key endorsement

Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman has taken a wide lead over incumbent Karen Bass in the L.A. mayor’s race, according to a new poll released Wednesday, although a high percentage of voters remain undecided less than two weeks before mail-in ballots are sent out for the Nov. 3 election.

Raman is favored by 39% of likely L.A. voters, compared with 28% for Bass, according to the poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times. The poll found that 33% of voters were undecided.

“Raman clearly has the advantage. Her task is a little less onerous than Bass’,” said Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Berkeley IGS Poll.

Adding to Bass’ low poll numbers are high unfavorability ratings.

The mayor had 63% unfavorable ratings, the poll found, with 28% favorable and 9% having no opinion. By comparison, 40% had a favorable view of Raman, according to the poll, while 39% said they had an unfavorable view of her and 21% had no opinion.

The survey released Wednesday was conducted online with a sample of 2,150 likely city voters between Sept. 15 and Sept. 20. It has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.

The poll represented the strongest showing yet for Raman, who trailed Bass in almost every poll during the primary campaign and who came in second to Bass in the primary election, with 29% of the vote compared with Bass’ 34%.

Mayoral candidate and Councilmember Nithya Raman, center, enjoys a light moment with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action members at La Cita Bar in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Even so, DiCamillo said the large number of undecided voters means the race is far from over.

“It’s extraordinarily unusual to see this many undecided voters at this point in the race,” he said. Mail-in ballots will be sent out beginning Oct. 1, local elections officials say.

The large number of undecided voters can be linked to the elimination of mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt in the June 2 primary, according to DiCamillo. The former reality TV star received 26% of the vote in the primary, and most of the voters who cast ballots for him — 63% — say they haven’t decided whom to vote for in the runoff, the poll found.

Among those Pratt voters who have decided, 22% favored Bass compared with 16% for Raman.

One of the most significant findings in the poll was a massive “generational divide” among L.A. voters, DiCamillo said.

Raman, 45, dominated the 72-year-old Bass among younger voters, with 66% of likely voters ages 18 to 29 choosing the council member while just 4% chose Bass, according to the poll.

Raman also had 64% of likely voters ages 30 to 39 compared with Bass’ 12%, and the council member had 50% of likely voters ages 40 to 49 compared with Bass’ 18%. Raman also was leading among voters 50 to 64 years old by a slim margin of 35% to 33%.

Bass, meanwhile, led among the oldest set of voters — those 65 and up — but not by the same margins. Bass had 41% of likely voters in that group compared with Raman’s 21%.

The mayor has had negative favorability ratings since the 2025 Palisades fire.

According to the poll, 56% of likely voters thought Bass did a poor or very poor job responding to the disaster, which killed 12 people and destroyed more than 4,000 homes, including Pratt’s.

Fourteen percent of the likely voters thought Bass had done either an excellent or a good job and 17% thought she had done a fair job.

Mayor Karen Bass campaigns at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park on Sunday.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The most important issues to likely voters were fixing city infrastructure, moving homeless people indoors, crime and public safety, and building more affordable housing, the poll found.

The poll shows Raman leading in nearly every geographic area of the city. Bass was leading in South Los Angeles and the Harbor region, 37% to 34%, but central Los Angeles as well as northeast and the east side of Los Angeles broke strongly for Raman.

The San Fernando Valley went 34% to Raman and 26% to Bass with 40% still undecided. The Westside favored Raman by a single percentage point, at 35% to 34%.

Raman has led in other polls recently, though none by as wide a margin as in the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll. Shortly before the primary, a separate Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll showed Raman leading Bass in a potential head-to-head matchup by just four percentage points, with 32% support compared with the mayor’s 28%.

But the gap between the two has widened since then, the latest poll found, as Bass weathered a difficult news cycle, including rising homelessness numbers citywide as well as the fallout from the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights that burned for nearly a week, leaving rotting food and a rancid stench in the neighborhood for more than a month.

Raman, meanwhile, picked up largely positive headlines this summer. She gained key endorsements from the carpenters’ union and Unite Here Local 11, the union representing hospitality workers at hotels and the airport, as well as an endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America. Street homelessness also dropped in her district, which she said was due to her office’s strong outreach, though the Bass campaign credited the mayor’s Inside Safe program for the reduction in Raman’s district.

On the negative side, Raman was booted from her position in the council as chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, a move she said was politically motivated.

In an internal Raman campaign poll from early September, the council member was ahead, 44% to 39%, with 17% undecided. She was also leading, 38% to 32%, in a poll commissioned by the group Streets for All, which is backing Raman.

In an early August poll commissioned by an independent expenditure group supporting Bass, the mayor had the edge, 41% to 35%, with 24% undecided.

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.

None of it mattered. Raman is now easily scoring off of Bass mishaps, like the mayor’s response to the Lineage warehouse fire and her random broadside against street vendors during a debate in Sherman Oaks last month. The Dodgers should sit Raman in their dugout come playoff time, because her knack for rallying from behind is almost preternatural.

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.”

Let’s see how far the Raman storm goes.