How liberal is Los Angeles? That question is very much on the minds of political insiders and observers these days as the city turns to its upcoming election and makes important decisions about its future: how much to invest in public safety, how much to tax its wealthiest residents, how to treat those who live here but without formal immigration documents.
One trend is clear: The city leans ever further to the left. Once the bulwark of conversative politics under the protection of a Republican business leadership and a Republican newspaper, the city has moved steadily leftward in recent decades. The days when Richard Riordan, a moderate Republican, could win the support of the electorate are far behind today’s Los Angeles.
Some of that is evident in voter registration. When Riordan was elected in 1993, more than 30% of the city’s voters were registered Republican. Today, the number is somewhere around half that. As measured by voter registration, Los Angeles is significantly more Democratic — and less Republican — than New York City, which recently elected Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as its mayor.
But voter registration is just a first cut at the question. Some of the evidence of L.A.’s shifting political center is more localized and impressionistic.
Always a city of neighborhoods, Los Angeles in recent years has seen the rise of more liberal activism in many of those communities, some of it owing to vastly improved outreach and voter contact work by the region’s Democratic Socialists.
The result has been a surge in liberal representation on the City Council, where Eunisses Hernandez, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman anchor a group that is well to the left of many mainstream Democrats. Those members and a growing number of their colleagues are skeptical of spending for police, eager to find new sources of taxation that tap the wealthy, committed to higher wages for working people and fiercely protective of residents, regardless of immigration status.
That program, backed by grassroots organizing and sophisticated political leadership, has touched voters, and has made the left far more viable in local elections.
The political muscle of Los Angeles’ rising liberal faction is demonstrated not just in the number of candidates who identify with the Democratic Socialists but more broadly in the way it helps shape the policies and priorities of the city generally.
It was not long ago that support for increased LAPD spending was a unifying city objective. Conservatives favored the idea of stricter enforcement of the law, while liberals saw it as a way to pay for police reform and empowering its oversight. No more.
Although “defund the police” is a bygone slogan, the LAPD’s critics are plentiful and unwilling to acquiesce to once-routine budget requests to maintain or expand its ranks. The department today employs about 8,500 officers, well below its peak staffing levels and far below the long-sought goal of 10,000.
There are many reasons for the leftward shift, and not all of them are specific to Los Angeles. The nation’s economic inequality continues to expand, and the plight of those left out of economic growth grows increasingly dire and visible in big cities, where opulence and poverty live side by side.
That’s inescapable in modern Los Angeles, with its grand homes, flashy boutiques and grinding homelessness.
The left also has clearly thrived in the era of President Trump. The president, who is fond of denigrating Los Angeles and California, is reviled in Los Angeles, and his influence has radicalized liberals, making them willing to vote for new congressional maps and rise to the defense of undocumented migrants.
More purely political changes have contributed as well. Los Angeles in 2015 switched its election schedule from voting in odd-numbered years to coinciding with the gubernatorial and presidential election cycles.
That’s been a change with mixed results, but one clear consequence has been to broaden the participants in city elections. An electorate once dominated by homeowners and wealthier interests now increasingly includes lower-income voters and renters, whose interests tend to pull the city toward programs such as rent control and away from priorities such as forceful police protection.
The tug affects the council, where several members are now renters. And it affects the race for citywide offices, including mayor, where incumbent Karen Bass and Raman are vying for leadership of the city’s liberal to very liberal core. Bass would love to see Spencer Pratt edge out Raman, but that’s only because he would make a more hapless opponent in November.
For Bass, the strongest card she has is her ardent opposition to President Trump, whose ICE raids have united Los Angeles as few other matters have — testament to what now brings together this city’s varied political strains.
“Staying silent or minimizing what is happening is not an option,” Bass told a group of supporters recently. “This senseless death, lawlessness and violence must end. And so must the presence of ICE in Los Angeles.”
Angelenos — moderate, liberal and very liberal — joined to stand in applause for that.
