From Karen Bass to Nithya Raman, LA repeats its mistakes

Los Angeles voters are stuck in the same big-city Democratic voting cycle: choosing terrible mayors and replacing them with even worse ones because they are unwilling to cross party lines and elect someone who can competently run a city.A University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Governmental Studies-Los Angeles Times poll found City Councilwoman Nithya Raman leading Mayor Karen Bass 39%-28%, with a third of voters undecided. Raman has the momentum, the better fundraising numbers, and the backing of Hollywood celebrities, with Los Angeles being the only city where that actually holds any electoral weight. That same poll puts Bass’s favorability at 28%, with 63% of voters having an unfavorable opinion of her. By comparison, Raman is just above water at 40%-39%. The celebrity backing of Raman is particularly funny given that Bass was the celebrity-backed candidate in 2022. Los Angeles voters thought Bass, despite her lack of accomplishments and propensity for socialism, would be the mayor to fix the city. Now that they see she has failed, they did not choose to go in the opposite direction by electing Spencer Pratt, because he is considered an icky Republican. Instead, they are on the verge of choosing Raman, despite her lack of accomplishments and her far more open embrace of socialism.This is how it goes in the major cities run by Democrats throughout the country. In Chicago, voters elected Lori Lightfoot in 2019 to try to turn around the city’s decline. When Lightfoot failed because of her tolerance for crime and focus on racial activism, Chicago voters chose to back Brandon Johnson, who has been more tolerant of crime and more focused on brain-rotted racial activism. Johnson’s tenure has been so terrible that not even 14% of voters want to see him run for reelection.CALIFORNIA’S WAR ON PARAMOUNT CONTINUES THE STATE’S SELF-SABOTAGENew York has seen the same Democratic death spiral. Voters jumped from socialist Bill de Blasio to Eric Adams in the 2021 mayoral election, a mild improvement given that Adams ostensibly cared about getting crime under control. But Adams was still a Democrat, prone to flooding the city with illegal immigrants and bloating the city’s budget. Rather than recognize that a “centrist” Democrat was not moderate enough to fix the city, voters jumped to the even more socialist Zohran Mamdani, an experiment with a predictable outcome that is now underway.Much like in New York and Chicago, Los Angeles voters have learned nothing. They know the previous Democrat they have elected has done a terrible job, and they desperately want things to change, but they would rather choose yet another Democrat who will put a different coat of paint on the city’s failures. Nothing will change, and you can essentially guess that Raman will be in Bass’s position in 2030, when voters turn on her in favor of yet another Democratic failure-in-waiting.