Four years ago, Karen Bass became the first woman elected mayor of Los Angeles. Born and raised on the West Side of the city, Bass first gave back to her community as a physician assistant before founding the Community Coalition in South Los Angeles in 1990.
Those organizing chops, honed while advocating for the Black community, were part of her campaign pitch in 2022: There are no simple answers to homelessness, “but Karen has the experience, values, and support to get the job done.”
Now the 73-year-old is running again, and facing an unexpected opponent.
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On February 7, the last day to register as a candidate for the mayor’s race, Councilmember Nithya Raman shocked everyone by throwing her hat in the ring. Compared with Bass, 45-year-old Raman is a neophyte — she moved to Los Angeles 13 years ago, and began her career in electoral politics in 2020. Two weeks prior, she had endorsed Bass.
Raman leans on her background as an immigrant from India, citing her education as an urban planner. She was the first Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidate to be elected to the city council, though the relationship has become strained. Turning against her once-ally, Raman’s campaign calls for “a city that works” — a message resonating with younger Angelenos. Raman placed second in the primary, ensuring that she would be the other name on the Election Day ballot.
No matter the outcome, the second-largest city in the country will be run by a progressive woman of color. But many young people who backed Bass last election say life has gotten more difficult over the past four years and have switched loyalties to Raman. Other voters look to Bass’s record as proof she can lead Los Angeles through a new gubernatorial administration, heightened federal immigration enforcement, the 2028 Olympics and the continued housing crisis. This race is a microcosm of divides facing Democrats today as the party splits on approaches to affordability, housing and representation.
Bass’ reelection bid has emphasized her legislative experience in the California Assembly and the U.S. House of Representatives, with endorsements from Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the late legendary organizer Dolores Huerta.
But Bass’s administration has also been plagued by mixed success in reducing homelessness, with her signature program Inside Safe seeing 40 percent of participants return to the streets while ballooning to over $300 million. She’s been criticized for her response to the 2025 Palisades fire, and more recently the Lineage Logistics fire that soured the air over Boyle Heights on the eastern side of the city.
And affordability continues to be a concern for many voters.
“Living in Los Angeles has become more difficult over the last four years, and we cannot continue in the same path,” said Rafael Jaime, the president of UAW Local 4811, which has endorsed Raman.
Jaime, 37, was one of more than a hundred young Raman supporters gathered at Los Angeles Trade Technical Institute, one of the city’s community colleges, on a triple-digit day in early October.
The union Jaime leads represents over 60,000 higher education workers in the University of California system. He’s been a renter since moving to Los Angeles a decade ago for graduate school. He couldn’t afford an apartment in Westwood, where UCLA is located, and instead commuted by bus an hour and a half each way during peak traffic.
“Do we want to continue with the status quo for years of failure, or do we want to actually take a chance on somebody who has a clear record of delivering for working people in Los Angeles?”
Bass has a strong base that looks to her experience as proof someone has fought for them for years. When her campaign headquarters hosted a watch party for the October 13 televised debate, the seats were filled with older Black constituents who had counted on Bass to represent them going back decades.
Pam Randle, 67, went to the watch party after she wrapped up a neighborhood watch meeting in Jefferson Park. “I support Karen all the time,” she said. She recalls Bass helping her neighborhood fight an eminent domain threat in the 1990s.
“This race is about moving forward and not going backwards. I don’t want to start over with somebody. I mean, she has four more years, and I think four years will help her move forward on all of her agendas. But if we start with this new lady, we’re going to be just starting back in the same place that we were before.”
Emiliana Guereca is the founder and executive director of Women’s March Action, the advocacy arm that spun out of the 2017 protests of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. She is stationed at the group’s West Side headquarters nearly every day until the election.
Women’s March Action endorsed Bass in 2022, and is sticking with her in 2026. “I think it’s about choosing experience,” Guereca said. “Who will be at the table when decisions are made in Los Angeles? And we see that more people in a broader coalition will be with Karen Bass, and so that’s important to us.”
Guereca has had to debunk disinformation about Bass — often boosted by the reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who lost the primary with 26 percent of the vote — while talking to voters. She explains that the mayor has in fact met with Palisades fire survivors and that she was not “on vacation” when the fires broke out, but rather out of the country on White House business.
She’s seen voters begin to warm to Bass in recent weeks. “She has admitted she’s made mistakes. She has admitted that she will do better moving forward,” Guereca said of Bass.
The organization has been criticized for not supporting both candidates. Guereca has gotten harassing voicemails, seen by The 19th: “You call yourself a feminist?”
“We have to make sure that we normalize two women running, and may the best candidate win. And for us, it’s Karen Bass.”
Those decades of experience sometimes do more to alienate voters than win them over.
Jaime, the union leader, voted for Bass in 2022, when she was up against Rick Caruso, a real estate mogul who previously registered as a Republican. “I knew that obviously Rick Caruso was not going to deliver the things that we need as working people in Los Angeles,” Jaime said.
Caruso announced he would be voting for Bass on October 26.
Some voters are riled up by the groups bankrolling the incumbent’s reelection campaign. The new mayor will oversee the 2028 Olympics mega event, an enormous tourism opportunity.
Through political action committees, the short-term rental marketplace Airbnb has funneled millions of dollars into supporting Bass’s campaign, according to the media outlet Torched.
The Los Angeles Police Department union has spent over $5 million to oppose Raman’s candidacy since she advanced from the primary, according to campaign finance filings.
Bass’s record on police accountability is part of what drove the Black Los Angeles Young Democrats to endorse Raman, reversing its 2022 position. This rankled many former members of the group, which was founded in 2012 and reportedly had its first meeting in Bass’ home.
The other part was opportunity.
“We’re young people, and we want to live in a city that we love and that we care about, and some of us that were even raised in,” said Kathryn Taylor Swain, the group’s vice president of political strategy, in a social media video. “And with Member Raman’s very imaginative, incredible idea for what affordable housing can look like in Los Angeles, we know it’s possible.”
Los Angeles is typically seen as underproducing housing, said Jason Ward, the economist who directs the nonpartisan think tank RAND’s Housing Center, and there are many barriers to building within the city. The details in Raman’s plans, such as utilities on construction sites, point to someone who has spent time trying to understand why construction is costly and slow, he noted. Ward’s research in Los Angeles disputes the city’s official homelessness count.
For Angelenos, affordability is also about more than rent, utilities or gas prices. It’s whether someone can make a sustainable living.
A’Kia Benbo shared the struggles of being a small business owner in the city while she passed out samples of her lemonade at a Vallarta grocery store in South Los Angeles. Her business operates in the city of Los Angeles, but Benbo had to move her lodgings outside the city because rent was so high.
Benbo started out selling her signature HoneyQween Lemonade as a street vendor in Leimert Park. In 2025, she found a dream location for a brick-and-mortar shop in the neighborhood where HoneyQween was born. But she had to make the former nail salon restaurant-ready, and code enforcement and other bureaucratic roadblocks dragged out for a year.
She was finally able to open this spring, but she could only stay afloat for two months before running out of savings. It’s not just new businesses like hers that she’s seen struggle; even Canter’s, the nearly 100-year-old Jewish deli, is running into trouble with operating costs.
Stronger tenant protections would have allowed her to keep her physical location longer, Benbo said.
She said she wished either candidate would speak more about small business. Benbo has heard of Bass’ initiative to fill up vacant storefronts downtown, and wants to see similar efforts in other neighborhoods.
The candidates also differ on campaign strategy. Raman has a robust online presence, working with younger influencers and communicating her agenda through social media channels. Raman has wooed content creators at exclusive events, courted the queer vote at a bar that spurred LGBTQ+ protests years before Stonewall and made viral ads parodying popular shows like “The Pitt” and “Heated Rivalry” with local actors.
She speaks confidently at rallies and in short clips with creators, comfortably discussing her detailed policies on issues ranging from animal welfare to saving Hollywood jobs. But pundits have noted Raman stumbles through media interviews, and most outlets declared Bass the winner of the only live televised debate.
Bass has leaned into rallying her base, pulling together partners and endorsements such as the California Nurses Association and Pilipino American Los Angeles Democrats from decades of community work. She has big names from Gov. Gavin Newsom to Samuel L. Jackson on her side.
Bass is the first incumbent mayor of Los Angeles to proceed to a runoff in 20 years, and attacks against her opponent are core to her communications strategy. When pitching voters, she mostly cites her accomplishments, like fast-tracking affordable housing and variable decreases in street homelessness. Throughout the race, her campaign site had few details about what she planned for the next four years. Only recently — less than two weeks ago — did the site add a “Term 2 Vision” page.
Bass hopes to win voters over by championing her past; Raman is betting on Angelenos buying into her vision for the future. The latest polls show either candidate could win — and either choice will reshape progressive politics in the city.
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