriting the city’s annual budget and creating programs of their own — like a recent $1.5 billion jobs program that Robert White said he would institute if elected mayor.

“If somebody is complaining about [the] $19 billion [budget] and what happened to it and they’ve been on the council for five years, you need to ask them, what did you do with the budget? You need to ask them why didn’t those transformational programs come five years ago? Four years ago? Or right now? You have the budget right now. If you think you want to spend $1 billion dollars for jobs that nobody really knows what they’re going to do or what they’re for, put it in the budget right now,” she said.

Throughout the debate, Butler, a former ANC commissioner in Ward 5 and unsuccessful mayoral candidate in 2018, tried his own populist appeal. He regularly derided the three other candidates as “career politicians” and members of the Green Team (the moniker for Bowser allies) or the “Karl Racine Machine (both Robert and Trayon White worked in his office) who have failed to address the city’s problems.

Butler pledged to increase the size of the Metropolitan Police Department by 700 officers (Bowser is currently asking for 347 officers over the next year to keep staffing steady at 3,500), to expand rent control to cover all buildings, and make Metro free for D.C. residents by increasing fares on Virginia and Maryland commuters. (It remains unclear how exactly he would convince Maryland and Virginia’s representatives on Metro’s board to increase fares on their constituents, though.)

The primary is scheduled for June 21. Mail ballots will be sent to all D.C. voters starting on May 16, and ballot drop boxes will open May 27. Early in-person voting will run from June 10-19.

WAMU 88.5 is hosting a live on-air mayoral debate between Mayor Muriel Bowser, Councilmember Robert White, and Councilmember Trayon White on Wednesday, May 4 at 7 p.m. Details are here.