Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman Set To Oust L.A. Mayor Karen Bass

On Wednesday night, the private election-watcher Decision Desk HQ called the razor-thin mayoral race in slow ballot-counting Los Angeles in favor of challenger Nithya Raman over the fire-embattled incumbent Karen Bass. If and when that call is confirmed, L.A. will join New York City and Washington, D.C. under the mayoral rule of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Raman, an Indian-born 45-year-old City Councilwoman and former owner of a homelessness nonprofit, was up 51.7 percent to 48.3 percent with 72 percent of the vote counted as of 7:20 a.m. West Coast time. The full count might take as long as another week.

That the race is close at all is testament to the political dysfunction of America’s second-largest city. Bass, the 73-year-old machine-politics lifer who came alarmingly close to being Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick in 2020, is remarkably, if deservedly, unpopular, with an unfavorability/favorability rating of 65 percent to 32 percent, according to a recent Berkeley IGS/Los Angeles Times poll. She was inexplicably in Ghana during the ruinous and predictable Pacific Palisades fire in January 2025, breaking a campaign promise to not indulge in her precious overseas trips. And she did not impress upon return, redirecting blame elsewhere for the city’s many emergency-planning shortfalls, then presiding over an agonizingly slow rebuilding process.

California’s top-two jungle primary system produced two main challenges to Bass’s power of incumbency: The reality TV populist Spencer Pratt to the right (in the absence of more experienced candidates, such as Austin Beutner or Bass’s 2022 opponent Rick Caruso), and then on the left a late-breaking challenge from Bass’s former ally Raman. Bass and Raman scratched out the top two slots, 34.3 percent and 29 percent to Pratt’s 25.5, after which the colorful outsider lamented that “Angelenos are now stuck with two morons responsible for all their problems and now have to choose between dumb and dumber.”

Those seeking a Raman comp with New York Mayor and DSA kingmaker Zohran Mamdani have to overcome a rather large gap in observable charisma. Mamdani, with his perma-smile and social media slickness, has an approval/disapproval rating of 69 percent to 28 percent, while the more tongue-tied Raman, who did not impress at mayoral debates, sits slightly underwater, at 42 percent/49 percent. Her colleagues on the City Council don’t like her. Even the DSA has a fraught relationship with their latest poster child; the day before the election, the national DSA, which had never endorsed her, voted only 14–13 to not revoke the endorsement by the local DSA chapter, over the usually disqualifying issue that Raman does not support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel. As The New York Times put it, “If Ms. Raman wins, [political experts] say, it will not be because she is the West Coast Mamdani. It will be because she is not Ms. Bass.”

On the stump, Raman presented herself as an outside challenger to a status quo that has allowed homelessness to spread and development to stall. Los Angeles, she complained to followers on election night, “stopped being a place where we could build things, where we could open things, where we could film things.” Her policy differences with Bass were narrow, if vociferously stated. As the Los Angeles Times delicately headlined it, “L.A. mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has strong opinions. But they often change.”

So now L.A. is set to have a Democratic Socialist overseeing the 2028 Summer Olympics, and seeking to undo the wreckage of Democratic politics by trying something a little further to the left.

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