Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has faced exactly the re-election campaign she hoped to avoid: locked in a close struggle not with a White businessman — she’d won that fight before — but against Councilmember Nithya Raman, a woman of color and former ally who came at the mayor from her left.
Their contest, now in its final weeks, has tested Los Angeles’ political complexion and may update the profile of its evolving electorate. It also has offered a case study on the subtle differences between liberal Democrats and Democratic socialists, along with the periodic reminder that races for mayor are ideological, yes, but also fundamentally judgments about leadership and promise.
Do Angelenos want a seasoned and tested veteran for the next four years, albeit one whose experiences have not all been positive? Or will they opt for a younger, dynamic but still largely unknown alternative? Those questions may be just as germane for voters as any broader conclusions about which candidate is more liberal or more homeowner-friendly.
The runoff election between Bass and Raman nearly did not happen at all. Raman waited until the last minute, after a couple of business-oriented White guys had passed on the race, to put her hat in the ring. That created a threeway contest on the June ballot, with Bass and Raman forced to navigate the distracting, though ultimately feckless, candidacy of ex-reality TV star Spencer Pratt, whose furious but mostly idiotic campaign drew national attention but hardly budged the Los Angeles political dial.
Pratt spent months fulminating about the city government having burned down his house, then squandered public sympathy with a memoir that revealed himself as having blown hundreds of thousands of dollars on luxury items and ammunition, not to mention his bizarre belief in the power of crystals and his willingness to sell out his friends to advance his ambition.
He lost, to the amazement of President Donald Trump but to the surprise of no one who watches Los Angeles and California politics closely.
Instead, the liberal Bass was left to face the even more liberal Raman, a former friend who spied the opening created by Bass’ shaky approval numbers and signed up for the campaign just hours before the deadline.
Their campaign has been both invigorating and complicated. On the one hand, it has given Angelenos a genuine chance to consider the differences, small though they are, in the philosophies and styles of these two leaders. Their differences are partly ideological: Bass is more supportive of policing responses to crime and more willing to push hard to remove homeless encampments. Raman tends to see police as more threatening, and she is inclined to counsel the homeless into shelter rather than to push them in that direction.
Both candidates talk about affordability — it’s the watchword in a cycle where President Trump has so conspicuously failed to bring down inflation, especially since his decision to go to war in Iran has disrupted international oil prices — and they work to outdo each other in their promises to protect immigrants against a ravenous federal government.
But the mayor’s office is not a hotbed of ideological purity. Bass is the sixth mayor of Los Angeles whom I’ve covered, and if there is a consistency across those leaders, it is that the problems mayors face tend to strip away their political preconceptions.
Mayor Richard Riordan ran as a businessman “tough enough to turn L.A. around,” and ended up devoting much of his work to the region’s schools. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa started as a labor organizer and became a sharp critic of teachers unions. All mayors discover that there is not a Republican or Democratic, or Democratic socialist, way to fill a pothole.
This election has underscored that. The same Nithya Raman who champions rent control and government action to make L.A. more affordable recognizes that the government doesn’t build housing. She enthusiastically campaigned on a platform of reducing government regulation to clear the way for housing construction.
And the same Mayor Bass whose early forays into community action included criticizing the LAPD for its racism and brutality and challenging elected officials who treated addiction as a crime rather than an illness now pushes to expand the police department and involve its officers in cleaning up MacArthur Park. She is a more nuanced leader today than she was four years ago, when she trounced Rick Caruso for this office.
If national politics tends to polarize candidates, local politics does the opposite. It reminds those at the heart of it that problems need solutions, not programs. Not everyone gets that, but Raman and Bass do. It’s one of many things they have in common.
Los Angeles ducked a bullet in this cycle. If Spencer Pratt had been just a little better received the city would have been forced to weather a long summer and fall of empty rhetoric and moronic arguments. Instead, Los Angeles got the choice that reflects its electorate at this juncture — one divided between moderate Democrats, many of them longtime residents, homeowners, some with kids in school; and Democratic socialists, younger, newer to the city, renters.
The former camp has Bass, the latter Raman, though each attracts some crossover (some younger voters value experience; some homeowners support rent control). In November, we will learn who the next mayor is. And what kind of city Los Angeles is.
