Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has wiped out an 11-point deficit and pulled even with challenger Nithya Raman, according to a poll from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies released Wednesday. She is closing her reelection campaign by arguing that her rival doesn't know the city well enough to lead it.
Her final pitch has two halves: Raman is too big a risk, and Bass's own policies are working but need more time. She is relying on Black voters, her firmest supporters, while courting residents wary of her opponent.
Bass, 69 when she took office, is the only one still in place among the four Black mayors who led the country's largest cities at the end of 2022.
Raman, a younger candidate running to Bass's left, belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America. The group is weighing whether to pull its endorsement because she won't explicitly embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
Polls show young voters heavily favor Raman, though Bass says those supporters aren't young Black residents and describes them as mostly white, with some Latinos.
Policing divides the left
Raman handed Bass an opening at a debate last week, when she described Los Angeles as a onetime gold standard for refusing to cooperate with immigration enforcement in the era of Daryl Gates. Gates, a former LAPD chief, resigned after the 1992 riots and left a legacy of racial tension and police brutality. Raman has apologized, but Bass has turned the remark into a rallying cry.
It’s very hard to say that you want to be mayor of this city, and you’ve never heard of Rodney King.
Karen Bass, Los Angeles mayor
Policing is also Bass's weak spot on the left. In Congress she was lead author of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, and the Los Angeles Police Protective League spent $2 million on racially charged ads against her first mayoral run. The union now backs her and has spent nearly $3 million opposing Raman.
She is campaigning on keeping the police chief, and in December she asked the City Council for a bigger police budget and a larger force. Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Los Angeles Black Lives Matter and a former friend, calls that a betrayal of what protesters demanded and says a loss would be one Bass earned.
These last four years with her in office have not translated into collective advancement for Black people or any marginalized group.
Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Los Angeles Black Lives Matter
Housing and homelessness
Housing costs hang over the race. Just 15% of city households could afford a median-priced home in the third quarter, the California Association of Realtors said Friday. In an April poll by the Los Angeles Business Council Institute, 87% of voters called housing affordability a serious problem and 63% said they had thought about leaving.
Homelessness fell for two years, then rose this year, a reversal Bass blames on federal and state funding cuts. Her campaign also cites faster home building, falling crime and an infrastructure plan.
The Palisades fires
The Palisades fires remain a liability. Bass was on a diplomatic trip to Ghana when they started, and displaced residents have been slow to rebuild and return. She apologized at the final debate, while Raman said she was in the emergency operations center as 60,000 people in her district evacuated and kept hearing residents ask where the mayor was.
Bass says she would not make the trip again, but she believes the destination sharpened the criticism. She said Sylvester Turner, then Houston's mayor, had warned her against visiting Africa during her first term.
Some loyalists are uneasy. Gabrielle Woods, a 70-year-old supporter at Bass's Baldwin Hills headquarters, said the mayor spends too much time answering critics and too little promoting her record. Woods sees a mood against the status quo more than against Bass, a view Raman's campaign partly shares: a spokesperson said young supporters believe the status quo is broken.
