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Following the historic victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election, many Los Angeles-based admirers of the 34-year-old politician’s campaign and agenda have longingly wondered: When will a political spark plug like that happen in L.A.?

Looking at the mayoral landscape of L.A. County, there are two existing mayors that espouse similarly progressive ideologies as Mamdani: Burbank Mayor Nikki Perez and Cudahy Mayor Elizabeth Alcantar Loza. Both elected officials have worked with and been recommended by the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Nikki Perez

Perez was sworn in as Burbank’s youngest mayor in 2024 at the age of 30. She is also the first Indigenous and out LGBTQ+ mayor to serve the city. The politician was first voted onto the City Council in 2022.

She was raised by parents who emigrated from Guatemala and El Salvador to Burbank. Perez received her bachelor’s degree from UC Riverside and a master’s from UCLA.

Prior to becoming a council member, she worked as a social worker with the L.A. Unified School District, served in the state Assembly as the communications director and functioned as a development coordinator for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

A key issue for Perez — and a common rallying point for democratic socialists — was having sufficient affordable housing options in the Media Capital of the World. The City Council has a goal of constructing 12,000 new housing units in the municipality and has accepted plans on two projects that are expected to create about 200 housing units.

“From the point of view of our average residents, most people just really want to be able to live, to work and to play in Burbank, so that’s what my priorities are,” then-Vice Mayor Perez told her constituents in 2024. “I want my very first priority to be continuing our efforts of alleviating the housing crisis.”

Cognizant of the unstable job market for production, or below-the-line, workers in the entertainment industry, Perez has attempted to combat the shrinking creative job prospects in her city.

In July — while celebrating the expansion of California’s film and television tax credit program alongside Gov. Gavin Newsom — Burbank launched a task force made up of professionals and stakeholders from across the entertainment sector to identify challenges, explore new opportunities and shape policies that help retain and grow industry jobs in the city.

Elizabeth Alcantar Loza

Before joining the City Council of her hometown of Cudahy, Alcantar Loza worked with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, to organize and educate community members about immigration issues. In November 2018, she was elected to the City Council and served as vice mayor of Cudahy.

She then served as Cudahy’s first Latina mayor beginning in 2020, when she led the southeast L.A. County city during the 2020 Delta jet fuel dump and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In November 2023, Alcantar Loza was a City Council member when Cudahy became the first city in Southern California to support the Palestinian people of Gaza with a resolution that not only called for a cease-fire, but declared Israel’s government as “engaging in collective punishment” in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas militants. The resolution passed on a 3-1 vote after hours of public comments and deliberation.

Last year, she was reinstated as the largely Latino city’s mayor, and in December, she led the City Council to vote to divest from investments that contribute to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and what it considers genocide in Gaza. The five-member council voted unanimously to divest city funds from all arms and weapons manufacturing industries.

“As a progressive leader representing one of our SELA cities, I am committed to ethical governance that prioritizes integrity, accountability, and the trust of the people I serve. Every decision I make is guided by a deep responsibility to transparency and equity in every policy we enact, with a commitment to rejecting backroom deals and self-serving politics,” she wrote in a social media post about her political ideologies.

“True leadership is not just about upholding the highest ethical standards but actively building a government that serves the people — not special interests or the politically connected. I look forward to collaborating with other progressive elected officials across our region who share these values, working together to transform the experience of our residents and redefine the narrative of Southeast L.A.”

Following Mamdani’s win, Alcantar Loza expressed joy for a national recognition that progressive ideals are popular.

“It’s an exciting time to see someone that is so like-minded, that is talking about the issues that matter most to our communities, actually win and win big for our communities and have a plan that will hopefully support folks that are very similar to our folks here,” Alcantar Loza told The Times.

While her city doesn’t have the same monetary sway or resources as New York City, the 32-year-old mayor noted that Cudahy is working with its limited funds to address the needs of as many citizens as possible.

“We often hear the phrase that a city’s budget is a list of the city’s priorities, and it’s something that rings really true,” she said. “In Cudahy, we’re really pushing forward with advancing programs that support the community.

“We’re so used to funding certain programs over for others. It’s often thought that every budget is touchable, except police and fire services. Those are important services to fund, but so are community program services ensuring that our kids have somewhere to go after school so that they’re not engaging in violent activity or activities they shouldn’t be participating in.”

One of Alcantar Loza’s main concerns is ensuring renters’ rights and that their needs are taken care of as over 80% of housing units in Cudahy are rentals.

“It’s important for us to fund programs and staff that support the renter community in knowing their rights and knowing what they can and cannot do, just how to keep folks housed because we should be catering to the needs of our of our most vulnerable folks,” she added.

The fight for rent stabilization is one that Alcantar Loza has been fighting for over half a decade now. She first tried to push it forward in 2019, but it lacked the votes on the City Council and it failed to pass again in 2021, despite a robust campaigning effort. In 2023, Cudahy’s City Council was able to get a Latina majority and advanced rent stabilization.

Additionally, the city established a minimum threshold for eviction in October in cases where a tenant has missed rent. Under the ordinance, a landlord may only initiate an eviction if the amount of rent missed exceeds one month of the fair market rent for the Los Angeles metro area, as determined annually by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

One obstacle that Alcantar Loza has noticed in her work has been with citizens envisioning what progress looks like in their day-to-day life.

“It’s difficult to help others visualize the opportunities in their community,” she said. “It’s easier for folks to imagine business as usual because it’s been happening for so long. They do not know how to visualize something new.

“Gifting people the opportunity to visualize something new, to think about other ways to support their community is a very powerful tool that we’ve been able to implement and show folks there are other ways to do policy other than what we’re used to.”

Democrats just crumbled like soft-bake cookies.

The so-called resistance party has given up the shutdown fight, ensuring that millions of Americans will face Republican-created skyrocketing healthcare costs, and millions more will bury any hope that the minority party will find the substance and leadership to run a viable defense against Trump.

Sunday night, eight turncoat Democrats sold out every American who pays for their own health insurance through the affordable marketplaces set up by President Obama.

As has been thoroughly reported in past weeks, Republicans are dead set on making sure that insurance is entirely out of financial reach for many Americans by refusing to help them pay for the premiums with subsidies that are part of current law, offered to both low- and middle-income families.

Republicans — for reasons hard to fathom other than they hate Obama, and apparently basics such as flu shots — have long desired to kill the ACA and now are on the brink of doing so, in spirit if not actuality, thanks to Democrats.

Trump must be doing his old-man jig in the Oval Office.

The pain this craven cave-in will cause is already evident. Rates for 2026 without the government subsidies have been announced, and premiums have doubled on average, according to nonpartisan health policy researchers KFF. Doubled.

Insurance companies are planning on raising their rates by about 18%, already devastating and symptomatic of the need for a total overhaul of our messed-up system. That increase, coupled with the loss of the subsidies beginning at the start of next year, means a 114% jump in costs for the folks dependent on this insurance. Premiums that cost an average $888 in 2025 will jump to $1,904 in 2026, according to KFF.

But it’s the middle-income people who will really be hit.

“On average, a 60-year-old couple making $85,000 … would see yearly premium payments rise by over $22,600 in 2026,” KFF warns, meaning that instead of paying 8.5% of their entire income toward health insurance, it will now jump to about 25%.

Merry Christmas, America.

While the eight Democrats who broke from their party to allow this to happen are directly responsible (thankfully our California senators are not among them), Democratic leadership should also be held accountable.

A party that can’t keep itself together on the really big votes isn’t a party. It’s a a bunch of people that occasionally have lunch together. Literally, they had one job: Stick together.

The failure of Democratic leadership to make sure its Senate votes didn’t shatter in this intense moment isn’t just shameful, it’s depressing. For all of the condemnation of the Republican members of Congress for failing to uphold their duty to be a check on the power of the presidency, here’s the opposition party rolling over belly up on the pivotal issue of healthcare.

As California Rep. Ro Khanna put it on social media, “Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”

If the recent elections had any lessons in them, it’s that Democrats — and voters in general — want courage. Love or hate Zohran Mamdani, his win as New York City mayor was due in no small part for daring to forge his own path. Ditto on Gov. Gavin Newsom and Proposition 50.

Mamdani put that sentiment best in his victory speech, promising an age when people can “expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt.”

Before you start angry-emailing me, yes, I do understand how much pain the shutdown in causing, especially for furloughed workers and those about to see their SNAP benefits cut off. I feel for every person who doesn’t know how they will pay their bills.

But here are the facts that we can’t forget. Republicans have purposefully made that pain intense in order to break Democrats. Trump has found ways to pay his deportation agents, while simultaneously not paying critical workers such as airport screeners and air traffic controllers, where the chaos created by their absence is both visible and disruptive. He has also threatened to not give back pay to some of those folks when this does end.

And on the give-in-or-don’t-eat front, he’s actually been ordered by courts to pay those SNAP benefits and is fighting it. Republicans could easy band together and demand that money goes out while the rest is hashed out, but they don’t want to. They want people to go hungry so that Democrats will break, and it worked.

But at what cost?

About 24 million people will be hit by these premium increases, leaving up to 4 million unable to keep their insurance. Unable to go to the doctor for routine care. Unable to pay for cancer treatments. Unable to have that lump, that pain, the broken bone looked at. Unable to get their kid a flu shot.

In many ways, this isn’t a California problem. The majority of these folks are in southern, Republican states that refused to expand Medicaid when they had the chance. About 6 in 10 subsidy recipients are represented by Republicans, according to KFF, led by those living in Florida, Georgia and Mississippi. But Americans have been clear that we want access to care for all of us, as a right, not an expensive privilege.

Which makes it all the more mystifying that Democrats are so eager to give up, on an issue that unites voters across parties, across demographics, across our seemingly endless divides.

But I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.