Nithya Raman wins LA mayor’s race, toppling incumbent Karen Bass

The 45-year-old Raman, a former urban planner who founded a homeless services nonprofit, will take office with seemingly few allies in City Hall.LOS ANGELES (CN) — Progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman will be the next mayor of Los Angeles, ousting Mayor Karen Bass after only one term in office.Bass called Raman Thursday to concede the race.“While this is not the outcome we hoped for, the people of Los Angeles have spoken,” Bass said in a written statement. “I have called Councilmember Nithya Raman to congratulate her on her victory, and I have committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition. Moving this city forward is what Los Angeles needs from all of us.”In a video statement, Raman thanked Bass and said, “To every voter out there who voted for Mayor Bass or who chose not to vote in this election at all, please know this: I am going to City Hall to work every single day to earn your trust, and to earn your trust in this city again.”The 45-year-old Raman currently leads Bass by roughly 35,000 votes, or 2%. But the momentum of the ongoing count points to a comfortable victory by the challenger. Though the early count put her just behind the older and more centrist Bass, every subsequent tranche of counted ballots has favored Raman. Past elections followed the same pattern: the early vote-by-mail ballots trended more conservative, while the ballots cast on Election Day leaned more progressive.It’s hard to imagine a less likely mayor than Raman, an Indian-American with degrees from Harvard and MIT, an introvert and a policy wonk, a former urban planner who founded a homeless services nonprofit. She surprised the establishment in 2020 when she defeated an incumbent for a spot on LA’s City Council, becoming the first of a number of left-wing candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.Despite that growing contingent, Raman was an unpopular figure inside the clubby world of City Hall. When it came time to redraw the council district map, Raman’s was thoroughly mutated — many of her renters were taken away and replaced with San Fernando Valley homeowners. Still she hung on, won reelection and was given a new lease on life by Bass, as well as the chair of the City Council’s housing committee.Her decision to run against her former ally came as a complete shock — Bass herself said she was “flabbergasted," and members of the City Council called it a betrayal. They all endorsed Bass, including the DSA-aligned members.But Bass was always unpopular. Voters blamed her for traveling out of the country, to Ghana, just before the deadly wildfires of 2025 devastated the neighborhoods of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades. And although her approach to homelessness, the centerpiece of her 2022 campaign, appeared to making headway, the most recent homeless count showed the numbers climbing, an indication that her tactics were failing.“Angelenos made up their mind about Bass last year, right after the wildfires,” said Dan Schnur, a political science professor at the University of Southern California. “Bass ran a very successful campaign to be mayor of 20th-century Los Angeles. Raman targeted younger voters who normally don’t turnout as heavily as older generations. But she got just enough of them to pull this off.”Raman will become the first challenger to topple an incumbent mayor in more than 20 years, and only the second in half a century. She’ll come into office with an electoral mandate — her margin of victory could rise as high as 10% by the time all the ballots are cast — but with few City Hall allies. That presents an enormous challenge in LA, which has a relatively weak mayor and a fairly strong City Council compared to cities like New York.“The most effective mayors are the ones who have been able to martial public pressure to pull City Council in their direction,” Schnur said. “Raman doesn’t have much of a relationship with the other City Council members, so she’s gonna have to do this from the outside in.”She won’t just face resistance from the council. Many of her policy positions are either unpopular or are opposed by entrenched special interests. Raman has said she wants to make it easier and cheaper to build apartment buildings and homeless shelters, which are often met with fierce resistance from homeowners. She’s also said she wants to fire LA Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell, and has made an enemy of the powerful police union, which spent more than $6 million in a failed effort to defeat her.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads