Your guide to the race for L.A. mayor: Bass vs. Raman

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is in the fight of her political life, facing a vigorous challenge from City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a savvy campaigner who was until recently a close ally.

Raman publicly endorsed Bass at the start of the year, then launched her own mayoral bid weeks later, saying the city “can’t seem to manage the basics.” She came in second behind Bass in the June 2 primary election, edging out the flashier and more attention-grabbing Spencer Pratt, a onetime reality television star.

Now, Raman and Bass — both Democrats — are heading toward a generational showdown.

Bass, 72, is a veteran lawmaker who served in Sacramento and Washington D.C., before coming to City Hall. She’s drawn support from more traditional corners of the city’s political establishment, including Los Angeles County’s Democratic Party and its Federation of Labor, which represents hundreds of thousands of workers.

Raman, 45, arrived in L.A. in 2013 and launched a City Council bid six years later. She’s been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and other groups that are newer to city politics, including Streets For All, which seeks to expand the city’s bus and bike lane network.

Bass has been dogged by high unfavorable ratings since the Palisades fire, which broke out in January 2025 while she was out of the country, destroying thousands of homes and leaving 12 dead. She has faced criticism over her handling of the wildfire response and recovery work.

Since the primary, the mayor’s political challenges have intensified.

The Lineage cold-storage warehouse fire broke out in June, causing communities on L.A.’s Eastside to cope with the stench of rotting meat for two months. The latest homeless count showed an increase in the number of people living on the street, dealing a setback to a mayor who staked her reputation on the issue.

Raman contends that Bass is simply a bad manager, pointing to those crises and other problems facing the city.

“I respect very much her long career of public service,” Raman said. “But the election has to be about results.”

The mayor isn’t backing down.

She says Raman has little to show for her three years running the council’s powerful housing and homeless committee. She contends that Raman is on the wrong side of the issues — particularly public safety — and does not work well with others.

“It says something that you do not have strong working relationships with any of your colleagues. Not one,” Bass said. “Each council member had a story to tell about how difficult she was to work with.”

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Voter guide to the 2026 California general election

California’s general election takes place on Novemer 3. Learn about L.A.’s city and county races as well races for state office.

Oct. 1, 2026

Bass started out as a physician’s assistant at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, now L.A. General Medical Center. She later formed Community Coalition, a South L.A.-based nonprofit that took on the crack epidemic, the AIDS crisis and skyrocketing homicide rate of the 1990s.

In 2004, she won a seat in the state Legislature, ascending to the position of Assembly speaker just as the state was hit with a massive budget crisis brought on by a global economic downturn. Bass said she was forced to make hard decisions during that era, cutting social programs that she had hoped to expand.

Bass was elected to Congress in 2010, spending the following decade representing portions of South L.A. and the Westside. With Mayor Eric Garcetti facing term limits, she entered the race for mayor in 2021. She defeated real estate developer Rick Caruso by about 10 percentage points, even after he spent more than $100 million on his campaign.

Now, seeking a second and final four-year term, Bass wants to finish the work she started on homelessness, public safety, housing production and rebuilding Pacific Palisades. She has been endorsed by 13 of the City Council’s 15 members and an array of business leaders, labor unions and advocacy groups.

Raman took office in 2020, representing a district stretching from Silver Lake to the San Fernando Valley. Even before running for office, she was heavily involved in issues surrounding the city’s homeless crisis.

A resident of Silver Lake, Raman co-founded the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, which provided aid to homeless residents in neighborhoods northwest of downtown. She also had a stint at City Hall in the Office of the City Administrative Officer, helping draft a report on the cost of combating the homeless crisis.

Raman also spent a year as executive director of Time’s Up Entertainment, which tackled sexual harassment in Hollywood. She left that post in 2019 to run for City Council, challenging and then defeating one-term incumbent David Ryu. She was the first candidate to win L.A. city office with the backing of the DSA.

Once in office, Raman devoted much of her energy and efforts to the issues of housing and homelessness. She helped pass a new cap on rent hikes in apartments built before October 1978. She also put in place new eviction protections.

Raman says she’s running to make L.A. “a city that works,” improving basic services while also ramping up housing production and helping revive the entertainment industry.

Fundraising data will be updated regularly until the election.

When Raman first ran for City Council in 2020, she made clear she wanted to cut funding for the Los Angeles Police Department. She tweeted “Defund the Police” in the days after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and pushed for the LAPD to become a “much smaller, specialized armed force.”

In office, she has voted in favor of some budgets that increased spending at the LAPD. But she opposed a package of police raises negotiated by Bass in 2023, saying they were too expensive.

In January, Raman voted against the mayor’s push to add 170 police officers, a proposal aimed at preventing the department from losing officers this year. Weeks later, after announcing her mayoral campaign, she told NBC4 that sworn staffing at the LAPD should not get any smaller.

Raman said she changed her thinking after learning more about the city budget and public safety.

Bass, for her part, has been touting the city’s drop in violent crime, particularly homicides, which fell last year to their lowest level in 60 years. She defended the police raises, saying the department would have shrunk even faster without them.

Even with those pay increases, the department has fallen from about 9,200 officers when Bass took office to roughly 8,500 in September.

Raman contends that the ongoing exodus of officers shows the raises didn’t work.

The pay increases are among the reasons the Los Angeles Police Protective League has endorsed Bass’ reelection. The rank-and-file officers’ union spent $1.4 million on campaign activities opposing Raman during the primary.

Bass frequently touts her decision to issue Executive Directive 1, which requires the city to fast-track the approval of 100% affordable housing projects with below-market-rate rents.

Nearly 36,000 units of affordable housing have been approved under the program since she took office, and 11,000 more are pending, according to city figures.

Bass says her administration has made it easier for property owners to convert their office towers into apartments or condominiums. Under her watch, the city also enacted a housing plan to allow the construction of nearly 500,000 additional residential units.

Bass has taken heat from housing advocates for opposing Senate Bill 79, last year’s law requiring the city to allow buildings of six to nine stories near rail and key bus stops, even in single-family neighborhoods. Bass believes city planners should work collaboratively with neighborhoods on ways of accommodating growth.

Raman is running with major backing from leaders of the state’s YIMBY — Yes in My Backyard — movement, which has spent years pushing for the city to permit taller apartment buildings in single-family neighborhoods. Raman did not endorse SB 79 but has criticized Bass for opposing it.

Raman has talked up her work enacting new renter protections, narrowing the ability of landlords to evict tenants and winning approval of a 4% cap on annual rent increases in rent-stabilized buildings.

Raman also has clashed with Bass over loosening the rules imposed on Airbnb and other short-term rental companies. Bass has called for the City Council to allow second homes to be used as short-term rentals, saying it would generate more tax revenue.

Raman opposes that idea, saying the city’s housing stock shouldn’t be depleted for short-term rentals during an affordability crisis.

Bass embraced the $2.6-billion plan for upgrading the Los Angeles Convention Center, saying it would create much-needed jobs and breathe new life into downtown’s economy.

The project was pushed by business and labor organizations, many of whom have spent large sums on her reelection.

Bass contends the project already is producing results, helping the city book major conventions.

Raman calls the project a boondoggle, saying that debt service and operating costs for the upgraded facility will divert billions of dollars of tax revenue away from basic city services such as police, firefighters and street repairs over the coming decades.

Bass promised to address homelessness in her 2022 campaign, declaring a state of emergency on her first day in office. She also launched Inside Safe, which has moved more than 6,000 people into hotels, motels and other interim housing.

Those efforts were followed by two years of decreases in unsheltered homelessness — the number of people living outside or in cars. But the latest homeless count showed the numbers are growing once again, dealing a setback to Bass.

By July 31, about 42% of the people served by Inside Safe had returned to homelessness, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Bass contends the city still has made meaningful progress, with unsheltered homelessness falling 11% since she took office. Now, she is looking to pull the city’s money out of LAHSA and create a new municipal homeless system.

Raman has promised to cut unsheltered homelessness by 50% citywide ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics and eliminate it entirely by 2030. She said she would replicate the success demonstrated in her own Hollywood Hills district, where unsheltered homelessness fell nearly 50% this year.

Raman’s critics say she deserves some of the blame for the city’s increase in homelessness. She spent three years leading the council’s housing and homeless committee, signing off on many of the mayor’s initiatives.

Raman voted to put hundreds of millions of dollars into Inside Safe and repeatedly renewed the mayor’s homeless emergency declaration, which ended in November.

Raman has portrayed Inside Safe as ineffective, saying the city should shift away from motels and rely more on vouchers that move the unhoused into apartments.

Raman voted against a law prohibiting homeless encampments within 500 feet of a public school or daycare center, saying it does nothing to address children’s safety. She also opposed dozens of efforts by her colleagues to create new anticamping zones in their own districts, many of them near parks, freeway overpasses and other locations.

Still, Raman said that as mayor, she wouldn’t stand in the way of City Council members who seek to use the law in their own districts. And on her DSA candidate questionnaire, she declined to say whether she would take steps to repeal the anticamping law.

Bass supports the city’s anticamping law, sometimes referred to as Municipal Code 41.18, but says it should be used sparingly. She also criticized Raman for voting against it, saying kids should not have to dodge homeless people and hypodermic needles on their way to school.