Jun 21, 2026
Call It A Win
...because it's a fucking win.
Young women now have 'close to zero' risk of cervical cancer death after HPV jab
3 days ago
Children vaccinated at age 12–13 against HPV (human papillomavirus) have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30, landmark new research reveals.
The first study of its kind shows deaths have fallen sharply since school-age girls began being offered it in 2008, and around 200 lives have been saved in England so far thanks to the vaccine.
Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 - the first time that had happened over a five-year period.
Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.
"It's incredible to think that a single jab can almost eliminate a particular type of cancer," said Prof Peter Sasieni, the lead researcher at Queen Mary University of London.
Overall, cervical cancer is still the 14th most common cancer among females in the UK, with 3,300 people diagnosed every year.
It is thought HPV, a virus which is spread through close skin-to-skin contact, causes 99% of those cases.
Most HPV infections clear up without any problems, but some cause abnormal cell changes and can lead to cancer years later.
The report's authors expect the numbers dying from the disease to continue to fall as more are given a HPV jab and vaccinated people grow older.
Cancer Research UK, which funded the research, described the findings as an "incredible milestone" but warned that vaccination rates in England were running below recommended levels.
"We know the HPV vaccine is extremely effective at stopping cervical cancer before it starts and for the first time these findings show it is saving lives," said the organisation's chief executive Michelle Mitchell.
'I'm a real advocate for this vaccine'
Alexandra Legg left school just before the HPV vaccine was introduced in England.
In 2021, just as she was planning her wedding, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer aged 30.
"I remember hearing the words and I just couldn't really breathe very well," she says.
"I was so upset - everything went through my head, it was so hard."
Her treatment involved the removal of lymph nodes in her abdomen, although surgeons were able to preserve a small part of her cervix, giving her a chance of becoming pregnant.
Alexandra and her three-year-old daughter Ivy, who was born after she had cervical cancer
Just a year later, Ivy was born. Her middle name is Marvella - meaning "miracle".
"Those nine months were so scary because I was at such risk of losing her at any point," she says.
Alexandra says her life could have been far less traumatic if she had been offered the HPV vaccine and urged those eligible to get it.
"I'm a real advocate for this vaccine and when Ivy is old enough, she'll be first in the queue," she adds.
Reduction in deaths 'tip of the iceberg'
Prof Sasieni, who specialises in cancer epidemiology at Queen Mary University of London, describes the reduction in deaths since the introduction of the vaccine as the "tip of the iceberg".
"As vaccinated generations grow older, we'll see many more lives saved from cervical cancer," he adds.
"New research shows just how vital it is to keep HPV vaccination levels high so more people are protected."
The UK government has pledged to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem by 2040.
But the latest data shows vaccination rates across the country have fallen below recommended levels.
Data from the UK Health Security Agency shows that 76% of girls in England were vaccinated by the age of 15 in 2024-25, well below the 90% that the World Health Organization (WHO) says is needed to eliminate cervical cancer.
"It's essential that the UK Government and health systems urgently address this with targeted action to reach communities where uptake is the lowest," says Michelle Mitchell at Cancer Research UK.
Dr Sharif Ismail from the UK Health Security Agency urged young people to come forward if they had missed being vaccinated.
Despite the rollout of the HPV vaccine, women aged 25 to 64 are still advised to attend cervical screening (formerly known as a smear test).
Boys have also been given the HPV vaccine since 2019, which helps to protect them against anal, penis, throat and mouth cancers, and reduces the risk of them passing the virus on to girls.
The Department of Health and Social Care in England said the study showed the "extraordinary impact of the HPV vaccination".
"We are boosting vaccine uptake so that more young people benefit from this life-saving protection - including rolling out catch-up HPV vaccination campaigns via community pharmacies," said a spokesman.
HPV self-testing kits are also being sent out to women who have not yet come forward for screening, he added.
3 days ago
Children vaccinated at age 12–13 against HPV (human papillomavirus) have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30, landmark new research reveals.
The first study of its kind shows deaths have fallen sharply since school-age girls began being offered it in 2008, and around 200 lives have been saved in England so far thanks to the vaccine.
Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 - the first time that had happened over a five-year period.
Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.
"It's incredible to think that a single jab can almost eliminate a particular type of cancer," said Prof Peter Sasieni, the lead researcher at Queen Mary University of London.
Overall, cervical cancer is still the 14th most common cancer among females in the UK, with 3,300 people diagnosed every year.
It is thought HPV, a virus which is spread through close skin-to-skin contact, causes 99% of those cases.
Most HPV infections clear up without any problems, but some cause abnormal cell changes and can lead to cancer years later.
The report's authors expect the numbers dying from the disease to continue to fall as more are given a HPV jab and vaccinated people grow older.
Cancer Research UK, which funded the research, described the findings as an "incredible milestone" but warned that vaccination rates in England were running below recommended levels.
"We know the HPV vaccine is extremely effective at stopping cervical cancer before it starts and for the first time these findings show it is saving lives," said the organisation's chief executive Michelle Mitchell.
'I'm a real advocate for this vaccine'
Alexandra Legg left school just before the HPV vaccine was introduced in England.
In 2021, just as she was planning her wedding, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer aged 30.
"I remember hearing the words and I just couldn't really breathe very well," she says.
"I was so upset - everything went through my head, it was so hard."
Her treatment involved the removal of lymph nodes in her abdomen, although surgeons were able to preserve a small part of her cervix, giving her a chance of becoming pregnant.
Alexandra and her three-year-old daughter Ivy, who was born after she had cervical cancer
Just a year later, Ivy was born. Her middle name is Marvella - meaning "miracle".
"Those nine months were so scary because I was at such risk of losing her at any point," she says.
Alexandra says her life could have been far less traumatic if she had been offered the HPV vaccine and urged those eligible to get it.
"I'm a real advocate for this vaccine and when Ivy is old enough, she'll be first in the queue," she adds.
Reduction in deaths 'tip of the iceberg'
Prof Sasieni, who specialises in cancer epidemiology at Queen Mary University of London, describes the reduction in deaths since the introduction of the vaccine as the "tip of the iceberg".
"As vaccinated generations grow older, we'll see many more lives saved from cervical cancer," he adds.
"New research shows just how vital it is to keep HPV vaccination levels high so more people are protected."
The UK government has pledged to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem by 2040.
But the latest data shows vaccination rates across the country have fallen below recommended levels.
Data from the UK Health Security Agency shows that 76% of girls in England were vaccinated by the age of 15 in 2024-25, well below the 90% that the World Health Organization (WHO) says is needed to eliminate cervical cancer.
"It's essential that the UK Government and health systems urgently address this with targeted action to reach communities where uptake is the lowest," says Michelle Mitchell at Cancer Research UK.
Dr Sharif Ismail from the UK Health Security Agency urged young people to come forward if they had missed being vaccinated.
Despite the rollout of the HPV vaccine, women aged 25 to 64 are still advised to attend cervical screening (formerly known as a smear test).
Boys have also been given the HPV vaccine since 2019, which helps to protect them against anal, penis, throat and mouth cancers, and reduces the risk of them passing the virus on to girls.
The Department of Health and Social Care in England said the study showed the "extraordinary impact of the HPV vaccination".
"We are boosting vaccine uptake so that more young people benefit from this life-saving protection - including rolling out catch-up HPV vaccination campaigns via community pharmacies," said a spokesman.
HPV self-testing kits are also being sent out to women who have not yet come forward for screening, he added.
Erika Jordan
It's the pipes, and the unfiltered river water, and the whole Style-Over-Substance thing that characterizes Trump's very existence.
Jun 20, 2026
Plutocrats At Play
Peter Thiel expresses fear of a one world totalitarian government, while he and his fellow parasite billionaires have been talking about a "post government" world united by shared commercial interests.
Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society
More than 200 of the world's elites registered for a retreat whose agenda runs from panels on cult-building and sex to prepping for World War III.
A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online, WIRED has confirmed, naming participants in its events and revealing sensitive personal details they were assured would stay private.
The group, called Dialog, is a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members.
Madness.
When it seems the world is falling apart, and nobody in a position of power is stepping up to prevent it, then we have to consider the probability that someone wants it that way.
More than 200 of the world's elites registered for a retreat whose agenda runs from panels on cult-building and sex to prepping for World War III.
A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online, WIRED has confirmed, naming participants in its events and revealing sensitive personal details they were assured would stay private.
The group, called Dialog, is a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members.
A directory in the website's code was first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew. Known for exposing the US government’s No Fly List and breaching the surveillance-camera company Verkada, crimew tells WIRED the directory surfaced via an anonymous tip. WIRED independently verified its contents.
A source separately provided WIRED with the registration list for Dialog's 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant's membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.
Those executives appear side by side with senior US officials overseeing their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, two of the most important suppliers in the consumer data economy. He appears in the directory alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.
Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs case management for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data fusion for the Pentagon and intelligence community, is listed in the same society as Army secretary Dan Driscoll and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees agencies Palantir contracts with.
None of the individuals named in this story responded to requests for comment. Raffi Grinberg, who lists himself as Dialog’s executive director on his LinkedIn profile and is the author of the self-help book How to Be a Grown-Up, did not respond to a request for comment.
The registration records appear to show not only who belongs to Dialog but who attends. Of the 222 people signed up for the 2026 retreat, according to the leaked records, 87 are marked as first-time attendees. Others list histories stretching back more than a decade, and a handful to the society's founding 20 years ago. None of the registrants, Grynkewich included, used a government email address. All registered with personal or corporate accounts, placing their attendance outside the email systems subject to public-records laws.
What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. Asked on a sign-up form to predict the future, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs; others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or religious revival provoked by the disruption.
“Societal degeneration,” predicted one person, “will continue to accelerate.”
Members also list talents like “funhouse construction,” accent imitation, backcountry skiing, urban exploration, and “meditative and psychedelic inquiry into the nature of reality”; one offers “compassion and existential dread,” another “dinner parties, keeping secrets, remembering birthdays.” Their book recommendations skew toward the canonical and optimization-minded, Marcus Aurelius and Milan Kundera alongside Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, Peter Attia’s Outlive, and, from at least one attendee, Thiel’s own Zero to One.
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
The form also gathers sensitive answers, including each registrant’s "political leaning,” which Dialog promises “WILL NOT be shared in the app or with other participants, ever.” That data, and the matchmaking responses, were exposed in the leak.
The records sit in Airtable, a commercial database. For each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.
The leaked registration list also names senior figures absent from the public directory of 113: Randy Kroszner, a former governor of the Federal Reserve who now serves on the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee; Hallie Hoffman, a former general counsel and acting chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League; Peter Goettler, the president of the Cato Institute; Ryan Stowers, the executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation; and Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.
It also lists a cluster of Google and Google DeepMind executives, among them Tom Lue, who leads global affairs for the company's frontier AI division, and one working journalist, Souad Mekhennet, a former national security correspondent for The Washington Post. (She is listed as running an event called “Ulysses Book Club.”)
The rest of the membership spans hedge fund and private equity billionaires, current and former foreign officials, network television actors, best-selling authors, and religious leaders.
One of several internal documents Dialog left exposed on the same online database that held its registration records is a guide for event moderators, urging them to remind participants that everything is “off the record” and that comments should be concise and “nonobvious.” It also coaches them to model brief introductions to “avoid status signaling” in a room full of senators, dignitaries, and tycoons.
The discipline imposed by the group did not extend to its website. The directory was embedded in the code of dialog.org, a near-empty page, and was served to any visitor who viewed the page's source. A separate Dialog page, at app.dialog.org, presents a sign-in screen for “Dialog Global 2026,” outside Dublin. The page invites any visitor to sign in by email or Google account and presents no terms of service, no notice that the application is restricted to members, and no indication that an invitation is required.
Dialog has operated with little public footprint since its founding. It holds at least one retreat a year, with assigned seating, moderated sessions, and a rule that nothing said is for attribution. Past gatherings have been held at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona and the San Clemente Palace in Venice, Italy, according to Axios, which first reported the group's plans for a campus in the Washington, DC, area. It has been likened to a tech-industry version of Bilderberg, the off-the-record gathering of Western political and business elites.
Accounts describe retreats of around 100 participants. The 2026 registration list reviewed by WIRED names 222. Public glimpses are rare. The statistician Andrew Gelman published one of Dialog’s invitations to his blog in 2022, describing its format and a registration fee of more than $16,000. The 2014 retreat drew renewed attention this year when an invitation forwarded to the financier Jeffrey Epstein surfaced in the US Justice Department's release of the Epstein files. A “Jeff Epstein” appears on an attached list of past participants—but the person is actually the former CFO of Oracle, not the deceased sex trafficker.
Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.
Update: 6/18/2026: 2:17 pm EDT: Following this article’s publication, The Washington Post clarified that Souad Mekhennet is a former employee of the outlet.
A source separately provided WIRED with the registration list for Dialog's 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant's membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.
Those executives appear side by side with senior US officials overseeing their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, two of the most important suppliers in the consumer data economy. He appears in the directory alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.
Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs case management for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data fusion for the Pentagon and intelligence community, is listed in the same society as Army secretary Dan Driscoll and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees agencies Palantir contracts with.
None of the individuals named in this story responded to requests for comment. Raffi Grinberg, who lists himself as Dialog’s executive director on his LinkedIn profile and is the author of the self-help book How to Be a Grown-Up, did not respond to a request for comment.
The registration records appear to show not only who belongs to Dialog but who attends. Of the 222 people signed up for the 2026 retreat, according to the leaked records, 87 are marked as first-time attendees. Others list histories stretching back more than a decade, and a handful to the society's founding 20 years ago. None of the registrants, Grynkewich included, used a government email address. All registered with personal or corporate accounts, placing their attendance outside the email systems subject to public-records laws.
What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. Asked on a sign-up form to predict the future, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs; others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or religious revival provoked by the disruption.
“Societal degeneration,” predicted one person, “will continue to accelerate.”
Members also list talents like “funhouse construction,” accent imitation, backcountry skiing, urban exploration, and “meditative and psychedelic inquiry into the nature of reality”; one offers “compassion and existential dread,” another “dinner parties, keeping secrets, remembering birthdays.” Their book recommendations skew toward the canonical and optimization-minded, Marcus Aurelius and Milan Kundera alongside Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, Peter Attia’s Outlive, and, from at least one attendee, Thiel’s own Zero to One.
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
The form also gathers sensitive answers, including each registrant’s "political leaning,” which Dialog promises “WILL NOT be shared in the app or with other participants, ever.” That data, and the matchmaking responses, were exposed in the leak.
The records sit in Airtable, a commercial database. For each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.
The leaked registration list also names senior figures absent from the public directory of 113: Randy Kroszner, a former governor of the Federal Reserve who now serves on the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee; Hallie Hoffman, a former general counsel and acting chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League; Peter Goettler, the president of the Cato Institute; Ryan Stowers, the executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation; and Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.
It also lists a cluster of Google and Google DeepMind executives, among them Tom Lue, who leads global affairs for the company's frontier AI division, and one working journalist, Souad Mekhennet, a former national security correspondent for The Washington Post. (She is listed as running an event called “Ulysses Book Club.”)
The rest of the membership spans hedge fund and private equity billionaires, current and former foreign officials, network television actors, best-selling authors, and religious leaders.
One of several internal documents Dialog left exposed on the same online database that held its registration records is a guide for event moderators, urging them to remind participants that everything is “off the record” and that comments should be concise and “nonobvious.” It also coaches them to model brief introductions to “avoid status signaling” in a room full of senators, dignitaries, and tycoons.
The discipline imposed by the group did not extend to its website. The directory was embedded in the code of dialog.org, a near-empty page, and was served to any visitor who viewed the page's source. A separate Dialog page, at app.dialog.org, presents a sign-in screen for “Dialog Global 2026,” outside Dublin. The page invites any visitor to sign in by email or Google account and presents no terms of service, no notice that the application is restricted to members, and no indication that an invitation is required.
Dialog has operated with little public footprint since its founding. It holds at least one retreat a year, with assigned seating, moderated sessions, and a rule that nothing said is for attribution. Past gatherings have been held at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona and the San Clemente Palace in Venice, Italy, according to Axios, which first reported the group's plans for a campus in the Washington, DC, area. It has been likened to a tech-industry version of Bilderberg, the off-the-record gathering of Western political and business elites.
Accounts describe retreats of around 100 participants. The 2026 registration list reviewed by WIRED names 222. Public glimpses are rare. The statistician Andrew Gelman published one of Dialog’s invitations to his blog in 2022, describing its format and a registration fee of more than $16,000. The 2014 retreat drew renewed attention this year when an invitation forwarded to the financier Jeffrey Epstein surfaced in the US Justice Department's release of the Epstein files. A “Jeff Epstein” appears on an attached list of past participants—but the person is actually the former CFO of Oracle, not the deceased sex trafficker.
Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.
Update: 6/18/2026: 2:17 pm EDT: Following this article’s publication, The Washington Post clarified that Souad Mekhennet is a former employee of the outlet.
Seems To Be A Trend
Practically my entire adult life training was all about not this Socialist shit!
It's hard for an old horse to learn how to just hang out with the herd and let the younger mustangs romp.
This is becoming a new world, and the old one is dying hard. But die it must.
The triumph of a democratic socialist in the D.C. mayoral race is the latest sign that younger urban voters are turbo-charging candidates who promise to go big on affordability and take on President Trump.
Why it matters:
While Washington joined New York and Seattle as the latest big city to elect a democratic socialist, Janeese Lewis George's victory was less about her political label than about punishing prices and anger at the president.
State of play:
State of play:
Lewis George, who handily defeated a moderate in the Democratic primary, marks a break from decades of business-friendly politicians running the nation's capital. Three trends explain her rise:
- Unhappiness with the city's direction stood at the highest level (55%) since Marion Barry's reign 28 years ago, per a Washington Post-Schar School poll. A lot of that disaffection was driven by Trump, but there was also a shout for change after three terms of Mayor Muriel Bowser.
- Washington's influx of white residents, who tend to be younger and more progressive, made winning that vote even more important, and Lewis George ran up the score in neighborhoods where they've settled. She also proved critics wrong by winning in majority-Black, working-class communities — the only place she lost was the city's wealthiest enclave, Northwest's Ward 3.
- Nearly half of D.C.'s registered Democrats have a favorable view of socialism, per the poll — so it's not a turnoff. Three other progressives led D.C. Council races, giving the presumptive mayor powerful allies.
Zoom in:
Lewis George appears to have broken through by:
- Echoing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, she made the cost of living her No. 1 issue. Her rival, Kenyan McDuffie, ran on public safety and called her soft on crime, even as violence was fading as a top issue.
- Assembling a potent get-out-the-vote machine that encompassed almost every major local union plus the Democratic Socialists of America's local chapter, which helped knock on what she says were 200,000 doors.
- Crafting a vibey social media campaign that might not have reached New York City-level cinematic appeal but attracted eyes, including on Gen Z's favorite hangout app, Partiful.
Lewis George's campaign rhetoric is about to collide with governing realities.
- The city's economic slump calls for business growth. Trump's slashing of the federal workforce has unemployment sitting at 6.3%, city data shows, and population growth is slowing. The city is dealing with a budget gap of up to $1.1 billion this year.
- Lewis George is already adapting to facts on the ground. She appeared to distance herself from a new wealth tax in an upcoming budget vote, and when asked if her pricey promise of universal child care is achievable in year one, she told Axios: "We will see."
- She'll also need Trump's help. Lewis George made two pitches to Washington's business elite: Rejuvenating empty federal offices downtown, and kickstarting a multi-billion dollar Union Station expansion. TBD if Trump bites.
For most D.C. voters, Lewis George's message hit all the right notes: Everything's expensive, and Trump is making life worse.
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