The choices for mayor of Los Angeles aren’t ideal. But someone’s going to be mayor.
Who should it be?
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ time as mayor can be best summed up by that interview of her staring vacantly out into the void after the Palisades fire. Her judgment in personnel decisions can likewise probably be summed up by Brian K. Williams, her deputy mayor who pleaded guilty to calling in a fake bomb threat to City Hall. And reports that she directed the watering down of the post-Palisades report (which she denies) and that her press team has used disappearing WhatsApp messages to communicate are totally on-brand for her.
On the homelessness front, Bass has presided over what can only be described as failure. In fact, homelessness counts ticked back up this year 3.4%, nearly triple the rate of the county-wide increase. That she resisted Controller Kenneth Mejia’s efforts to audit her homelessness program Inside Safe again speaks to her contempt for accountability and transparency.
For all of these failures, and more, she’s still seemingly the more conservative choice in this race.
One reason is her set of supporters. The city’s business groups and the police union have backed her. But the first has Stockholm Syndrome and the latter of course is backing Bass because she delivered $1 billion in raises and benefit enhancements to them. On the other hand, there’s a plausible case it’s better to have a mayor who has the ear of businesses and the police rather than far-left activists.
Another reason Bass is the more conservative choice is simply that she’s already the mayor and Angelenos can more or less know what to expect from her. Decline within certain bounds. She’ll sign away the store to the police union and whoever else she needs short-term political help from. Basically. But the city hasn’t gone completely broke, yet. That counts for something.
Then there’s Nithya Raman, the council member best known for being the first self-described democratic socialist on the Los Angeles City Council. The self-proclaimed supporter of “big government intervention” says she doesn’t have government grocery stores on the agenda and that what she wants to do is make government work for the people.
In an interview earlier this year with the editorial board of this paper, she seemed willing to criticize the city’s prioritizing of special interest groups (like the police union) and projects (like the convention center expansion) over the practical needs of Los Angeles. The fact that the vast majority of special interests in the city, especially public employee unions, are backing Bass over Raman is a point in Raman’s favor. If she’s elected, she won’t owe them anything.
Raman says a lot of perfectly sensible things when it comes to housing policy; unlike many on the left, she recognizes the need for market-rate housing and has called for reforms to LA’s self-defeating transfer taxes that (surprise!) have ended up hurting the housing market. Indeed, her housing plan is infinitely better than Bass’ resistance to allowing more housing to get built in more parts of the city.
But for every reasonable thing she says, she has a lot of really bad takes and her status as a democratic socialist endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America-LA should make most people queasy.
The police union put out an ad highlighting her opposition to prohibiting encampments within 500 feet of schools. While she’s right that the mere clearing of encampments is insufficient, it’s also the case that parents and community members aren’t wrong to want encampments away from schools. No doubt, to many ordinary people, her stand makes her look like an out-of-touch ideologue.
Ditto her appearance on the podcast of far-left extremist Hasan Piker, where she agreed that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Asked on Tuesday September 29 about it at the Jewish Los Angeles Mayoral Forum, she was twice asked how she defines “genocide,” but talked around it by saying she used it because unnamed experts used the term.
Use of a loaded word should probably come with a serviceable definition. Then again, she’s running for a municipal post, and her international policy views are mostly irrelevant to the day-to-day things she’d be doing. And on the other hand, Raman was censured in 2024 by DSA-LA for having accepted support from Democrats for Israel-LA. The horror.
Perhaps the strongest argument for Raman is that she’s not Bass. But the reverse is also the strongest argument for Bass.
Should Bass win re-election, we basically know how things will go. It’ll just be more of the same, with Bass delivering more money for the special interests that got her re-elected and dragging her feet on state mandates for more housing. Whatever progress is made on any front will be in spite of whatever Bass or the City Council are doing.
Should Raman win, I wouldn’t expect Maoist struggle sessions in the apparently renamed Pershing Square. As someone who is not-Bass and more ideas-driven, Raman might be able to channel her political capital to some constructive ends. If she sticks to being a “sewer socialist” who focuses on getting municipal government to work better rather than dreaming up new ways for government to meddle in everything, that’s practically better than being a mayor who oversaw the burning down of whole neighborhoods.
But on the other hand, I expect Raman to be more interventionist than Bass, but by how much I’m not sure. That Raman is backed by Unite Here Local 11, one of the most obnoxious and odious unions in the state, tells me she will probably be pretty bad for business.
The union is backing her, among other reasons, because she’s more supportive of cracking down on short-term rentals than Bass is. As a supporter of private property rights, I don’t see it as the city’s business to tell homeowners they can’t rent to visitors. And as a supporter of more housing, I don’t buy the argument that housing scarcity justifies curtailing those rights.
It’s things like that that make the trade-off challenging for someone like me and many other Angelenos.
It won’t be surprising at all to see many people simply skipping the mayoral race in protest or disgust, which would then leave the vote to the share of the electorate that can stomach more left-leaning candidates.
Either outcome at that point wouldn’t surprise me, though the vibe seems to be that Raman’s the one with momentum.
But how much risk are Angelenos willing to take? Will some conservatives bail out Bass in the end? Or is Bass so unpopular that some disgruntled Spencer Pratt voters will end up sealing the deal for Raman?
I guess we’ll see, and I can’t really blame anyone for how they decide.
In the end, Angelenos will get the mayor they deserve — whether they vote for one or not.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com