Loose Lips predicted six months ago that Lisa Gore would run a tough-on-crime campaign. And that bit of forecasting in her challenge to Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George seems to have been spot-on. LL did not have it on his bingo card, however, that Gore would do so by calling Lewis George a lawmaker who “protects the criminal element more so than the public.”

“You can look at the record, you can look at the votes and you determine for yourself: Is it better for you, or is it better for the person that committed a crime?” Gore asked Tuesday night at a Brightwood forum convened by the Ward 4 Democrats. 

That’s a far cry from the vague allusions about public safety concerns the former at-large candidate favored when she entered the race last fall. But with crime dominating headlines for the past year and Lewis George standing up as the rare councilmember to challenge the rightward turn embraced by most local politicians, it was inevitable that sharper attacks would follow. 

Gore, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Hawthorne, has hit Lewis George most forcefully thus far, but the other, lesser known challenger in the race—ex-Petworth ANC Paul Johnson—has used similar rhetoric in the final weeks before the June 4 primary. At Tuesday’s forum, he accused Lewis George of working to “weaken” the “Secure DC” crime bill by passing an amendment to an anti-mask provision. Never mind that the bill’s sponsor, Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, ultimately accepted Lewis George’s changes as a friendly amendment to the legislation: It’s primary season and facts tend to fly out the window.

“It’s one thing to say crimes are being prosecuted now, but that hasn’t been the messaging over the past three to four years,” Johnson chided Lewis George this week.

But is this approach actually working? Most D.C. politicos to speak with LL don’t seem to think so, whether they’re for or against Lewis George. And they aren’t expecting too much drama in what initially appeared to be an interesting contest.

Gore, in particular, has just not gained the sort of traction that Lewis George’s detractors might’ve hoped when she first entered the race.

Not a single group to endorse in the primary has chosen Gore over Lewis George. And Gore’s fundraising hasn’t been anemic, per se, but she also hasn’t made enough headway to indicate that she poses a real threat to the incumbent. Gore has pulled in nearly $14,000 from D.C. residents over the life of her campaign, which get matched with public funds at a rate of five to one under the Fair Elections Program, per finance reports released April 10. She spent more than $58,000 and banked $60,800 for the final two months before the primary. By contrast, Lewis George has raised more than $36,000 from local donors, spent more than $127,000, and built a war chest of more than $95,000. (Johnson has yet to file his April 10 report, but he only had $5,500 in the bank a month ago.)

It’s not impossible for Gore to overcome this sort of cash mismatch, but it certainly makes her path much more difficult. The promise of her campaign when she jumped in the race was that she could unite progressives who are frustrated with Lewis George’s approach to crime with Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Green Team, which still resents her 2020 win over then-Councilmember Brandon Todd. But even the mayor’s people don’t seem particularly interested in boosting Gore’s bid.

Her financial reports include a handful of donations from Green Teamers—there’s former councilmember and top Bowser adviser Bill Lightfoot, for one, plus former agency heads LaQuandra Nesbitt and Brenda Donald. But there’s hardly the flood of contributions from Bowser allies that tend to flow to the mayor’s preferred candidates. Recall the way Salah Czapary started earning some serious investment from the Green Team in 2022 once he showed signs that he could mount a serious challenge to Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau.

Dark money groups aligned with the mayor haven’t been targeting the race in any serious way either. The big business-backed Opportunity DC started running a tough-on-crime mail campaign against Lewis George late last year, but has since gone fairly quiet. Similarly, the local chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, which made so many waves with their anti-Lewis George mailers four years ago, hasn’t made a peep about the race.

This could change in a hurry as these independent expenditure groups won’t report their finances again until after the primary—one of the many loopholes in D.C.’s campaign finance system. But their absence thus far is conspicuous considering voters will start receiving mail-in ballots in just a few weeks. If Bowser’s allies want to provide outside help to overcome Gore’s underwhelming financials, they’re running out of time to do so.

Part of the problem for Lewis George’s opponents is that crime has been falling pretty substantially this year, a fact that the incumbent repeatedly pointed out Tuesday night. Numbers may creep back up as the hot summer months approach (as they typically do), but even Bowser has admitted the sky isn’t falling. 

And that leaves challengers like Gore repeating stale police union talking points. 

“The votes have been against law enforcement, the votes have been against protecting citizens,” Gore said Tuesday. “This is an environment set by our Council very specifically to take police out of public safety, plain and simple. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about that.”

Of course, Lewis George wasn’t even on the Council when many of the votes supposedly “defunding the police” happened in 2020. And she has used her record as a prosecutor with the attorney general’s office as a shield against many of these tough-on-crime attacks. 

But, often, Lewis George has been able to defuse these critiques by defending her positions passionately rather than retreating from them. She’s taken some heat for her vote against expanding pretrial detention in last summer’s big crime bill, but her emotional argument against the policy put her opponents on the defensive when she delivered it from that dais (and LL has since heard it cited several times since around the Wilson Building). 

So when Gore and Johnson spent Tuesday’s forum characterizing the police reform movement of 2020 and 2021 as an aberration that drove down police morale and made the city less safe, Lewis George pushed back hard, and the crowd responded in kind.

“It wasn’t that we were against police officers; it was Black people saying, ‘We don’t want to be murdered,’” Lewis George said. “‘We want you to serve in our communities, but we want you to be public servants, and we don’t want you to murder our young Black men and our young Black people. And because, as mothers, as sisters, as brothers, we’re scared, sending our Black sons out into the street and hoping they don’t get killed.’ … I don’t think we should apologize for that because I think it moved us forward.”