{"id":518154,"date":"2026-11-04T10:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T10:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/518154\/"},"modified":"2026-11-04T10:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T10:08:11","slug":"nithya-raman-narrowly-leads-karen-bass-in-tight-l-a-mayors-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/518154\/","title":{"rendered":"Nithya Raman narrowly leads Karen Bass in tight L.A. mayor’s race"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman pulled narrowly ahead of Mayor Karen Bass, her onetime political ally, in the race to lead the nation\u2019s second largest city, according to partial returns released Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Bass, a veteran politician who had been politically weakened in the wake of the 2025 Palisades fire, had been attempting to hold off a vigorous challenge from Raman, who stunned the city\u2019s establishment this year by entering the race at the last minute.<\/p>\n

Appearing before a boisterous audience at the Greek Theatre plaza, Raman said her campaign was about taking on the status quo. L.A., she said, has stopped \u201cbeing a place where we could build things, where we could open things, where we could film things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHopelessness can be fatal for a city,\u201d she told the crowd. \u201cBut this campaign refused to accept that. You refused to accept that. You saw hopelessness and you chose hope, because you know that Los Angeles is a city with hope in its soil.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bass, addressing her election night party earlier in the evening, voiced confidence that she would prevail, saying her administration had worked to make neighborhoods safer, bring homeless people off the streets and creating more job opportunities for working people.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will always fight for the city that we deserve,\u201d said Bass, addressing a cheering crowd at the Loews Hollywood Hotel.<\/p>\n

Tuesday\u2019s early returns did not bode well for Bass, since Raman is expected to secure a larger portion of the late-arriving ballots in the coming days. Those ballots tend to be cast by the younger voters who serve as her base.<\/p>\n

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The first ballots counted on election night are from voters who tend to skew older and more conservative, a group that Bass needs to win by large margins, said Paul Mitchell, who heads the polling data firm PDI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is probably better numbers than the Raman campaign could have expected,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was probably Karen\u2019s best set of voters.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Los Feliz, supporters of Raman flooded into the Greek Theatre plaza, with many cheering the election victories of Democrats in other parts of the country. Maria Spear, a grad student who knocked on doors for Raman, said affordability was a top issue in the campaign.<\/p>\n

Spear, who spends more than half her paycheck on rent, said Raman \u201crepresents the change that I think a lot of people in the city are really yearning for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raman, first elected to the council in 2020, joined the race in February, launching a challenge<\/a> against someone she had publicly endorsed just a few weeks earlier. Since then, the contest has been in many ways a generational fight, with the two staking out differing positions on public safety, housing production and strategies for ending homelessness.<\/p>\n

Bass, 73, was backed by much of the city\u2019s political establishment, including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the county\u2019s Democratic Party. Raman, 45, has aligned herself with groups that have emerged at City Hall more recently, including the left-wing Democratic Socialists of America and Streets For All, a transportation advocacy group.<\/p>\n

During the campaign\u2019s final days, Bass went to venues populated by older voters, including senior centers in West Adams and in Northridge, where she danced with elderly Angelenos. Raman showed up at bars and nightclubs and on college campuses, spreading her call for change at City Hall.<\/p>\n

Bass, who previously served in Congress and the state Legislature, secured just 34% of the vote in the June 2 primary, a weak showing for an incumbent. Her disapproval ratings had remained high ever since the Palisades fire in 2025, which broke out when she was out of the country on a diplomatic mission.<\/p>\n

Bass attempted to reverse her fortunes by touting her administration\u2019s progress in reducing violent crime, fast-tracking affordable housing and bringing down unsheltered homelessness \u2014 the number of people living outside and in their cars \u2014 by 11%.<\/p>\n

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Raman, on the other hand, offered lacerating critiques of the mayor\u2019s record, saying her fight against homelessness has been costly and ineffective. Raman, who took credit for a major reduction in encampments in her own Hollywood Hills district, vowed to cut street homelessness in half citywide by summer 2028 and completely by the end of her first four-year term.<\/p>\n

Since the June 2 primary election, Bass and Raman have received a huge influx of financial support from outside political interests.<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file officers, put at least $6 million into a political action committee that has been airing ads criticizing Raman over her approach to public safety, particularly her opposition to a law barring homeless encampments near schools. The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group flush with funding from Airbnb, put another $2 million into efforts to promote Bass.<\/p>\n

Raman said those outside campaigns showed that \u201cpay-to-play\u201d politics have dominated Bass\u2019 tenure. The mayor received that political support after giving expensive raises to police officers and committing the city to a $2.6-billion upgrade of the Convention Center, she said.<\/p>\n

Bass said the Convention Center will give the city an economic boost and argued that the police raises kept the city from losing a much larger number of officers during her time in office.<\/p>\n

Raman received her own support from well-funded interests. The carpenters union, whose leaders have voiced anger that Bass did not incorporate labor standards into her affordable housing initiative, put $3.8 million into a campaign that savaged Bass over her handling of the Palisades fire, homelessness and other issues.<\/p>\n

Hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick, who has advocated for an expansion in the city\u2019s bike lane network, put $8 million into a pair of committees that have promoted Raman, including the one overseen by the carpenters.<\/p>\n

Bass went on the offensive as well, hitting Raman over her shifting political positions on public safety, homelessness, housing production and other issues. Bass repeatedly pointed out that none of Raman\u2019s colleagues had endorsed her, saying it showed that she does not work well with others.<\/p>\n

Yet another campaign flash point was Police Chief Jim McDonnell, who was appointed by Bass to run the LAPD in 2024.<\/p>\n

Raman vowed to replace McDonnell, saying he had not \u201cmet the moment\u201d during the federal immigration raids that upended the city. She accused the LAPD of protecting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and mistreating protesters, firing tear gas and less-lethal munitions at them.<\/p>\n

As the campaign progressed, Raman gave different answers about her timeline for replacing the police chief. At one point, she said she would wait until 2030, after his term had ended. She then walked that back and said she would replace him sooner than 2030, without offering specifics. She later said she would start the replacement process on Day 1.<\/p>\n

The race tightened in the campaign\u2019s final weeks. In an October poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, Bass erased an 11-point gap<\/a> with Raman. Both were tied at 40% support among likely L.A. voters, the survey found.<\/p>\n

About a fifth were still undecided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman pulled narrowly ahead of Mayor Karen Bass, her onetime political ally, in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[12858,3705,1409,84956,217,2903,1493,64873,48,52,51,47,50,49,13825,56779,1839,73547,1492,2211,32081],"class_list":["post-518154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bass","tag-campaign","tag-city","tag-councilmember-nithya-raman","tag-day","tag-encampment","tag-homelessness","tag-l-a-mayor","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mayor-karen-bass","tag-other-issue","tag-palisades-fire","tag-primary","tag-public-safety","tag-race","tag-raman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}