Rae Huang [Photo: Rae Huang]<\/p>\n
Rae Huang, a Presbyterian pastor, nonprofit executive and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has announced her candidacy for the June 2, 2026, Los Angeles mayoral election, challenging incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.<\/p>\n
Millions of workers and young people are searching for an alternative to the policies of austerity, repression and war offered from the two corporate-controlled parties in the US. There is growing opposition to Trump\u2019s fascistic drive to establish a dictatorship, the war on immigrants, the destruction of social programs and the global eruption of war and genocide. In Los Angeles, Bass\u2019s administration has become a byword for austerity, law-and-order policing and unrestrained support for real-estate developers.<\/p>\n
Bass\u2019s 2025-26 budget has fueled opposition among workers facing overwork, stagnant wages and crumbling services. Her response to January\u2019s wildfires, after slashing fire department funding and leaving positions vacant, intensified public anger over the inadequate response to climate disasters.<\/p>\n
Bass has positioned herself as a law-and-order Democrat, denouncing the slogan \u201cDefund the Police\u201d and expanding the LAPD budget, even as the department joins federal immigration raids\u2014exposing the fraud of her \u201csanctuary\u201d rhetoric. Her homelessness policy follows the same pattern: while declaring a state of emergency and launching \u201cInside Safe,\u201d she has channeled funds to developers, cleared encampments and warehoused the unhoused in overpriced private facilities.<\/p>\n
Under these conditions, little-known figures such as New York\u2019s Zohran Mamdani and Seattle\u2019s Katie Wilson have gained sudden support. Huang is of the same political type, and like Mamdani and Wilson, her campaign is a political trap.<\/p>\n
In her campaign launch, Huang states she is \u201crunning to make Los Angeles affordable and healthy,\u201d promising to \u201clower our rent,\u201d \u201cdeliver housing for all,\u201d \u201ccreate an economy for the people, not the billionaires,\u201d transition to renewable energy, provide \u201cfast and free transit,\u201d protect small businesses, and achieve \u201creal public safety\u201d through mental-health services. <\/p>\n
How all this is to be achieved, she does not say, but her whole campaign is based on the lie that the interests of workers can be secured through the Democratic Party, and without a frontal assault on the wealth of the oligarchy, the real-estate developers, finance capital and corporate titans who dictate city policy, in Los Angeles and beyond. <\/p>\n
On housing, Huang acknowledges the scale of the crisis with mass evictions, record rents and tens of thousands pushed onto the streets, but refuses to name the principal forces responsible: the Democrats who control the state, real estate conglomerates, banks, private-equity firms and developers who treat housing as a commodity and who dominate Los Angeles politics. Her proposals for stronger tenant protections, legal-aid expansion, \u201cdeeply affordable\u201d units, and nonprofit-led \u201csocial housing\u201d all accept the continued private ownership of land and housing.<\/p>\n
Her enthusiastic support for SB 567 and SB 555 further proves this pro-capitalist orientation. SB 567, marketed as an \u201canti-eviction\u201d measure, preserves the prerogatives of landlords and private developers. SB 555 mandates only a study of social housing, producing no homes and committing the state to nothing.<\/p>\n
Huang\u2019s campaign rhetoric on immigration is even more revealing. She asserts: \u201cas a mayor I would be enforcing the fact that we should not be allowing any federal-LAPD relationships. We should be enforcing what it means when we say we are a sanctuary city and ensuring that all of our families are safe.\u201d <\/p>\n
These phrases are deliberately deceitful and indistinguishable from those uttered by every Democratic politician in California. The entire sanctuary-city framework has been exposed as a fraud by the real experience of workers throughout the state, where figures like Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass have simultaneously proclaimed \u201csanctuary\u201d status while collaborating with federal agencies, expanding police powers, and presiding over mass deportations. Huang\u2019s statements serve only to sow false illusions that the Democratic Party will shield immigrants from the machinery of the federal state.<\/p>\n
Huang\u2019s \u201ccare-first\u201d public-safety rhetoric carefully avoids challenging the LAPD\u2019s fundamental function as the armed enforcer of capitalist property relations.<\/p>\n
The DSA currently occupies key positions within the state apparatus in Los Angeles. The DSA-aligned city council members Huang points to as proof of a \u201cnew kind of leadership\u201d have, in practice, upheld the status quo: backing developer-driven homelessness policies, supporting giveaways to big business and standing behind the union bureaucracy as it sabotaged the struggles of city and county workers in recent months. <\/p>\n The city has four city council members who identify with or orbit the DSA. After celebrating Mamdani\u2019s victory in New York as a supposed triumph for the \u201cleft,\u201d they now line up squarely behind the political establishment in Los Angeles. Nithya Raman and Eunisses Hernandez hail Bass as \u201cthe most progressive mayor we\u2019ve ever had,\u201d while Hugo Soto-Mart\u00ednez dispenses with the pretense of independence from the political establishment altogether and endorses Bass outright.<\/p>\n Indeed, at the time of Bass\u2019s rise to mayor, the DSA offered only mild criticisms and even falsely portrayed her as having once been a \u201csocialist,\u201d a myth used to politically legitimize her within left-leaning circles. <\/p>\n More broadly, the DSA functions as a faction of the Democratic Party and an increasingly critical role as a bulwark of class rule.<\/p>\n The experience of Zohran Mamdani in New York demonstrates the political role of these DSA-backed campaigns. After posturing as a champion of the \u201cleft,\u201d Mamdani appointed his transition team: a roster of right-wing Democratic Party operatives<\/a>, selected not from the working class but from the political establishment and corporate-aligned nonprofits.<\/p>\n Even more revealing was Mamdani\u2019s meeting with Donald Trump<\/a>, ushering a \u201cpartnership\u201d and legitimizing the fascistic president at the very moment he was deepening his assault on democratic rights and confronting growing popular opposition. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n