karen bass

With less than a week until Nov. 3, it seems like the Los Angeles mayor’s race is Karen Bass’ to lose.

After a bad debate against challenger Nithya Raman over the summer and the fiasco that was City Hall’s response to the Lineage fire, the incumbent had no other way forward but attack, attack, attack.

Now, a poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times has the two in a statistical dead heat, with 19% of voters undecided and time running out for both campaigns to grab them. It’s a stunning reversal from just a month ago, when the same poll had Raman substantially ahead.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, right, speaks during an Oct. 13 debate with Mayor Karen Bass, left, moderated by Conan Nolan, Colleen Williams and Alejandra Ortiz.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Bass barely improved on her abysmal favorability ratings. But some Angelenos seem willing to shrug and cast a ballot for her, because they just don’t trust the more liberal alternative. Raman, a democratic socialist who has served on the City Council since 2020, saw her unfavorability rating jump to 50%, as more people got to know her and didn’t like what they saw.

This isn’t the first time voters have swung like this in a mayoral race involving an unpopular incumbent and an upstart representing a new L.A.

In 1969, the candidate with six years on the City Council was Tom Bradley. The mayor, who, like Bass, had served in the California state Assembly and Congress was Sam Yorty, four years removed from a disastrous response to the Watts riots.

Bradley placed first in the primary and seemed a shoo-in to become L.A.’s first Black mayor in an era when cities across the country were also electing Black mayors.

Councilman Tom Bradley, right, and Mayor Sam Yorty debate in Tarzana in May 1973.

(Los Angeles Times)

So Yorty — a former New Dealer turned conservative Democrat — chose the only path to victory. He claimed that “left-wing radicals” who supported the arriviste were salivating to “take over your city.” The nattering negativity worked: He easily beat Bradley.

History doesn’t repeat itself, the adage goes, but it always rhymes.

One factor boosting Bass’ fortunes: Backers of conservative reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who finished third in the June primary, are trending toward the mayor they loathe, apparently because they hate Raman even more.

Part of Raman’s fall is self-inflicted. She lost her momentum with an October of unforced errors, from awkward television interviews to inadvertently praising the late LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, whose name is still synonymous with Lucifer across swaths of the city.

You know you’re having a bad month when you think it’s wise to yell, “Only you can stop fascist liars!” in unison with a progressive influencer, only to walk it back after realizing the influencer had superimposed an image of your opponent on his video.

Councilmember Nithya Raman celebrates advancing to the general election with mayoral campaign volunteers and supporters at Lawless Brewing Co. on June 13.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

But don’t discount how Bass’ camp decided to frame the race. Facing voters who just don’t like their candidate, they long ago stopped focusing on how she would govern the city better in a second term and doubled down on attacking Raman anywhere and everywhere. That strategy owes as much to Yorty’s win as the Beats did to Walt Whitman.

Raman’s colleagues on the City Council have trashed her like bullies out of a boarding school novel.Videos and fliers of homeless encampments blooming across L.A. under a Raman regime are reminiscent of Yorty campaign ads featuring Bradley and the caption, “Will Your City Be Safe With This Man?”

Bass — whose usual sunny disposition I’ve always found a tonic in the toxic world of politics — lashed into Raman during their final debate, offering no real platform and little defense of her record, preferring instead to paint an L.A. collapsing without her in charge.

“Now is not the time,” she said at one point, “to turn the city over to Nithya Raman.”

Then when, Karen?

L.A. Mayor Sam Yorty in 1971.

(Los Angeles Times)

The comparison to 1969 isn’t apples to apples, of course. The city’s demographics are vastly different, its politics nowhere near as conservative. L.A.’s first female Black mayor would never throw racist slurs at Raman, although Bass and her team continue to point out that the India-born council member has lived in L.A. for only 13 years and thus doesn’t understand the place — a page from Yorty’s troll-tastic playbook.

I don’t like Bass’ tactics, but I get it. When you have nothing to run on but your failures, you have to go nasty against a rival who offers a different vision for the city — because fearmongering works when Angelenos know change is on the way but are skittish about what’s next. It happened in 1969, it happened in 2001 when James Hahn beat Antonio Villaraigosa, and it seems to be happening this time around.

We’ll see what election day brings, but Raman can take solace in history if she loses.

Bradley lost his first mayoral campaign but easily won his rematch against Yorty in 1973, after voters realized the status quo was going to remain the status quo. Villaraigosa, too, eventually became mayor.

“Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come,” goes another cliché of history.

Bass might very well cling to her position, but Angelenos still yearn for a visionary to pick them back up from four years of despair under her. They know she’s not it.

Let’s hope she doesn’t become like Yorty in his last term, complaining about haters being unfair and fending off the rebels she can only keep away for so long.

A political advertisement released this summer claimed former L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón “almost destroyed Los Angeles” and warned that, if elected as L.A.’s next city attorney, Marissa Roy will “do the same.”

Earlier this month, a seemingly out-of-nowhere rumor spread through City Hall and among rank-and-file cops that City Councilwoman Nithya Raman plans to name Gascón the city’s next police chief if she ousts Karen Bass in the mayoral contest.

Gascón told The Times last week he has no interest in the job and hasn’t spoken to Raman or her team. Raman has dismissed the rumor as a politically motivated lie started by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the police union that supports Bass.

A spokesperson for the union said Raman’s allegation was “untrue”; Bass’ campaign also said it had nothing to do with the Gascón rumor.

Nevertheless, the claim has been amplified in a number of arenas in recent days. An article in the California Post raised the issue last week, but only cited the panic of anonymous police officers. The LAPD’s former top cop, Bill Bratton, signal boosted the issue in a tweet praising LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, whose future could be in jeopardy if Raman wins.

Gascón declined to comment for this article, other than to shoot down the rumor that he could become LAPD chief.

After suffering a crushing defeat in his bid for reelection in 2024, Gascón all but disappeared from public life. He routinely declines interview requests and has receded from the leading role he once held in the nationwide progressive prosecutor movement.

But in the homestretch of the two most important contests on most Angelenos’ ballots this year, Gascón has been conjured as a bogeyman by opponents of progressive candidates. With polls showing Roy and Raman favored to win their respective races, political observers say the attempt to make Gascón relevant again may be a sign of panic from their opponents.

“At one point in time, Gascón clearly was box office poison and he may still be,” said Roy Behr, a Democratic consultant who isn’t involved in either race. “But this feels a lot like [President] Trump and the Republicans invoking Joe Biden’s name whenever they’re in trouble. In both cases, they’re clearly signs of desperation and not invoking any particular realistic possibilities.”

On Tuesday, billionaire developer and onetime mayoral candidate Rick Caruso said if Raman hired Gascón it would “take the city into a very dark place.”

“If you’re going to fire [Chief McDonnell], who are you going to appoint? Is it going to look like somebody like a Gascón?” Caruso asked. “Because I don’t think we need LAPD being a lab experiment for the [Democratic Socialists of L.A.] It’s going to take L.A. in the wrong direction.”

Caruso, who lost to Bass by nearly 10 points in the 2022 mayoral contest, has yet to offer an endorsement in this year’s race. But he has been publicly critical of Raman and invoked the Gascón police chief rumor at an event launching a new L.A. Department of Water and Power initiative. Bass was standing right next to him.

Gascón surged into office in 2020 amid nationwide demands for criminal justice reform after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The former San Francisco district attorney and assistant LAPD chief promised to reduce mass incarceration and hold police accountable while also reducing crime. But his lone term in office was beset by turmoil.

Gascón instituted a number of unilateral policies on his first day in office — barring prosecutors from trying juveniles as adults, seeking the death penalty or charging certain misdemeanors — that left him at war with his own staff. A raft of lawsuits soon followed, as well as a battery of made-for-TV-news crimes that served as red meat to critics who wanted to blame Gascón’s reforms for violence. Crime went up early in his term, and although a Times analysis cast serious doubt on links between the spike and the district attorney’s policies, Gascón’s name became shorthand for labeling a politician as soft on crime.

Two attempts to recall Gascón from office failed. But after a bruising four years in office, current Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman routed Gascón in 2024, effectively ending his political career.

In the city attorney’s race, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney has tried to draw a straight line between Gascón and Roy, insisting in one advertisement that she won’t prosecute misdemeanor crimes, including trespassing, theft and drug possession. The claim echoes Gascón’s blanket ban on prosecuting loitering, public intoxication and other minor drug offenses he believed played a role in criminalizing homelessness.

During the primary, text messages sent out in support of McKinney’s campaign also referred to City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, a moderate, as a “Gascón-style” Democrat. Feldstein Soto never supported Gascón and endorsed one of his challengers in the 2024 primary.

Roy’s campaign declined to comment. She prefers using diversion programs to handle defendants suffering from mental illness or addiction issues, according to her campaign website, but hasn’t specifically said she’d ban deputy city attorneys from filing any particular case. She supported Gascón’s 2024 reelection bid and attended some of his rallies.

McKinney, whose shift from trial prosecutor to politician began when he became an outspoken critic of Gascón, also favors diversion for mentally ill and addicted defendants for nonviolent offenses and has referred to his platform as one of “compassionate accountability” toward unhoused defendants.

But, he stands by the comparison between Roy and Gascón.

“I think that when she talks about not prosecuting certain misdemeanors, it’s a blanket policy,” he said. “That’s very reminiscent of George Gascón.”

The invocation of the former district attorney in the mayor’s race is more complicated.

Bass and Gascón were known to have a frosty relationship. She didn’t support efforts to recall him in 2022, but she didn’t endorse her fellow Democrat’s reelection bid in 2024 either.

Raman never endorsed Gascón and the pair had “no relationship” while in office, according to two people with direct knowledge of their thinking who requested anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. In a tweet last week, she called the rumor about naming Gascón police chief a “bizarre lie.”

“This rumor was created by the Police Union Super PAC, which is spending millions of dollars to re-elect Mayor Bass,” Raman wrote.

In a statement, Raman said she would seek to remove McDonnell before his term ends in 2030, but did not mention any potential candidates for his replacement. She is seeking to remove McDonnell, in part, over the LAPD’s heavily criticized response to protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids in L.A. last year, which saw officers trample people on horseback and deploy tear gas on citizens for the first time in decades. McDonnell, she says, has lost the trust of immigrant communities.

Tom Saggau, a spokesman for the police union, said the organization had nothing to do with the Gascón rumor. While the union is no friend to Roy, Raman or Gascón and has spent millions against all three candidates, Saggau said he first heard about the potential new police chief from a California Post reporter. None of the union’s members or directors had raised the issue beforehand, he said.

Still, in Saggau’s mind, perception trumps reality. He said there’s a reason people might believe Raman would pick a police chief who is considered persona non grata in law enforcement circles.

“Certainly they share some similar values when it comes to policing, especially on the prosecutorial side. Gascón was, I think it’s fair to say, lenient with some of his prosecutorial decisions,” Saggau said. “I think it’s her bouncing around on public safety items that has fed this rumor. … I think she’s just got a credibility issue when it comes to public safety.”

Times staff writers Itzel Luna and David Zahniser contributed to this report.

With three weeks left to go until election day and polls showing her on the brink of losing, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has begun to channel the Sun King himself, Louis XIV:

L’État, c’est moi.

Gaslighting voters by insisting the political establishment that has left Los Angeles a mess and that she personifies is worth keeping in office for four more years is her only hope for victory. It’s a wild strategy that reached a crescendo during Tuesday night’s debate, as Bass kept bringing up the fact that L.A.’s ancien régime just doesn’t like her democratic socialist opponent, Nithya Raman.

“Your colleagues have a very difficult time working with you,” Bass snapped at one point, later claiming that Raman’s constituents don’t care for her even though the council member won reelection two years ago. The mayor twice bragged that immigrant rights groups support her; twice referenced Imelda Padilla, the moderate San Fernando Valley council member whose internet dragging of Raman has been out of the Burn Book from “Mean Girls”; and described her opponent as “not ready for prime time.”

Well, the way the mayor’s term has gone in the last couple of years, if it was a prime-time TV show, it might be called “Breaking Bad 2.” And it wouldn’t exactly be a hit.

If it were, two-thirds of Angelenos wouldn’t have decided to vote for anyone but Bass in the primary.

Bass arguably won the debate Tuesday night, but it felt like the technical “victory” — and that’s probably the wrong word — of a politician who is simply more polished. The mayor really needed a knockout punch, and that she did not achieve.

Instead, she in effect told voters that the last four years of disasters, inefficiencies and ineptitude are still a better option than taking a chance on the City Hall equivalent of the classroom dork.

Yet people are so angry at Bass and what she represents that a democratic socialist has a great shot at becoming L.A.’s next mayor — an unthinkable prospect even last year, with no one to blame but the ruling class that has left this great city hobbled, cynical and at the point of giving up.

So the establishment doesn’t like Raman: So what? And: Boo-hoo.

Casting Raman as a political leper while asserting that Bass represents stability and good times ahead isn’t the winning strategy that Bass and Raman’s critics think it is. It’s really just a sad coda for Bass.

She’s been a good soldier for L.A., someone who has participated in nearly every progressive movement to pass through Southern California since volunteering for Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign as a teenager nearly 60 years ago. Even as Bass embarked on a 22-year political career that has seen stops in Sacramento, Washington and City Hall, the native Angeleno always successfully depicted herself as a political outsider.

Because she was: a Black woman in a realm not meant for people like her. She was someone who co-founded a pioneering nonprofit in the crucible of a changing South L.A. in the 1990s and always seemed to land on the right side of history until becoming mayor in 2022.

Sadly, Bass didn’t turn out to be the visionary L.A. desperately needed.

Mayor Karen Bass, left, sits for Tuesday’s debate with Councilmember Nithya Raman, right. Between them are NBC4 reporter Conan Nolan, NBC4 News anchor Colleen Williams and Telemundo 52 anchor Alejandra Ortiz.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Like so many baby boomers, Bass eventually became The Man without realizing it. Today, she not only stands as the figurehead of the city’s liberal potentates, but she’s also calling on them to rally around one of their own — and they have responded in kind. Democratic politicians, bureaucrats and labor leaders, once rabble-rousers like Bass who nowadays seem to exist mostly to keep their sinecure, have labored mightily to convince unbelieving voters that Bass deserves another shot.

That’s always been the marvel of L.A.’s political establishment. It can take someone like Bass, once considered so radical that her days visiting communist Cuba in the 1970s torpedoed her chances of becoming then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020, and transform her into an anodyne incumbent. It can make democratic socialists like Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martínez — people who explicitly ran to take on a sclerotic City Hall — full-throated Bass supporters who have refused to support one of their own in Raman.

Raman was also becoming part of L.A.’s political chosen ones, to the point she initially endorsed Bass. But she now embraces her turn as the machine’s biggest sellout — whether it’s a true change of heart or a chameleonic self-serving measure, as critics maintain, remains to be seen. It was Raman who said at the end of the debate, “When the mayor is confronted with issues, she blames the system. With your support, we can actually change the system” — catnip to enough Angelenos that Raman seems to be at the cusp of victory and a monumental upset.

After the debate, NBC reporter Robert Kovacic interviewed elected officials to let them hype up Bass or Raman. The latter’s proxy was City Controller Kenneth Mejia, another person loathed by L.A.’s political know-it-alls because he keeps bucking the establishment. Mejia gushed about how Raman “destroyed” Bass with the enthusiasm of a Swiftie.

Bass’ supporters were Councilmember Monica Rodriguez and Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, both of whom gravely parroted their candidate’s warnings about just how dangerous a Raman mayoralty would be. Chavez Zbur reduced Raman’s not-bad performance to a “host of complaints” — ironic, because most of Bass’ night was spent bashing Raman instead of offering much of anything positive.

Rodriguez, meanwhile, told Kovacic that voters shouldn’t choose Raman because “we can’t afford that level of indecisive leadership.”

I rolled my eyes when Rodriguez — whose office declined a chance for her to sit down with me to talk up why Latinos should support Bass — said that.

She’s part of the fabled eastern San Fernando Valley Latino political machine, another group of former gatecrashers who assumed the trappings and stylings of the old guard once they assumed power. Rodriguez long blasted Bass with the same venom she reserved for Raman until the latter mounted her challenge — but now that Rodriguez’s power is under threat, she’s all of a sudden decided to become Bass’ ride-or-die?

Moves like that remind me of another French monarch, Louis XV. “After me, the deluge,” he is supposed to have said, a warning of what would happen once his reign ended.

If Bass’ vow to rule the same as before represents a decisive leader, more and more Angelenos seem to be saying, give us the Raman flood.

Besides, nobody ever said, nor ever put on a campaign sticker, “The establishment? It’s cool!”