On a blustery day in mid-February, Erin Palmer and a small group of campaign volunteers set off on a neighborhood walk in Ward 7. Led by Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Anthony Lorenzo Green, the group slowly made its way up Division Avenue NE, discussing nearby challenges ranging from cars driving too fast down residential streets to local parks and playground that were falling into disrepair.

This is Palmer’s comfort zone; she’s a Ward 4 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner herself, a member of the corps of elected officials across D.C. whose portfolio covers the nitty-gritty of daily life, everything from pushing for speed humps to fighting bar owners over operating hours and noise. But it’s many of those very hyper-local issues that are animating Palmer’s run for a much bigger office: D.C. Council Chairperson.

“What you’ve seen today is a little bit different, this idea of person by person, neighborhood by neighborhood, talking about the little issues that become the big issues,” she told me.

It was in October that Palmer, a 40-year-old ethics attorney and mother of three, announced she would challenge Council Chairman Phil Mendelson for the seat he has held since 2012. In dozens of neighborhood walks, meet-and-greets, and candidate debates since jumping into the race, Palmer has said that she’d bring new “energy, vision, and compassion to D.C.’s challenges.”

That vision is decidedly to the left of Mendelson is. While he often touts his progressive credentials, critics (and challengers like Palmer) say his style and legislative accomplishments haven’t kept pace with the scale of challenges the city faces, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.

This isn’t the first time Mendelson, 69, has dealt with those types of accusations. In 2018, he faced a similar challenge from the left from Ed Lazere, the former head of the left-leaning D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. Mendelson, who was first elected to the council in 1998, has long promoted himself as a wonky, details-oriented legislator who prizes incremental gains over the sweeping reforms many progressives push for.

“What I see in all of the races is folks who are running very much to the left and are unrealistic,” he says of the current political climate ahead of the June 21 primary. “They’re big on ideology, but it doesn’t work out practically.”

Mendelson often cites the progressive-minded bills he’s gotten through the council: marriage equality, new gun restrictions in the wake of the 2008 Supreme Court case that tossed out D.C.’s handgun ban, an increase in the city’s minimum wage, the city’s universal paid leave program for private-sector workers, the creation of the D.C. Police Reform Commission, and a pay increase for childcare workers. Last year, he funded a new Baby Bonds program for low-income kids and during this budget cycle he marshaled an increase in funding for schools with a high concentration of at-risk students.

He says his record of pragmatism and compromise has been consistently rewarded by voters. Mendelson is one of the few white elected officials to perform well in citywide elections over the years, often because of his understated style that found him regularly addressing civic and neighborhood associations on weekday nights with his young daughter in tow. (She is now in college.)

But Palmer says Mendelson’s record is more complicated than he lets on. The paid leave bill the council passed in 2016 was pared down by Mendelson from what was originally introduced, going from a proposed 16 weeks of paid parental leave to just eight. On the pay raise for child care workers, Palmer notes that “he voted against the tax increase that funded that.” And on the Police Reform Commission, she says Mendelson has since stalled on adopting its recommendations — and recently went against it when he pushed to keep police in D.C. schools.

Palmer says she believes housing is a human right — a position born from her estranged father dying while experiencing homelessness. She wants more sustained funding for public housing repairs; rent control expansion; more use of public land for housing; and better management of the city’s Housing Production Trust Fund, which she says consistently escape council oversight leading to underspending on housing for the lowest-income residents. She has also been critical of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s clearing of homeless encampments, which Mendelson has been more supportive of.

Mendelson opposes expanding rent control beyond its current boundaries (it only applies in buildings built before 1975) but says that he has creatively steered funding towards fixing public housing and has worked to ensure a steady stream of money for building affordable housing. “If you compare us to other cities, the amount of public dollars we’re putting into affordable housing and the different strategies, nobody competes,” he says.

It’s those types of small yet steady gains that Mendelson says come from his years as a legislator, something he says Palmer simply can’t offer.

“I do think that the experience is critical to running the council. There’s never been a council chair who did not serve as legislator on the council prior to being elected,” he says. “We can look at the other legislature in the city, you know, the one that’s up on the hill, and see how impossible is to get legislation through.”

But Palmer says she possesses experience of her own, having worked for the federal judiciary on issues related to ethics and judicial misconduct. “I used soft-power techniques. That’s how you build consensus but also how you operate within an institution that’s very status quo oriented,” she says, likening the courts to the council. She also says her experience as an ANC shows she can build consensus with other elected officials who she may not always agree with.

Palmer also says that Mendelson’s long years on the council is a double-edged sword; he may know how to get things done, but he can also be stuck in those ways. She says Mendelson was largely absent in addressing the ethics scandal that embroiled former councilmember Jack Evans and also says that Mendelson’s belief in the value of his own experience has led to the centralization of power on one key issue: oversight of D.C. schools. In early 2021, Mendelson eliminated the council’s stand-alone education committee, taking on the responsibilities himself.

“I don’t think the concentration of authority over education in himself does service to education as a whole. I think a committee with more institutionalized knowledge and support staff, a dedicated attention on education with the ability to hold hearings that are more accessible to teachers and families, would be great for us and our schools,” she says. (Mendelson disagrees, saying he held many public hearings on education and advanced a number of bills.)

Palmer says this is one area that sets her aside from Lazere: she’s not just focused on issues, but also on how the council functions. The first plan she unveiled in January didn’t address housing or public safety, but rather how to improve the legislative body she seeks to lead. She says the “accountability plan” would strengthen ethics rules; expand the professional staff to aid in researching and writing bills; and empower the council committees that actually consider legislation, perform oversight, and rewrite large portions of the city’s budget.

“I’m a process person,” she says. “Some of the focus on that has fallen to the wayside [under Mendelson], and some of what new energy brings is new focus on institutional accountability. In some ways that can only come from the outside in meaningful ways.”

Palmer admits she used to admire Mendelson for his attention to detail, drive to get things done, and past progressive leanings, but adds that she feels there’s been less indication of those in recent years. While she accepted public financing to fund her race — which limits how much campaigns can accept from contributors and prohibits businesses from giving — Mendelson opted to raise money traditionally and has accepted money from developers, lobbyists, and contractors with local interests.

Mendelson, for his part, disagrees that his fundamental beliefs or approaches to legislating have really changed. He admits that he often looks back on his own time as a rabble-rousing Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Ward 3 in the 1980s as a reminder of why he remains in public service.

“I think about when I was growing up, when there was a lot of anger toward the establishment. Now I am part of the establishment. So am I working for change and improvement? I think so,” he says. “Any officeholder should only stay in office as long as they have a drive to do things. And that’s not a function of age and it’s actually not even a function of how many terms one has served. It’s do they have the drive to continue to serve and do good work and look for change and improvement? And I do.”

Palmer has been endorsed by the Washington Teachers’ Union, D.C. for Democracy, Jews United for Justice, the D.C. Working Families Party, a number of current ANCs, and more. Mendelson has gotten endorsements from The Washington Post’s editorial board, the D.C. chapter of the Sierra Club, the D.C. Association of Realtors, and a number of labor unions.