Progressive Nithya Raman leads incumbent Karen Bass in LA mayor race

LOS ANGELES (CN) — With the first 730,000 or so ballots counted in the LA mayoral election, City Councilmember Nithya Raman is ahead of incumbent Karen Bass by just over 16,000 votes — about two points.Although that may sound like a slender advantage, those familiar with recent LA elections see the results as extremely good news for Raman, the progressive challenger.“Karen Bass isn’t coming back,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president at Political Data, one of the top election experts in the state. “The late vote is going be break strongly toward Raman.”In every recent election, the more progressive candidate has struggled in the early ballots. That’s because older voters tend to vote early, often by mail, while younger voters, renters and low-income residents tend to vote on Election Day. And so the more left-leaning candidate can easily pick up as many 10 points as the late-arriving ballots are tallied up, a process that could take weeks.“The reality is, Karen Bass probably needed to be ahead by eight points right now in order to win,” Mitchell said.Should the results hold, it would be the first time in more than 20 years that an incumbent mayor in LA lost reelection, and only the second time in more than 50 years.“For too long, our broken and unjust status quo has convinced Angelenos that this is the best we can do,” Raman told a jubilant crowd at the Greek Theater on Tuesday night. “LA stopped being a place where we could build things, where we could open things, where we could film things, where we could create things. We stopped asking when the sidewalk would be fixed and started planning our commute around it.“Hopelessness can be fatal for a city,” she added. “But 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.”Bass, speaking to her supporters at a ballroom in the Loews Hollywood Hotel, remained optimistic. “I will always fight for the city that we deserve," she said.A month ago, most polls showed Raman with a significant lead. But more recent polls showed a tightened race, and two major figures announced they were voting for the mayor, if not quite endorsing her: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra — now the governor-elect — and billionaire developer Rick Caruso, whom Bass defeated in the 2022 mayor’s race. Right up until election night, in fact, the prediction market Kalshi gave Bass a 57% chance of getting reelected.“All the polls I saw showed that it was a tight race for mayor, and it did not appear to end that way,” said Stuart Waldman, CEO of the LA County Business Federation, who supported Bass. He called the preliminary election results “stunning.”The 73-year-old Bass, a former congresswoman, ran in 2022 promising to end homelessness, a crisis that has long plagued the city. In her first few years in office, she appeared to have made some progress. But the most recent “point-in-time” count of the number of people living on the streets showed the number of homelessness rising once again. Bass also received withering criticism for traveling abroad to Ghana just before the 2025 wildfires that devastated Altadena and the Pacific Palisades erupted.Nonetheless, Bass received the endorsement of just about every elected official in the county. Raman, meanwhile, a 45-year-old Indian American who’s served on the City Council since 2020, was backed by only two local politicians: the city controller and one county supervisor. Her 14 colleagues on the council, in fact, seemed to go out of their way to badmouth her in the run-up to the election.“Fundamental trust with a partner you’re working with is a big problem if you don’t have it,” Councilmember Monica Rodriguez told Politico. “There’s a lot of bad will there.” Another councilwoman took to Instagram to say Raman ran the city’s Housing Committee “like a lecture hall at a university, not a place of government decision-making.”Bass also received heavy backing from the powerful police union.Raman was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, but not its most prominent national members, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders or New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.Waldman said he thought the deciding factor in race was “voter dissatisfaction.” Polls showed Bass with high unfavorable ratings, a challenge for any incumbent to overcome. He also credited Raman with running a campaign that appears to have reached younger voters.“Nithya had cool commercials, was doing fun stuff like bicycle karaoke,” Waldman said. “It humanized her. I think that had an impact.”If Raman does hang on to her lead and succeed Bass as mayor, she’ll face numerous challenges. The cost of living remains sky high, thanks in large measure to the cost of gas — an issue outside her control — and housing, a problem very much her job to help solve, but one that could take decades. President Donald Trump will be in office for two more years, and the tensions over ICE raids, and the police department’s role in aiding them, still hang in the air.The city is also scheduled to host the Olympics in 2028, an opportunity for Raman to receive worldwide attention, be it good or bad. Numerous infrastructure projects appear to be behind schedule. And of course, homelessness remains very much a crisis.“I think whoever’s mayor has a tough challenge to deliver on whatever people want, in a city with a lot of problems, like homelessness and infrastructure,” said Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Haynes Foundation. “It’s heavy lift for whoever comes in.”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