Hollywood’s film and TV post-production workers took their case directly to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday, urging him to sign a bill that would create the state’s first standalone post-production tax incentive.
Workers such as editors, singers and sound supervisors joined bill author Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank) and Mayor Karen Bass at a news conference Thursday morning in front of the Television Academy’s headquarters in North Hollywood.
The bill, AB 2319, is aimed at supporting the industry’s editors, sound mixers, composers and visual effects artists. It passed the state Senate 33 to 5 on Aug. 30, and the Assembly approved the final version 72 to 2 the same day. Newsom, who has not taken a public position on the measure, has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it.
Bass urged supporters not to let up before then.
“We need our industry in full force,” Bass said. “It’s all a part of making our city more affordable. We know that this is one of the biggest issues in our city, and so having a strong, robust industry helps Angelenos across the board.”
The incentive would allow a 35% to 50% credit on qualified expenses relating specifically to post-production in California. The state’s existing film and TV tax credit program already covers post-production, but only if 75% of filming or the overall budget is spent in the state. The new credit doesn’t require productions to shoot in California.
Even if Newsom signs the bill, the program would start small. Schultz initially proposed $100 million to fund the effort, but the Legislature’s end-of-session budget sets aside $10 million to launch it.
“When you think about production, it’s easy to think about the actors, the directors and the writers; you don’t think about all that happens when the camera stops rolling,” Schultz said. “What’s changed is that they’re now telling their story about the struggles they’re facing.”
For industry veteran Karen Baker Landers, the decline in local post-production work is impossible to overlook. A two-time Oscar-winning supervising sound editor, Baker Landers is vice president of California Post Alliance, the group sponsoring the bill.
“It’s affecting people in huge ways, like losing their health insurance. I get people calling me asking to get just two weeks of work to qualify for coverage,” said Baker Landers. “It’s really difficult.”
Despite the state’s bigger bet on the industry — and this summer’s fight over the cap — L.A. City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, whose district includes North Hollywood, argued at the press conference that this is the right moment to keep asking for more.
“It’s that exact momentum that we need. When you double down on something, you’re giving more than hope, and you’re saying welcome back. Please come and do your work. Don’t stop doing this,” Nazarian said.
On the night of the June primary, standing before cheering supporters at a downtown brewery, Nithya Raman was in a familiar position:
Outspent by rivals. Mocked by online haters. Her political career left for dead.
In early returns for Los Angeles mayor, Raman was in third place behind incumbent Karen Bass and reality TV villain Spencer Pratt. The City Council member thanked everyone for helping her “little campaign” but seemed resigned to defeat.
“We may not get an answer we like,” Raman said. “But regardless of what happens next, nobody — nobody — can take away what all of us have built together.”
She ended her short speech by going on the dance floor to greet well-wishers and boogie for a bit. The move came off to me as someone losing herself in happiness so she didn’t have to think about the sad reality.
But when I think about that moment now, it seems clear that she was embracing another familiar position:
Confident in what was ahead. Content with being underestimated. Ready to upend City Hall yet again.
As more votes were counted, Raman overtook Pratt to face Bass in the November runoff. Raman’s last-minute decision to enter the race had shocked L.A.’s political class and drawn accusations of betrayal for challenging Bass, a longtime ally whom she had endorsed. Yet Raman managed to pull off a hard-fought campaign, with Pratt as an unexpectedly strong insurgent from the right — a winning streak that continued this week when she scored two key endorsements.
The L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and Unite Here Local 11, the powerful hospitality workers union, will now bring their renowned get-out-the-vote operations to L.A. doorsteps, street corners and smartphone screens on Raman’s behalf. Unite Here gives Raman’s campaign a working class cred it has sorely lacked. The DSA will unleash the democratic socialist trade winds that have swept across elections nationwide and helped five of its six endorsed candidates in L.A. County either win outright in the June primary or move on to the general election.
Neither endorsement was guaranteed. Even though Raman is a member and the L.A. chapter had endorsed her two City Council campaigns, the group didn’t officially support her in the mayoral primary. Some members openly questioned whether having a democratic socialist run a city seemingly destined for the dumpster was the best look for their movement. Raman’s positions on police funding, the mansion tax and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks also ran counter to the party orthodoxy.
Unite Here had regularly endorsed Bass throughout her 22-year political career and seemed likely to join the dozens of other unions backing the mayor.
But with the one-two punch, Raman has shown yet again that she’s the comeback kid of L.A. politics. Every time critics throw her a curveball, she smacks it to the opposite field and gets on base, ready to grind her way to a win.
People line up to attend a Democratic Socialists of America fundraiser May 17 in Los Angeles.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
In 2020, the city’s establishment initially dismissed Raman, then a political novice, as a wokosa fluke, until she beat David Ryu, who became the first L.A. council incumbent to lose in 17 years.
A year later, Raman was seen as such a threat that the powers that be sought to torpedo her for good. In the infamous City Hall leaked audio, then-Councilmember Kevin de León suggested to then-Councilmember Gil Cedillo, then-council President Nury Martinez and labor leader Ron Herrera that Raman’s district could be “put in the blender and [chopped] up, left and right” during redistricting to dampen her reelection chances.
On the recording, Martinez enthusiastically endorsed the plan, telling the other three that Raman had complained about her redrawn district.
“Go f— do the work,” Martinez said she told Raman, “and see if you can” win again.
Raman did win, scoring an outright victory in the 2024 primary (Martinez, of course, resigned in disgrace). A censure from DSA-LA because Raman accepted the endorsement of a pro-Israel group proved no more debilitating than a stray eyelash.
In this year’s mayoral primary, Raman raised less money than Bass and Pratt and flopped during their one debate against each other. Her fellow democratic socialist council members — Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martínez — all endorsed the mayor.
The road to victory remains hard, of course. Bass has never lost an election and won’t easily fold, even as her first term has careened from one crisis to another. Raman’s fiercest critics on the council — Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Traci Park and Monica Rodriguez — lord over South L.A., the Westside and the eastern San Fernando Valley, respectively, regions where Raman needs strong showings. The DSA endorsement will make it easier for critics to paint Raman as left of Lenin, even though her record is more pragmatist than pinko puppet.
She’s even drawing the ire of Pratt, who spent most of his campaign deriding the mayor as “basura” — trash — but is now blasting Raman, while the 26% of Angelenos who voted for him and are a key swing constituency are waiting to see who, if anyone, he’ll favor.
Raman anticipated all of this when she jumped into the race, she told supporters on primary night.
“These powerful interests spent millions of dollars against this little campaign, spent millions trying to preserve this city’s broken and unjust status quo,” she said. “And we said no.”
But the words I recall the most from that party at Boomtown Brewery came from Raman’s father, Venkit. After joking that his daughter didn’t go into a profession that most Indian immigrant parents wish for their children, he explained that her full name — Nithya Varsha — means “forever monsoon” in Sanskrit.
“If you think about it more, that’s exactly what she is,” Venkit said to cheers. “A constant, unstoppable force that brings life to the land.”
The newest battleground in the Los Angeles mayoral race is at your favorite taco stand, as Mayor Karen Bass and her opponent, Councilmember Nithya Raman, spar over how they plan to run the city and treat its street vendors.
The Los Angeles Police Department told Bass’ office it had erroneously issued criminal citations to vendors around MacArthur Park, Bass spokesperson Paige Sterling told The Times on Thursday.
Bass has ordered LAPD to stop issuing criminal citations to vendors and is working to remove any charges issued in error, Sterling said. The mayor’s office also asked LAPD to make sure that these citations aren’t happening citywide.
“The Mayor and her team will continue meeting with street vendors to implement policies and programs based on their needs. Street vending is a quintessential part of L.A.’s world-class food scene and a livelihood for thousands of hardworking Angelenos,” Sterling said in a statement.
The sudden focus on street food comes after Bass faced scrutiny for saying street vendors should not be allowed to set up in front of brick-and-mortar restaurants at a mayoral debate last week at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.
“Just like you shouldn’t have encampments in front of restaurants or in front of schools, you just should not do that,” Bass said.
Critics, including Raman, said Bass was directly comparing homeless encampments to street vendors.
Raman followed up on negative interpretations of her Sherman Oaks statement with a one-two punch, showing up with supporters and television cameras at the famous Brothers Cousins Tacos stand on Sawtelle Boulevard on Wednesday night to mark the release of a pro-street-vendor policy plan.
“When you come for our street vendors, you’re coming for the heart of L.A.,” Raman said of Bass.
In the plan, Raman hopes to create an Immigrant Economic Opportunity Hub, which would offer permitting support, microloans and legal help. Wednesday night, after a vegetarian quesadilla dinner, she said the city should provide pathways for food stands that make fresh food to get permits and grow their businesses, including potentially working toward a brick-and-mortar location.
Also included is a proposal to create special vending zones in L.A.’s iconic vending corridors, although the plan doesn’t outline where such opt-in zones could be. These corridors would include infrastructure like shared sinks, power, lighting, shade and restrooms.
“What we have in our plan is a plan for street vendor districts that can ensure that vendors and brick-and-mortar businesses are not in conflict with one another; that they’re actually able to share streets,” Raman said.
When asked the same question she faced at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn., whether she would allow food stands to sit in front of a brick-and-mortar restaurant, Raman said Wednesday she believed there were ways to keep food stands and restaurants from intruding upon each other, but didn’t say whether that would be enforced by distance requirements, ticketing or otherwise.
Nithya Raman has made Los Angeles’ struggle to combat homelessness a key plank in her mayoral campaign, yet her own record on the matter has itself become an issue with her ouster as head of the City Council committee seeking solutions to the crisis.
Mayor Karen Bass is at the helm of the city’s battle against homelessness, but since 2023 Raman has been the second-most powerful official as chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. That changed this month, when council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a key Bass ally, split the committee in two and removed Raman as its chair, effective Sept. 1.
Raman claims that politics were at play, casting her removal as a hit job for her decision to challenge Bass. Harris-Dawson disputes that, saying Raman failed to lead the committee with the urgency needed to combat L.A.’s enduring homelessness crisis.
“The committee is behind in excess of more than 100 issues,” said Harris-Dawson in an interview. “There are very serious decisions to make over what happens with homelessness. We needed someone who could focus on that and get it done and get it done quickly and show ability to build consensus.”
Beyond the dispute over Raman’s leadership of the committee, there are clear policy disagreements between the mayor and the council member over the best way to combat the crisis.
A Metro bus passes by a man sleeping on the sidewalk on North Spring Street in downtown Friday.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raman contends that Bass’ signature program Inside Safe, which dismantles encampments and moves people living there into motels, hotels and interim housing, is overly expensive and unsustainable. On average, the cost of housing these individuals runs about $82,000 a year, according to city reports.
Raman has repeatedly signed off on funding for the program, but has become more critical of it in the last year.
Despite the city’s efforts, L.A.’s unsheltered homeless population — those living outdoors or in their vehicles — went up by 7.9% after two consecutive years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.
“The approach to homelessness that Mayor Bass has led and defended has brought us here,” Raman said after LAHSA’s report was released.
Raman has called for the use of time-limited subsidies, or rental vouchers, to house homeless Angelenos in private residences — at a city-estimated cost of $30,000, less than half the price of an average Inside Safe bed. Raman says she would “significantly expand” the city’s investment in the vouchers if she became mayor.
“For the same amount of money, we could rent three apartments using a short-term rental voucher and provide intensive services — housing more people in a program that has delivered much better outcomes,” Raman says in her mayoral policy platform on homelessness.
Even so, the more than $60-million voucher program Raman has already pushed through her committee has so far struggled to get off the ground under a tight timeline, and Raman’s critics have seized on the delay as evidence of the council member’s ineffectiveness.
Pedestrians pass by a homeless encampment along the 101 northbound offramp, at right, near City Hall Friday.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
A city consultant on the program set a goal of having 600 households moved into leases by July 1 of this year, and 2,000 households moved in by next April. But as of that July 1 date, only three households had moved into homes via the vouchers, housing officials said in a report.
By Aug. 13, however, the number had jumped to 54 households, “with new move ins happening nearly every day,” the housing department said in a report.
Bass’ campaign spokesperson, Alex Stack, cited the sluggish start to the program and said subsidies are only a small part of the fight against homelessness.
“It’s not the silver bullet Raman’s selling,” Stack said.
In an interview, Raman said that the contracting process slowed the start of the program, but that time-limited subsidies are a great way to free up space in city shelters by moving those people into private housing.
“This is a cost-effective program that has very good outcomes in the past in terms of percentage of people moving on to permanent housing,” she said.
Nithya Rama listens to a question at the mayoral debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.
(David Butow / For The Times)
Raman added that the council will continue to monitor data from the program and make fixes as needed if it doesn’t move fast enough.
Homeless services providers working with the city on the program said part of the challenge has been getting a completely new program off the ground.
“It’s definitely been slower than I think most people anticipated,” said Sasha Morozov, the regional director of supportive services for PATH, a nonprofit contracting with the city for the program.
But Morozov said the program is speeding up now and she believed the 2,000 slots will be filled on time.
A key plank in Raman’s platform
Raman said she ran for council largely to take on the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. She says she is running for mayor for the same reason.
She’s cited a 49% drop in street homelessness in her district over the past year as a clear sign that she is equipped to bring down homelessness citywide. Bass counters it was her efforts through Inside Safe that brought homelessness down in Raman’s district.
People living on the street in downtown L.A. gather cardboard for shelter during a heat wave last month.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
While chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman established monitoring of all the city’s spending on homelessness and tracking of 35 key performance metrics to see how effective the city’s investments are. She also stewarded the creation of a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the city’s Housing Department that is responsible for coordinating and overseeing the city’s homelessness system.
Her critics say that Raman’s tenure atop the committee hasn’t adequately met the moment facing the city of Los Angeles — with the Trump administration and county both moving to cut funding from LAHSA, the joint city-county authority responsible for homeless services. Meanwhile, the city is still managing a landmark federal lawsuit settlement, which requires it to invest in thousands of new shelter beds in its response to homelessness.
“She’s been in this building … longer than Karen Bass,” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who served on the committee under Raman. “It’s convenient now for her to saddle all blame on the mayor when she rubber-stamped Inside Safe and stood in lockstep with the mayor.”
Mayor Karen Bass, left, and City Council member Monica Rodriguez at City Hall.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Rodriguez has specifically accused Raman — as chair of the committee — of slow-walking Rodriguez’s proposal from 2024 for the city to study a plan to separate itself from LAHSA and form its own department that would directly contract with homeless services providers.
Rodriguez said it took Raman months to schedule her motion in committee and that, while it was pending, the county removed most of its funding from LAHSA.
“The city has been left flatfooted because she wouldn’t lead our conversation. She wouldn’t schedule our items. She set us up for failure,” Rodriguez said.
While Rodriguez’s motion was waiting on a report, Raman made her own proposal to create a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the Los Angeles Housing Department to keep track of the city’s more than $1-billion annual investment in homelessness response.
The council moved that bureau forward last year, and a spokesperson for the Housing Department said that seven positions have been hired within the bureau handling contracts and data oversight.
Harris-Dawson said a seven-person bureau isn’t adequate.
Raman said the bureau was a starting point that could one day lead to a department, which she said would be expensive and take a long time to stand up.
“This was not precluding [the creation of a department],” Raman told The Times. “This was trying to speed up that staffing faster than the departmental process normally takes in this city.”
Raman said she talked to Bass about creating a department for homelessness in late 2023 or early 2024, but the mayor told her to move ahead with the bureau instead. Bass representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Paige Sterling, a spokesperson for the mayor, said that Bass and Raman discussed the bureau in 2025, during the budget process. The mayor opposed a standalone department at the time because it “would add to the bureaucracy,” and the bureau was a compromise, Sterling said.
“The mayor signed a budget with funding and positions for the bureau, which begins to give the city the capacity it needs to start overseeing homelessness as we evaluate what the future governance of this issue looks like,” Sterling said.
Raman has touted the bureau as a success that provides clear oversight of how the city spends its money, but has also claimed that the mayor’s office has moved too slowly to staff the bureau. The Housing Department still hasn’t hired an assistant general manager to oversee it.
The rotunda at L.A. City Hall.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Canceled meetings and frustrated colleagues
Raman hasn’t been endorsed for mayor by any of her colleagues on the council, and some of those who served on her homelessness and housing panel say she did a shoddy job as its chair. They complain that she frequently canceled meetings and allowed hundreds of motions to pile up without getting moved through council.
“It had started to feel less like a policymaking body and more like a scholastic seminar — a lot of philosophizing, a lot of talk about feelings, but not enough substantive questions or direction on policy to present to staff,” Councilmember Imelda Padilla said in a statement to The Times.
In response, Raman said her committee focused on data to make sure the city’s investment in fighting homelessness is paying off.
“That doesn’t feel scholarly to me, that feels like oversight and accountability — exactly what the public is asking for for one of our largest investments as a city,” she said.
The full council, meanwhile, has agreed to review its relationship with LAHSA and the county, and to study creating a new department to centralize homelessness oversight.
“This conversation that we’re having about this … is long overdue,” said Councilmember John Lee.
Raman will have a seat on the new homelessness committee, but it will be chaired by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado. Padilla was named chair of the new Housing Committee.
Raman’s final meeting as committee chair was supposed to be Wednesday.
Community activist Karen Bass achieved a decisive victory in the Democratic primary for the 47th state Assembly district by assembling a coalition that extended beyond the traditional base of African American voters to include Latinos and organized labor.
That broader coalition, which allowed her to trounce two candidates who have long been part of the African American political establishment in the area, may signal a changing of the guard in South Los Angeles. The district extends from Westwood through Culver City to the Crenshaw area.
Bass captured 48% of the vote in the Democratic primary, while Nate Holden, who represented part of the area as a state legislator and city councilman for 20 years, received 21%. Attorney Rickey Ivie finished a distant third, despite support from many of the area’s most prominent black leaders, including current Assemblyman Herb Wesson (D-Culver City), County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, City Councilman Bernard C. Parks and state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City).
Bass and political experts said that her campaign had benefited from demographic shifts, grass-roots organizing and the power of organized labor.
The candidate said people had seemed to appreciate that, before running for office, she had toiled in the community for more than a decade as the executive director of the Community Coalition, a group that led the fight against rebuilding liquor stores in South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, and championed education reform for schools in poor neighborhoods.
“I think the idea of new leadership resonated,” Bass, 50, said Wednesday. “People wanted a new style of leadership. I think they liked the fact that I was an activist who had been deeply involved in the community for years.”
Working in the community gave Bass a huge base of grass-roots supporters to draw on in one of the most ethnically diverse districts in the state, said Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who, along with Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D- Los Angeles), formed a powerful group of Latino leaders that backed Bass.
“She has demonstrated that successful candidates in multiracial districts are going to have to build coalitions, and Karen Bass has been building coalitions for 30 years,” Villaraigosa said. Bass benefited from a $250,000 independent campaign by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which also flooded the district with 450 volunteers to get out the vote on election day.
“She is part of a new paradigm, of an African American/labor alliance for South Los Angeles,” said Miguel Contreras, head of the labor organization.
The 47th Assembly District was redrawn in 2002 to make it less heavily African American, making it imperative to build alliances beyond a single ethnic group. That’s an increasingly important skill in Los Angeles, where the growing Latino population means there are few areas where someone can be elected with the support of black voters alone.
Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), a Bass backer, said Bass had done the best job of reaching out to diverse groups. Bass said she had courted Jewish voters in the western end of the district, while organized labor had helped her by targeting Latino voters on her behalf. Ideology also played a role, Ridley-Thomas said, saying that Bass is more liberal than Ivie, Wesson and Burke.
“Ivie is a middle-of-the road, moderate Democrat and Karen is definitely left of center and progressive,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State L.A..
A Baldwin Vista resident who teaches health communications at the USC School of Medicine, Bass agreed that she was a better ideological match with voters in the predominantly Democratic district.
The 47th Assembly District was one of 100 state Senate and Assembly contests that drew California voters to the polls Tuesday.
Though Tuesday’s winners must still compete in the November general election, most districts have been drawn to strongly favor either Republicans or Democrats. As a result, odds are good that the people who will take seats as new lawmakers in December will include Van Tran, who would become the first Vietnamese American elected to the Legislature, and Lori Saldana, a San Diego community college teacher who shocked the Democratic establishment by spending just $50,000 to beat other Democrats who enjoyed hundreds of thousands of dollars of support from some of the biggest interests trying to influence the Legislature.
Saldana’s clear win over former Gov. Gray Davis aide Vince Hall and Democratic pollster Heidi Von Szeliski was the biggest decided upset in the state, but three races were too close to call Wednesday as counties tallied absentee ballots.
Interest groups, including trial lawyers, business groups and unions, sank nearly $7 million into races, either directly or through independent expenditure campaigns, but no special interest group emerged as a clear winner.
The election allowed some politicians to extend their careers, including Board of Equalization member Carole Migden, who won the Democratic primary in a liberal San Francisco state Senate district, and Assemblyman John Campbell (R-Irvine), who beat fellow Assemblyman Ken Maddox (R-Garden Grove) for the Republican nomination in a conservative Orange County Senate district. Johan Klehs, a Democrat who has served eight years in the Assembly and six years on the Board of Equalization, appears headed back to the Assembly. Unopposed, he won the nomination in a Democratic-leaning district east of San Francisco.
Another former assemblyman seeking a comeback, Democrat Tom Umberg, had a slight lead of 51.2% to 48.8% over opponent Claudia Alvarez in the heavily Latino 69th Assembly District, which includes Santa Ana. Alvarez held out hope Wednesday that the absentee ballot tally could swing the race her way.
Also awaiting absentee ballot results were the trial lawyers who sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into the 21st Assembly District south of San Francisco. A four-way race among Democrats has been narrowed to a neck-and-neck contest between Redwood City Councilman Ira Ruskin, with 37.4% of the precinct vote and attorney Joe Carcione, with 36.6%.
Her Honor just needed to do more of the same: hail her own accomplishments, deliver well-timed zingers and keep as cool as a cucumber while baiting Raman into self-immolation.
Bass did none of that, while Raman stepped up the way she needed to.
This time, the challenger offered concrete answers instead of word salads. She mostly stuck to the allotted time limits while Bass repeatedly whined that she wasn’t given enough time. Raman effortlessly turned the mayor’s rhetorical traps around like Bugs Bunny twisting Elmer Fudd’s rifle right in his face.
Take the moment when Bass pointed out that Raman had missed the second-most votes among councilmembers during her six years in office. Raman responded that she missed many meetings while representing the city on the South Coast Air Quality Management District and other governmental boards. Bass’ clap-back — that Raman’s colleagues also had other official responsibilities yet “they find their way to work” — drew “ooohs” from the audience at the debate, put on by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.
If this were still the primary, Raman would have flustered her way to a non-answer. This time, she calmly said that she must not be such a bad councilmember, since Bass had appointed her to those boards.
“Well, we really need to look at that,” Bass stammered before asking Raman if she was “getting ready to resign” from them.
“I’m sorry?” Raman asked off mic as Bass challenged her to step down from all her boards. “No,” Raman then said firmly before shrugging and letting the moderator move on to the next question.
The moment was par for the mayor’s night.
Again and again, Bass went after Raman in the pettiest, most personal ways. She kept mocking the MIT graduate as a clueless egghead with no idea what’s going on in the city, stating twice that Raman governed as if L.A. were “an academic institution” — a line that sounded like a MAGA talking point and that was originally trotted out by Councilmember Imelda Padilla.
Bass tried to paint Raman as a member of an ineffectual city establishment, not a newcomer, which fell flat, considering that Bass has held one elected office or another for 22 years while Raman has been in politics only since 2020.
Bass frequently resorted to her trademark nervous laughter and repeated obviously crafted lines with all the enthusiasm of someone gulping down cod oil. Her furrowed brow and exasperated looks, which she had effectively used in previous debates, made her come off as embittered, tired and unable to defend the indefensible mess that has been her first term.
At one point, the mayor even compared street taco vendors to homeless encampments, with both supposedly disrupting the fabric of a well-run city.
Somewhere, Jonathan Gold is shaking his head in disgust.
“You have lots of plans and lots of ideas but have done very little,” Bass told Raman at another point.
And what have you done, Mayor Bass?
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass speaks with a woman after the end of a mayoral debate against challenger Nithya Raman in Sherman Oaks.
(David Butow/For the Times)
I’ve really tried to like Bass. Her trajectory from South L.A. activist to nonprofit founder to Sacramento, Washington and City Hall is impressive and important. Yet when Angelenos needed her to rise and succeed as their city faced one crisis after another during these past four years, Bass stumbled and stumbled again. Her flop of a debate performance left her sounding like someone with no vision or kindness — career suicide for someone who has made her reputation on both traits.
At this point, the architects of Bass’ campaign need to burn sage to drive out bad spirits or just bow out altogether. Any time something could go wrong, it has.
Bass placed first in the primary with 34% of the vote — an abysmal number for a Democratic incumbent in a deep blue city. Her campaign’s cynical gambit to boost washed-up reality TV star Spencer Pratt into the general election, because he’d be an easier opponent than Raman, failed. The Lineage fire in Boyle Heights brought back memories of the deadly Palisades inferno, angering a voting bloc Bass desperately needs — Latinos.
Then came news this week that a poll the Bass campaign had promoted, claiming that she held a commanding lead over Raman, turned out to be fake. Bass came out looking like someone incapable of overseeing paint dry, let alone running America’s second-largest city.
And now, this debate.
The audience, which was heavily pro-Bass, eventually started applauding more and more of Raman’s responses. Bass, desperate to trip up her opponent, talked over her so much that the councilmember responded with the line of the night and possibly the race:
“You gotta let me answer, Mayor Bass. This is my time.”
Raman still faces an uphill battle. Nearly all of the city’s power structure — elected officials, labor unions, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, business owners and even the three other democratic socialist councilmembers — has endorsed Bass. The mayor has outpaced Raman in fundraising. Raman has to win over voters who supported Pratt’s conservative stances while not alienating her progressive base. She did herself no favors with the Democratic Socialist of America’s local chapter, which didn’t endorse her in the primary and will decide next week whether to endorse her in the general election, by stating that the city needs to maintain the current size of its police force.
But in Wednesday night’s debate, she offered voters a distinct choice between how she would run L.A. and how Bass has.
Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks with staff and supporters after a mayoral debate with incumbent Karen Bass in Sherman Oaks.
(David Butow/For the Times)
All the mayor could sputter in her closing remarks was that Raman “does not have the support of [any] of her colleagues” — yet another line she had repeated ad nauseum.
When it was her turn, Raman said she keeps hearing from residents “that this city feels rudderless.”
“I have news for you, Angelenos. You’re right,” she continued. “No one is in charge right now.”
Then, instead of launching another fusillade against Bass, Raman went for something few people associate with L.A. nowadays:
Hope.
“You have every right to expect more from your city,” Raman proclaimed, her voice strong and clear. She urged Angelenos to “raise our expectations” of what’s possible and strive for a city that’s “affordable, functional, safe, joyful, ambitious.”
A few months ago, that would have sounded like the delusional ramblings of someone with no chance at winning. After tonight’s debate, Raman seems like L.A.’s final, best chance.
