L.A

A Los Angeles County judge who has been accused of sexual harassment, making racist remarks and mistreating fellow members of the bench was officially removed from office Tuesday, officials said.

The state Commission on Judicial Performance upheld 17 findings of misconduct against Judge Robert Draper, 84, according to a disciplinary document made public Tuesday.

“Judge Draper persistently violated the standards governing judicial behavior and engaged in extensive and severe misconduct,” the commission said in a statement. “Judge Draper’s misconduct reflected either a concerning lack of familiarity with ethical precepts, or an unwillingness to conform to those precepts.”

Earlier this year, Draper compared the commission to the “Russian Mafia” in an interview with The Times where he denied all wrongdoing and claimed the charges were political payback for his opposition to another judge’s bid to become L.A. County’s presiding justice.

In an e-mail to The Times, Draper said the commission’s ruling was “wrong” and that he plans to seek review from the California Supreme Court, which he said “will look at the actual facts and not simply the characterization of those facts by the Examiners.”

“Kind of like what every citizen is entitled to – a presumption of innocence, a fair opportunity to be heard by an unbiased panel, decision makers who are willing to actually look at the real facts in a complete way and apply the legally required standard of proof rather than simply reciting it, and then ignoring it,” he wrote. “It just amazes me that I have had to go this far in order to have these standards for the first time applied.”

The Commission has only ordered the removal of 14 judges across the state since 2002, according to its website.

The removal order was the final step in a years-long fall from grace for Draper. A well-respected veteran member of the bench, colleagues began expressing concern about his decline in 2022. In 2023, according to a letter sent to the state commission, he was barred from hearing cases and re-assigned to a Santa Monica Courthouse department that colleagues likened to a “closet.” When a Times reporter visited the building earlier this year, staff on site said Draper almost never came in.

In letters sent to the commission in 2022 and 2023, two of the L.A. County Superior Court’s top judges accused Draper of sending abusive e-mails to colleagues replete with racist and abusive language. In one letter, then-Presiding Justice Samantha Jessner said Draper was “unable to carry out the duties and responsibilities of a judge” due to deteriorating mental and physical health.

“He has demonstrated a flagging handle on reality,” L.A. County Superior Court Judge Eric Taylor wrote.

Draper was accused of sexual harassment, making racist remarks and callous behavior all over the course of one hearing in 2022.

According to court records and testimony given at Draper’s six-day removal hearing earlier this year, the judge allegedly stroked a female lawyer’s hair after going on a tangent to a Black attorney about “Black history, Black football players, the Civil Rights Act, and the Black Lives Matter movement,” even though the case had nothing to do with those issues.

The commission described Draper’s misconduct as “extensive” and argued his alleged racist behavior continued while testifying in his May removal hearing. While testifying he referred two specific Black people as “very black in terms of pigmentation” and “way Black,” according to the commission.

He was also accused of making crude remarks to a group of female attorneys while in chambers. Reflecting on his time as a civil attorney, he recalled how male lawyers would deride female secretaries, insisting they learn to “f— better than they could type,” according to testimony given by attorney Janice Brown at Draper’s hearing earlier this year.

Draper lost his bid for re-election in June to former L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Tal K. Valbuena by nearly 13 points, after the L.A. County Bar Assn. rated Draper as “unqualified” for service.

The race highlighted the lengths the insular judicial community would go to protect their own from election challenges. Despite well-known concerns about Draper’s fitness, a political action committee run by fellow judges gave $72,500 to his campaign, state election finance records show. The PAC did not respond to prior inquiries from The Times.

A fellow judge, speaking on condition of anonymity because judges are not allowed to speak to the press, described the end of Draper’s career as a “super sad situation.”

“Perhaps it should spur California to consider enacting what most states have — a mandatory retirement age,” the judge said.

Randall Winston has declared victory in his campaign for Seat 6 on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, in what was the closest of three races in last week’s election for the seven-member board.

Second-place finisher Gabriel Buelna has conceded.

According to the count released Monday, Winston had 38.7% of the vote and Buelna had 31.7%, followed by community college professor Roberto David LaCarra in third place and realtor Tonia Arey in fourth.

To win a seat on the seven-member board, candidates need only a plurality of votes, not a majority.

Winston declared victory in an email to supporters over the weekend.

“You voted and told your friends and family why this race mattered,” Winston told supporters on Saturday. “Because of you, the Los Angeles Community College District will have a trustee who believes our colleges are where this city builds opportunity.”

In a brief interview Monday, Buelna said he called Winston to concede and wished him the best in his new role.

Seat 6 turned out to be the most contentious of the races for the Board of Trustees, which oversees the largest community college district in the country with some 200,000 students, most of whom are low-income.

During the campaign, Buelna and Arey accused Winston of misleading the public by describing himself as an architect and an educator, when his full-time job is deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Winston responded by saying his first professional degree is in architecture, he is licensed in the field and he will be teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College this fall.

Helping boost him to victory was a key endorsement from the community college district’s faculty union, which put significant financial resources behind his candidacy.

Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, the union contributed $800,000 to a committee supporting Winston and the two other winning candidates, helping produce slate mailers that hit the doors of voters, according to campaign filings.

James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision, but told The Times that the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.

In the race for Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres held a 40.91% to 33.48% lead over educator Adriana Cabrera, who was in second.

Cabrera did not return emails seeking comment, and Veres said she had not called to concede. As of Monday afternoon, Veres had nearly 97,000 more votes than Cabrera with an estimated 44,000 more ballots to be counted county-wide, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.

In Seat 4, Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, has the biggest lead of all.

According to the latest numbers, Harris had 57.3% of the vote in a seven-person race. Healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz was in second place with 14.4%.

In late October, two non-Equity touring musicals opened on the same night at two of L.A.’s largest theaters: “Tommy” at the Hollywood Pantages and “The Music Man” at Center Theatre Group’s Ahmanson. The shows — which operate outside of the Actors’ Equity Assn., the union that represents more than 51,000 professional stage actors and managers nationwide — reignited a contentious debate about whether a major regional nonprofit like CTG should host nonunion shows.

Critics questioned whether these productions threaten CTG’s artistic mission and if Angelenos should pay top dollar for nonunion shows. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what should matter more, a theater’s bottom line or its core values? The underlying implication in much of the criticism was that non-Equity shows are subpar and that hosting them implies a tacit acceptance of the mistreatment of actors.

Savannah Stevenson, who plays Mrs. Paroo in the national tour of “The Music Man,” would like to banish those concerns.

“We should completely dispel the notion that because we’re a non-Equity tour, we’re somehow put through the wringer,” Stevenson said during a phone interview from the Airbnb she was sharing with three cast members. It was a few hours before curtain during the final days of the show’s nearly two-week run in downtown L.A., before it departed for the Capitol Theatre in Yakima, Wash.

Touring small towns like Yakima is a big part of why non-Equity shows exist. The tours began popping up in the 1990s after the rise of the Broadway megamusical, to bring shows to places that would otherwise go without. Before its arrival in L.A., “The Music Man” was in Senatobia, Miss., with a population of about 8,500. A major union show like “The Lion King” will never stop in Senatobia, but the people there can enjoy a bit of River City thanks to Stevenson and the rest of “The Music Man” cast.

“The biggest difference in my mind is, frankly, the schedule. As a non-Equity tour, we do significantly more one-nighters or short engagements,” Stevenson said. “But we also all knew that when we signed up for it. And that is what allows us to share this particular piece of musical theater and musical theater history with such a wide swath of the country.”

Many professional actors choose to remain non-Equity for a variety of reasons, Stevenson said. Jobs are more plentiful for non-Equity actors, she noted, especially if you make a living working at regional houses outside of major cities, which often book only a handful of Equity actors per show. Stevenson recently shared a dressing room and top billing with an Equity actor in a Connecticut show — and other than the fact that the Equity actor was paid more, their treatment was the same, she said.

“We worked side by side every single day, had equally large parts, and I don’t think that anyone coming to that show would have said, ‘Oh, well, gosh, the Equity girl was the real standout in that show,’” Stevenson said gamely.

Stevenson spoke in the wake of a review by Times theater critic Charles McNulty, which called “The Music Man” a “community-theater-level production,” and slammed CTG for “damaging its stature as a nonprofit theater leader by offering such an important showcase to this second-tier touring production.”

The public reception for “The Music Man” was quite warmer. The show ranked above “Amélie, A New Musical,” “Latin History for Morons” and “Paranormal Activity” in audience surveys, according to CTG, and late last week it was on track to outsell “Parade,” “Life of Pi” and “Paranormal Activity.” CTG’s Artistic Director Snehal Desai said each year fans ask for a classic musical and this season only two such shows were on tour: “The Sound of Music” and “The Music Man.” The former (an Equity tour) went to the Pantages, which is run by the for-profit Nederlander organization. That left the latter available to CTG.

The uproar resulting from the non-Equity “The Music Man’s” arrival at the Ahmanson ties directly into the ongoing — and at times overheated — conversation about the future of the American nonprofit theater movement that erupted in late July when the Public Theater’s Artistic Director Oskar Eustis announced his intention to step down after 23 years, declaring the movement “over” and “not coming back.” Since then, theater leaders, including Desai, have been casting around for a brand new way of building a sustainable future. In Desai’s case, that meant attempting to stay in the black — a course of action that is not always looked upon kindly.

Equity vs. non-Equity

The decision to book non-Equity shows was less about saving money than it was about the Tetris-like planning required to keep the Ahmanson gainfully booked, Desai said. The cost of hosting an Equity versus a non-Equity show is about the same for CTG. Non-Equity shows get paid a flat-rate guarantee that is less than what Equity shows seek, but that’s just one piece of the pie, Desai said. CTG also must factor in overhead and local labor costs, production and marketing expenses, and more. This year there are 25 touring Equity shows and 24 non-Equity shows (a number that has stayed fairly steady for the last eight years, with the exception of the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when Equity tours shut down completely). More than 20 available Equity shows went to the Pantages — along with at least five non-Equity shows. This left only a few Equity shows for CTG to choose from, and Desai had to make sure those fit into the schedule.

This season will see three non-Equity shows: “Clue,” “The Music Man” and Boop!,” which is the rare show to go straight from Broadway to a non-Equity tour.

“The three [non-Equity shows] that we programmed were what was available to us,” Desai said, adding that the shows came from producers CTG had worked with before so he was confident that “they’re maintaining a certain quality. That they’re taking care of the companies. That they’re adhering to standards.”

Daniel Sher, the president of Big League Productions, which is producing “The Music Man” tour, said the organization does its best to follow union rules that are “reasonable.” Big League has produced mostly non-Equity touring shows for about 35 years, and Sher noted that the show’s crew is union, so the production adheres to many union rules by proxy. The Ahmanson is a union house, with its own union crew — so those rules also apply. Sher wishes he could provide health insurance for his actors, but that is cost-prohibitive, so he gives a small health stipend instead.

“I think there’s just a lot of non-Equity work now,” Sher said. “So it’s kind of like it’s a natural market force. As long as there remains this kind of vast amount of work, there are actors who will choose to remain non-Equity.”

Broadway hits will almost always start as Equity tours, he said, but once they stop being money-making juggernauts, they often go nonunion by necessity. That’s the case with “The Music Man,” he said, noting that a show of its size and scope would be financially impossible to stage as an Equity tour in the current marketplace. He would love for the union to consider allowing a mix of union and nonunion actors on national tours — like it does for regional theaters: “There’s a world where the producers and Equity could try to find a way, but the economics just have to work.”

Stevenson’s goal is to keep performing. She was an Equity member at the beginning of her career, then took 18 years off to practice law before returning to acting — this time without an Equity card.

“Whether you are a presenter or a producer or an actor or a member of the crew, or an audience member, we are all aligned around the notion of ensuring that the theater industry does not continue to contract in the way that it has, particularly since the pandemic,” she said. “So if we can ensure that we’re keeping a variety of shows alive and reaching more corners of the country, then we have to make room for both Equity and non-Equity tours.”

Even Actors’ Equity has changed its approach to non-Equity shows. In 2001 the union picketed a previous non-Equity tour of “The Music Man” and in 2014 it ran an ad campaign urging theatergoers to “Ask if it’s Equity,” before buying tickets. That campaign, along with more demanding rules around how an actor could join the union, were scrapped in 2023 out of concern for “small ‘e’ equity and justice, and who should have the decision to join the union,” said Actors’ Equity Assn. sopkesperson David Levy.

Prior rules relied on the employer to decide whether an actor was worthy of joining the union, “and we wanted to put that power back in the hands of the actual members themselves,” Levy said. Actors’ Equity currently has an “open access” policy that allows anyone who has worked in any kind of professional theater in the U.S. to join.

“The quality of the talent in these tours is not any less than the quality of talent on any union stage,” Levy said. “What’s at issue is how that talent is treated, how they’re paid, what the workplace safety rules are, what accommodations they’re given as they travel, whether they get appropriate rest time.”

While the union would prefer that every theater show operate under an Equity contract, it’s aware that this may not be financially feasible in all situations, Levy said, noting that nonunion shows might be the only viable option for smaller towns across the country without rich and diverse theater ecosystems.

“We would never want to deprive those audiences of having that transformational opportunity of seeing singers and dancers and actors and musicians do their thing,” Levy said, adding that L.A., unlike less populous cities, doesn’t have a dearth of theater offerings. “Now, in a perfect world, that job would come with both standardized wages and work rules and benefits, as well as the safety guarantees of a union contract.” He paused, “We do not live in a perfect world.”

The future of nonprofit theater

CTG came perilously close to financially bottoming out in 2023 when it closed the Mark Taper Forum for almost a year and a half. This happened just before Desai took over from Michael Ritchie as the third artistic director in CTG’s history, arriving just in time to pick up the pieces following the COVID-19 pandemic. When CTG finally reopened its theater doors after an astonishing 56 weeks, its staff was decimated, tickets sales had plunged and the cost of putting on productions had skyrocketed. CTG’s staffing still remains more than 20% down from its pre-pandemic high, although its subscriptions are on the rise — up 226% over last year.

“We used to talk to donors about how CTG valued union-only productions, even though they are more expensive, because CTG valued more than just the bottom-line,” former CTG board chair Kiki Ramos Gindler wrote on Facebook in response to McNulty’s review. “Unlike the Nederlander Organization, a for-profit theatre business keenly focused on profits. … The mission is to support our community, not to find ways to keep from going out of business. If this is a path to staying in business, it’s a wrong path and maybe time to take a final bow rather than completely throw away core values.” (Nederlander declined a request for comment on the issue.)

In late September the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management, which was founded at the Kennedy Center in 2001 and supports arts groups nationwide, hosted a nearly two-hour Zoom forum called “Is the American Nonprofit Theater Movement Over?” About 17 major theater leaders spoke on the call that had 800 participants, including Eustis and Desai, all seeking to examine what elements of “a historical model for producing and presenting nonprofit theater in America” have ended, and which remain relevant.

“When I first became an artistic director, there were two words that I had never heard before that became my mantra for years: cash flow. These days, a lot of my conversations seem to be focused on three words: minding the gap,” Desai said. “There are so many gaps confronting our field right now. There is the gap between what a production costs and the revenue it can generate. The gap between the impact of the work we make and the value we assign it. The gap between the origin stories of our institutions and the communities we serve. And perhaps, most importantly, there is the gap between the models we inherited and the world we actually live in.”

For CTG, that means keeping the 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theatre booked with revenue-generating shows in order to afford to continue producing work the company does at the Taper and at Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theatre. “Phantom of the Opera” ran for 4½ years straight at the Ahmanson from 1989 to 1993, a commercial success that enabled a golden age at CTG under founding Artistic Director Gordon Davidson that included the 1992 premiere of Tony Kushner’s groundbreaking two-part play “Angels in America.”

The Ahmanson needs to be that commercial vehicle again, if CTG is to continue pushing artistic boundaries, Desai said. CTG-produced shows are always Equity, while major touring shows arriving at the Ahmanson sometimes aren’t.

“When a show doesn’t meet its goal, it is a huge swing. It is millions of dollars. And so we have to be super careful about what we’re programming,” Desai said. “And I’m also trying to take care of the audience that I’m building in line with the artistic vision.”

During LA28, the official competitions will be just one part of the massive summer extravaganza happening in Los Angeles.

A kaleidoscope of international hubs will rise throughout the county, each hosting events such as watch parties, concerts, regional meals, immersive installations and meet-and-greets with newly crowned medalists. Known as hospitality houses, these temporary gathering places give traveling fans a home away from home beyond the competition venues, while offering Angelenos a chance to experience the cultural thrills of the Olympics, even if they weren’t able to snag tickets to the Games.

“You can go to 20 countries at the Olympic Games without ever leaving the host city,” said Tiffany Assman, founder of House Party Blog, which covers Olympic hospitality houses.

At the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, the hospitality houses were as diverse as the countries themselves: The China House opened with traditional Chinese fan and sword performances while Ireland staked its claim at a pub, hosting night-after-night parties with live music and céilí dance lessons. Los Angeles hopes to welcome about 60 to 70 hospitality houses for LA28, up from roughly 40 houses in Paris, according to Dilpreet Sidhu, the city’s deputy mayor of international affairs. At the same time, Team USA fan events will take place across the region.

The partnerships between countries and local host cities can be mutually beneficial. Paul Krekorian, Los Angeles’ executive director of major events, said hospitality houses can help generate “meaningful economic opportunities for our city by supporting nearby local businesses and investing in the workforce that makes these events possible.” In Santa Monica, Switzerland’s planned use of the Camera Obscura building has “helped us to reimagine the future” of the landmark, said Jennifer Taylor, the city’s economic development manager. In Venice, where Australia will make the venue 57 Windward its LA28 home, Councilmember Traci Park said she wants the Games to “accelerate meaningful improvements in accessibility, public spaces and neighborhood infrastructure that residents and visitors will enjoy for generations.” And in San Pedro, Councilmember Tim McOsker wants Croatia’s presence to draw visitors into the historic downtown, arts district and surrounding businesses.

In choosing a location, countries look for more than a scenic backdrop. Factors include neighborhood demographics, transportation and proximity to hotels and Olympic venues. Funding varies by house: Some countries rely on government or Olympic committee resources, others on private support and sponsorships.

While many countries are still scouting venues and negotiating agreements, several have already confirmed where their houses will be. Here’s a look at where you’ll find some of these cultural hubs in the summer of 2028. Details on programming — both free and fee-based experiences — will be announced at a later date.

Pinch & Punch is the microbakery venture from Cathy Asapahu, one of the sisters behind Westchester’s family-owned Ayara Thai. A former pastry chef at Michelin-starred Providence, Asapahu has a knack for balancing sweetness with salty, acidic, spicy and even umami elements to create unexpected flavor combinations. This year, she’s bringing an Asian-inspired twist to your holiday desserts with pandan coconut pie ($78), layered with young coconut, pandan custard and salted coconut whipped ganache; five-spice apple pie ($88), featuring Granny Smith apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, anise, cloves and Sichuan peppercorns; and banoffee chocolate pie ($98), a decadent combo of fresh bananas, Thai chocolate ganache, fish sauce dulce de leche and whipped cream in a black cocoa crust. Preorder online by Nov. 22 at 11:59 p.m. for pickup at Ayara Thai on Nov. 21, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., or Thanksgiving Day from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

LeBron James says that his loved ones are not in danger after multiple media outlets reported that a man was arrested outside the former Lakers star’s Brentwood home late last week.

According to a Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson, officers responded to a reported burglary in progress in a Brentwood neighborhood on Friday at around 9:40 p.m. A 22-year-old male identified as Jaliere McWhite was taken into custody without incident and booked for felony stalking.

As of Monday morning, McWhite was being held on $150,000 bond at the Van Nuys Regional Jail, according to online inmate records.

James, who currently plays for the Philadelphia 76ers, was asked about the incident following his team’s 127-121 victory over the Bulls in Chicago on Sunday.

“My family is safe, and that’s the most important,” James said. “We’re still looking into everything.”

A 24-year NBA veteran, James spent the previous eight seasons with the Lakers before signing with the 76ers as a free agent this summer. His wife, Savannah James, and 12-year-old daughter Zhuri still live in Los Angeles.

James told reporters last year that his oldest son Bronny James, a third-year Lakers guard who was assigned to G League Coachella Valley last week, had moved out of the family home. Middle child Bryce James is a redshirt freshman guard at Arizona.

A few weeks after the anniversary of her mother’s death, Ronni Minnis received an email invitation to Sweet Antelope, a storytelling-themed supper club. The evening’s theme was grief, a subject that felt especially poignant to Minnis as she continued to mourn her mother. After a meditation in an attic, she sat down to an elaborate candlelit dinner and shared stories of her grief with strangers. “It was extraordinary,” she says.

The experience left Minnis eager to return. Tonight, she’s back, this time with her husband, Michael Minnis, whose birthday she’s celebrating in an unusual way. She surprised him by bringing him to the supper club. “Surprise! You’re spending your birthday with strangers,” she jokes at the dinner table, where pink dahlias cut from the home garden fill the table.

Tonight’s theme is “goodbye,” setting the stage for conversations that veer into the provocative and sentimental, moving beyond pleasantries and small talk.

Kristina Robbins created Sweet Antelope in 2023, hosting the storytelling-based supper club in her West Adams home. Each month, she invites mostly strangers to share personal stories over four-course meals prepared with ingredients from her garden and local farms. “All the herbs from last night were from my garden. All the flowers were from my garden,” she says.

Robbins has always loved throwing parties. When her children moved out, she began wondering where to direct her energy. Sweet Antelope became an outlet for her passion for hosting and an expression of her belief that people need deeper connections with one another through storytelling. The name originated from a nickname her husband gave her — an adorable little creature, yet one that still wields its horns.

“We’ve really forgotten that, as human beings, we are wired to ground ourselves through our connection to other people,” she says.

For Robbins, the dinners offer something beyond good food and conversation. At a time when she sees people becoming increasingly reluctant to talk to strangers, Sweet Antelope creates space for vulnerability that she believes many people’s lives lack.

“This was the most perfect expression of what I feel is missing from a lot of people’s lives, and I felt uniquely able to offer it,” she adds.

Guests arrive beneath bougainvillea vines bursting with vivid pink blooms and are ushered through Robbins’ historic Craftsman-style home, built in 1908 and owned by her family since 2014. In the kitchen, chefs prepare an elaborate four-course meal. Outside, guests sip blackberry tequila spritzes and explore the garden before joining a ritual tied to the evening’s theme: Each receives a wooden totem and tosses it into the fire pit as a symbolic goodbye to something in their life.

Eleanor Bigelow and Tom Paper traveled from San Francisco to attend the supper club. They had met Kristina 30 years earlier through an improv troupe in San Francisco. “She was super talented and the kind of person who you remember after 30 years,” says Bigelow.

As performers who had toured a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, they were intrigued when they heard about an event that married a culinary experience with storytelling. “We decided to come here because we both are really into organic food and the idea of learning to be better storytellers,” says Bigelow.

Tonight’s featured storyteller is Madeline Walter, who co-runs the popular storytelling show “Essays” with her brother, Evan Walters. Robbins reached out to the siblings and invited Madeline to read at tonight’s supper club.

“It felt very similar to ‘Essays’ in that she is interested in building a community and an exciting live event that is just not what you see every day,” says Walter.

Before introducing the storyteller, Robbins explains that after she announces the theme, every guest will have a chance to tell their own story at dinner. The dinner, she says, is a chance to “connect with people over something other than what we do for a living and where our kids go to school.”

Madeline takes the stage and begins reading her essay about imagining her “Manhattan-feral” husband’s life in the event of her untimely death. She mainly envisions that her husband would not “know where we keep the majority of things in our home.” It elicits laughter from the dinner party guests. “I need to announce that I’m leaving to open myself up and remind myself that time is limited, and I can operate with a little more freedom,” she concludes.

After the reading, guests make their way to one of three candlelit tables inside the Craftsman home. Each person has an assigned seat and a number indicating when it’s their turn to share a story. A placard on the table offers prompts to start the conversation: “Tell us about a goodbye you’ll never forget.”

For Robbins, the moments that follow reveal something special about the gatherings. When strangers sit together and move beyond small talk, she says, unexpected connections can emerge. “We share experiences that become launching pads for conversation,” she says. “Some people go funny, some people go deep.”

No matter where guests sit, they’ll have a memorable conversation, Robbins explains. “At the end of the night, people will come up to me, and they’ll be like, ‘How did you know to seat me at that table?’ ” she says. “Everyone is convinced that they had the best table.”

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, chefs put the finishing touches on a melon, cucumber and tomato salad as guests prepare to share their own stories. What began as a small culinary operation has grown into a team of chefs who bring their own influences to the menu. “I hire on vibes — if they’re fun, have a great attitude and have a nurturing, calm presence, and are talented at what they do,” says Robbins.

Like the evening’s theme, the menu tells a story. From the melon salad to curried tomato soup and black garlic short rib (which one guest exclaims is “insane!”), each dish reflects a deliberate choice. “We are at the end of the melon season, so I definitely knew I wanted to do a melon dish before they disappeared,” says Robbins.

Her intimate dinners have garnered fans in the culinary world. Daphne Brogdon, who once co-owned the beloved Los Angeles restaurant Tar Pit and helped run operations at the legendary Campanile, is a longtime friend and one of tonight’s guests. “I think what she’s doing is even more important than ever,” says Brogdon, who believes that supper clubs can be an antidote to loneliness. “There’s a premium for being in real life.”

At the dinner tables, conversation flows freely, veering from cathartic discussions of women’s boundaries and dispatches from the psychic realm to memories of departed loved ones and a bizarre encounter with a disgraced rock star that elicits giggles and bewilderment. Fleetwood Mac plays softly in the background. Wine flows.

As the meal winds down, guest Katelyn Hindin says she doesn’t believe in goodbyes. “I think goodbyes are treated with reverence that they shouldn’t be,” she says before revealing a bittersweet story about a lost family member.

One of the dinner party guests, Mark Chervinsky, shares a story about receiving an organ transplant, which inspired him to start a nonprofit, Mark Here 4 Life, that advocates for organ donation after he connected with the mother of his donor.

Shortly afterward, Robbins floats through the room to invite guests into the garden for salted caramel pots de crème and lemon balm tea, “grown and dried here,” she adds.

Under the stars, guests swap numbers while sipping from toasty mugs. “The event was more profound than I ever expected, and a really wonderful way to get to know people very quickly,” says Jessica Hernández as she prepares to say her own reluctant goodbye.

Sweet Antelope’s next Storytelling Supper Club is Dec. 5, 5-9:30 p.m. Tickets are $185.

Grammy Award-winning artist Macklemore said he is getting pushback from concert venues as he brings his Free Palestine benefit concerts to the U.S.

The rapper behind hits including “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us” said on Instagram that nine U.S. venues told him in mid-September that they had available dates for concerts, but “once they found out these were my benefit shows for Palestine, those dates were suddenly off the table. The doors were closed.”

The nine venues include Inglewood’s Kia Forum, L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena and Madison Square Garden in New York.

Earlier this year, Macklemore said he was removed from Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour after venue owners told Sheeran they would not host him at their stadiums if Macklemore was still part of the concert. Sheeran has said his promoters made the decision, according to the BBC.

Macklemore launched his Free Palestine tour in October, playing in Dublin, Paris and London. The concert proceeds benefit organizations supporting the Palestinian movement, according to the tour’s website.

Representatives for the Kia Forum and AEG, which owns Crypto.com Arena, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

MSG Entertainment, which owns Madison Square Garden, said that Macklemore is “not an arena level act.”

“We have some of the busiest venues in the world with extremely limited availability,” MSG Entertainment, said in a statement.

Spokespeople for the talent agency that reps Macklemore did not immediately return a request for comment.

Weighing in on the Palestinian issue can be a sensitive subject in Hollywood, as some people in the entertainment industry have received backlash on their social media posts on the topic.

In 2023, a prominent agent at Creative Artists Agency stepped aside from her leadership roles at the company after she reposted inflammatory comments on Instagram calling Israel’s response to Hamas “genocide.” That same year, actor Melissa Barrera was dropped from her role in “Scream VII” after she shared pro-Palestinian statements on Instagram.

When I recall the great restaurants, culture and art found in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, one story that comes to mind is the tranquility and resilience of Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple.

The roughly 1½-acre parcel at the corner of 3rd Street and Central Avenue offers peace amid the noise and bustle of downtown. It’s an oasis I first learned about five years ago when an unknown vandal broke into the sanctuary and stole some lanterns while burning others and vandalizing the facility.

The community ultimately rallied around its shrine, helping raise tens of thousands of dollars for repairs in time for the temple to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Nov. 7, 1976 founding.

That sense of shared community and mission can be found throughout Little Tokyo, a theme easy to recognize in a feature written by my colleague Betty Hallock entitled “This must be Little Tokyo.”

Hallock jumps into the history of one of L.A.’s most vibrant neighborhoods and picks a few of the many places and experiences that make Little Tokyo unique. Let’s jump into a few of them.

Japanese breakfast at Azay

Azay, a restaurant founded by the late chef Akira Hirose and run by his son Philip and wife, JoAnn, is one of the few places in Los Angeles serving traditional Japanese breakfast, and this one is stellar.

Composed of several small dishes, it feels like a celebration and draws a weekend crowd (reservations recommended). A wooden tray arrives at the table laden with jewel-like dishes such as grilled black cod and rolled omelet. Or order the daily bento or à la carte items, including custardy, savory chawanmushi or curry potato croquettes with shiso aioli.

Visit the family’s legacy shop next door, Anzen Hardware, for Japanese kitchen goods, knives and housewares. Philip Hirose also regularly programs community workshops and pop-ups.

Pro tip: Park all day in the Aiso Parking Garage across the street at 101 N. Judge John Aiso St., named after the first Japanese American to hold a judicial position in the continental U.S.

Mexican American muralist Robert Vargas, who was born near Little Tokyo in Boyle Heights, painted a 150-foot image of baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani on the side of the 11-story Miyako Hotel, unveiled in the spring of 2024.

The painting, titled “L.A. Rising,” is meant to promote a cultural bridge between communities celebrating Dodgers pride. Vargas painted two versions of Ohtani, the best two-way player in Major League Baseball history (he’s the first to hit at least 50 home runs and steal at least 50 bases in a single season).

The mural shows Ohtani both pitching and hitting, and you can see him come to life by using an augmented reality feature. Scan a QR code located beneath the mural and point your phone camera at the image to see Ohtani swing the bat and pitch.

Shop for souvenirs at Bunkado, where Little Tokyo began

Gift shop Bunkado stands at the location of Little Tokyo’s beginning, where Hamanosuke Sugita opened a restaurant called Kame (which means “turtle,” a symbol of longevity) in 1884, the first Japanese-owned business in Los Angeles.

In 2022, the L.A. City Council commemorated the site and “the birth of Little Tokyo” with a plaque and street sign. Bunkado was founded in the same location in the mid-1940s by renowned Japanese American oil painter Tokio Ueyama and his wife, Suye, after they returned from incarceration in the World World II internment camps.

The name means “house of culture,” and the Ueyamas built an artists’ hub and eventually became important sellers and importers of recorded Japanese music. The store is now owned by their niece, Irene Tsukada Simonian, and sells Japanese ceramics, art tools, incense, toys, T-shirts and postcards.

Check out Hallock’s entire list.

Top stories

Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman

State and local elections

Trump administration policies and reactions

Weather, wildlife and environmental issues

More news

Commentary and opinion

Editor’s pick

More picks

Things to do

Today’s recipe

Los Angeles food writer Carolynn Carreño believes the shift in the season marks an opportunity to embrace pumpkins this fall. Carreño’s twist, however, is telling her readers, who love fresh and organic ingredients, that it’s OK to use canned pumpkins. In fact, the canned product beats fresh when baking loaves, cookies and pancakes. She included several recipes here. Take a deep breath and try it out.

Photo of the day

Games

Here’s today’s mini crossword, plus our other free, daily crossword puzzle, sudoku, word search and jigsaw games.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Jack Dolan, investigative reporter
Hugo Martín, assistant editor, Fast Break desk
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew J. Campa, weekend writer
Karim Doumar, head of Newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

The first volunteers gathered in the back house of Nithya Raman’s Silver Lake home with little besides a whiteboard counting down the number of days until the June 2 primary election.

Raman had jumped into the Los Angeles mayor’s race the day before, right at the Feb. 7 filing deadline. Her campaign didn’t have an office, a bank account, a campaign treasurer, or even a proper website.

It lacked, put simply, “the most basic things,” said Ian Manheimer, Raman’s campaign manager, who joined the team after a 10 p.m. call from Raman the night before the filing deadline. There would be a meeting the next day in Raman’s backyard accessory dwelling unit to get things rolling.

“For anyone who suspected Nithya had designs on this for a long time, you could just come to the ADU and that would dispel those notions,” Manheimer said.

Those unassuming beginnings in Raman’s backyard, with her parents and her husband’s parents taking turns cooking vegetarian Indian lunches for the small staff, evolved into a disciplined campaign that overcame initial struggles to unseat incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, a veteran politician who had racked up endorsements from most of L.A.’s traditional power brokers.

Raman did it on a hyper-abbreviated timeline by turning out and expanding her base of younger renters, pitching herself successfully to Latino voters, securing late but key endorsements from groups and officials that gave massive support to her campaign’s ground game and by running on a hopeful message about restoring city services against a deeply unpopular mayor.

From the moment she got into the race, there was an evident, yet narrow lane for the progressive, second-term council member to rise to the city’s highest office, but it was far from clear that she would be able to make it through.

For much of the primary, Raman and her campaign were all alone. She had few endorsements, and almost none from elected officials.

Because of her late entry into the race and some past disagreements, she failed to secure the backing of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America for the June 2 primary, even though the left-wing organization endorsed her in both of her council campaigns. Raman got almost no supportive outside spending in the primary, while millions of dollars were spent opposing her.

But Raman had made a name for herself on the City Council as an advocate for tenant rights, and her campaign focused on turning out L.A.’s legions of renters to secure enough of the vote to make the runoff.

She was still a largely unknown entity early on in the race, with 51% of likely voters in a March poll saying they didn’t know enough about Raman to form an opinion of her.

On top of that, Raman was quickly upstaged by Spencer Pratt, the Republican former reality television personality, whose slash-and-burn campaign on social media attacking L.A.’s liberal political establishment dominated news coverage.

While Raman’s camp hadn’t initially worried too much about Pratt, thinking he and entrepreneur Adam Miller would split the more conservative vote in the city, it became clear as the primary went on that Pratt could emerge over Raman as the second candidate in the runoff.

To dent Pratt’s appeal, the Raman campaign worked to brand him as the MAGA Republican in the nonpartisan race, knowing it would hurt his chances in a deep-blue city like Los Angeles. They chose to try out the line at the only televised mayoral debate.

Raman didn’t miss her chance.

“This is a MAGA Republican’s idea of what Los Angeles looks like,” she said during the NBC4 debate on May 6, referring to Pratt’s sometimes dystopian depiction of L.A. “This is really not the city that I love so much.”

Though Raman’s debate performance was widely panned — and Pratt’s was praised — her team felt she had gotten the point across to Angelenos: With the unpopular Bass almost certain not to win the primary outright, the runoff could either be a contest between two progressive Democrats, or Bass versus a candidate whose views echoed those of President Trump.

That debate was a learning moment for Raman and her campaign.

“She’s up against an extremely seasoned politician and a television star. She’s just a normal person who hasn’t been on stage like that,” Manheimer said.

But defining Pratt as MAGA, the campaign believed, would pull some voters to Raman from lower-performing candidates on the left and in the middle with the hopes of keeping Pratt out of the runoff.

Raman was able to eke out a win against Pratt in the primary, getting 29% of the vote compared to his 26%, with Bass taking first place at 34%.

The sole goal of the primary for Raman’s campaign was, self-evidently, to make it out of the primary.

If her team could move on to the runoff, it would be able to reset — fundraising would restart, it could build a bigger team and it would have a longer runway to increase Raman’s name recognition and build out her base.

While Bass dominated labor and elected official endorsements throughout the race, Raman began to pick up key supporters in the runoff.

In August, the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters endorsed her, sponsoring an independent expenditure group for her called Estamos con Nithya for Mayor 2026.

That was followed by the endorsement from the union Unite Here Local 11, a major player in city politics, which represents hospitality workers at airports and in hotels.

Raman also got major endorsements in the runoff from City Controller Kenneth Mejia and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath.

Mejia especially became a pit bull for Raman at events and on social media.

“Kenneth would call every day and say, ‘Let me know what myths I can bust today,’ ” said Tessa Wick, the communications director for Raman’s campaign.

“We didn’t have time to feel particularly lonely in the primary, but once we saw what it felt like to have all these groups and people behind us, each press conference we would do was injecting more force into this movement we were building,” Wick said.

Raman’s bid also got a serious infusion of cash from Aaron Sosnick, a hedge fund manager and bike lane advocate who poured $8 million into two independent expenditure groups to support Raman, making him the single biggest spender in the mayoral campaign.

“He is a cyclist. He just wants to not die riding the streets in L.A.,” said Michael Schneider, who runs Streets for All, a transportation advocacy group that ran one of the independent expenditure groups that Sosnick funded.

Raman also capitalized on a difficult summer for Bass, during which the mayor faced turnover on both her campaign and administration teams, unsheltered homelessness rose citywide (but crucially, went down sharply in Raman’s city council district) and a massive fire burned at a cold-storage food warehouse in Boyle Heights, sending noxious fumes into the heavily Latino, working-class neighborhood.

“Many Latinos saw themselves in the Boyle Heights residents,” said Lauren Perez-Rangel, senior director of Latino outreach for the Raman campaign.

Bass had prevailed in more Latino neighborhoods than any other candidate in the primary. The Raman campaign worked to change that in the runoff, Perez-Rangel said, focusing especially on Latino voters. Raman brushed up on her Spanish and used it frequently at events.

The campaign also teamed up with Latino and Spanish-language content creators to spread Raman’s message of affordability, building more housing and solving the homeless crisis. The result: Raman led Bass among Latino likely voters throughout the runoff campaign, according to polls by UC Berkeley IGS and the L.A. Times.

Despite that growing support, Bass and her allies’ negative portrayal of Raman in attack ads had an effect, as Raman’s unfavorable ratings rose month by month. They framed the council member as too far left, allowing homeless encampments in front of schools and failing to show up for thousands of City Council votes.

“It was a race to define Nithya,” said Jeff Millman, an advisor and spokesperson for Raman’s campaign. “Their strategy was to tear down Nithya. Our job was to make sure that people knew Nithya’s strengths and record of success as a council member.”

As the campaign drew to a climax, Raman improved as a candidate and came off as more confident during the two runoff debates. Her team said she spent many hours improving her debate skills.

“There was no secret weapon, just a person really committed to practicing,” said Wick.

Still, she opened herself up to attacks from Bass’ side during the final debate Oct. 13, after she said the city used to be the “gold standard” of noncooperation with immigration authorities under controversial former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates. Bass hammered Raman over the remark, accusing the council member of romanticizing Gates’ tenure.

Despite that and other missteps during the closing days of the campaign, her team said it was Raman’s insistence on running a largely positive campaign about an optimistic vision of L.A.’s future that pushed her over the finish line.

“She was really dogged that it was a campaign that was hopeful, not nasty and cynical. She wanted the campaign to be a love letter to L.A.,” said Wick.

In her election night speech, still trailing Bass by a few percentage points that she would quickly make up, Raman spoke to that vision.

She called it a vision where the people who made L.A. extraordinary could afford to live in the city and where government is responsive and takes responsibility.

“We believed that Angelenos were hungry for that city,” she said. “And it turns out that we were right.”

Twenty years after its world premiere in Northern California — and subsequent success on Broadway and in London — “Passing Strange,” the quintessential L.A. coming-of-age musical, is finally arriving in Southern California, staging its long-awaited area premiere at Pasadena Playhouse on Sunday.

Exactly why it has taken so long for this acclaimed, Tony Award-winning show — much of it set in the heart of Los Angeles — to come here is something its creators, the artist and singer-songwriter, Stew, and Heidi Rodewald (along with this writer) have been scrutinizing since 2009, the year after it opened to critical acclaim on Broadway.

“Passing Strange” tells the story of a young, artistic “Youth” (that’s actually his name in the show) who rejects his single mother and the “Black, middle class dream” of 1970s Los Angeles in favor of leaving home to find “The Real,” an elusive state of mind and authenticity he craves.

The reasons “The Real” took so long to land in its hometown began to make sense during a recent group Zoom with the “Passing Strange” brain trust, including Stew, Rodewald and its new director Zhailon Levingston.

“At my age, at this point, I think it is absolute poetry that this gentleman [Levingston] is the one who brings it to our hometown,” said Stew, pointing to a serendipity of timing.

Levingston is the 32-year-old theatrical wunderkind who won this year’s Tony Award for best director, for the groundbreaking revival of “Cats” on Broadway by re-imagining the long-running ‘80s smash as a ballroom drag competition.

Getting Levingston to do this revival of “Passing Strange” as his immediate follow-up to “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is a coup for Pasadena Playhouse’s Artistic Director Danny Feldman. Feldman calls Levingston a rare talent, who’s “generous and fearless.” Or as Stew says more bluntly: “Zhailon’s got the receipts. … it’s the right time because it’s him. We made this play for him — literally, I don’t mean figuratively — because me and Heidi don’t make work necessarily for the contemporary time, we make it for the future.”

One of the main themes of “Passing Strange” is how knowledge is awkwardly handed down from one generation to another. In a key scene, the narrator describes a mentor, Franklin, whose words and wisdom wash over Youth “like a Bach fugue creeping out of a cheap car stereo.” In conversation together, Stew and Levingston (the former is twice the latter’s age) seem entirely in sync, having both clearly absorbed the show’s mantra: “Just ask the song.”

Stew says he learned the virtues of “asking the song” while casting the original production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2006. The show would go on to play 165 performances on Broadway, but it wasn’t a traditional book musical — it played more like a cabaret or rock experience. “When we had everybody audition, they had to sing a punk rock song,” Stew recounts. “That was the fast track to figure out if they could do what we needed, or not.”

That original Berkeley cast, including Eisa Davis, Daniel Breaker, Rebecca Naomi Jones and Coleman Domingo, won the 2008 Obie Award for ensemble at New York’s Public Theater before transferring to Broadway. That cast was a big part of the show’s success, so much so that Levingston calls them “the Avengers of Black talent.”

Spike Lee filmed the show’s penultimate night at the Belasco Theater. In 2010, PBS broadcast it as part of “Great Performances,” which is how a then 15-year-old Levingston learned about “The Real.”

“My grandmother’s bedroom had a TV and that was kind of my refuge as a kid. I happened to turn on PBS,” Levingston recalls, “and it just so happens that was the night that they were airing ‘Passing Strange.’ I wasn’t looking for it. I just clicked on the television, and the opening credits were happening. I stayed glued. I didn’t leave. I didn’t pee. I just watched it.”

Levingston was hooked. “It became my favorite show ever,” he says, “I had two birthday parties designated to my friends watching it.”

But more importantly, it made him ask questions. “I then went to school the next day. … I got a dictionary and I looked up every word I didn’t know. I looked up every reference I didn’t know,” Levingston says. “I didn’t know who James Baldwin was. I didn’t know who Josephine Baker was. I didn’t know the significance of the Berlin Wall. I had never been out of the country, let alone Louisiana.”

None of the creators of “Passing Strange” would wince at the musical being described as a “bildungsroman,” or a classic coming-of-age story. Its title is derived from Shakespeare’s “Othello,” and the show earned Joycean comparisons, including to “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Black Man,” from critics.

“Passing Strange” pokes fun at the pretensions of youth, how a young person can know every indie rock album or French New Wave film and still be clueless about their own emotions and need for family. The truth and timelessness of Stew’s story — about a boy in the 1970s wanting to escape what he sees as L.A.’s “fishbowl of philistines” resonated so much for Levingston that he was inspired to escape his own fishbowl (Louisiana) for a life in Los Angeles, where he enrolled in AMDA College of the Performing Arts in Hollywood.

He lived in L.A. for four years, before making his name in theater back east. He had never dreamed of directing “Passing Strange,” saying, “it felt like too ‘full circle’ to actively pitch myself as the director.” But when he took a meeting with Pasadena’s Feldman: “I mentioned ‘Passing Strange,’ kind of as a secret menu option.”

Feldman loved the idea, and now “Passing Strange” is here. Asked during a recent rehearsal whether he’s deconstructing or re-inventing the show as he did “Cats,” Levingston replied with an emphatic no.

“I didn’t want to put it on the moon … or create some kind of other, concept approach to ‘Passing Strange,’ that would make it too corny. The concept has to be the people,” he said.

Inspired by Stew, Levingston looked for actors with a punk vibe, because he “wanted a company that understood what it meant to lead a band, even if you’re not the Narrator or Stew, I wanted the authenticity of that kind of swagger.”

Ty Taylor plays Stew in the revival, along with a whole new cast. During a recent rehearsal, it was uncanny how these performers look and sound so different — yet still carry the same fiery sense of invention as the actors who created the roles. It was also moving to see that Stew and Rodewald’s Tony Award-winning book still delivers laughs and pathos two decades on. Their show about passing the torch of cultural enlightenment hasn’t lost its edge — even as it is being handed off to another generation.

During the Zoom interview, Rodewald noted that the show’s original director, Annie Dorsen, gave them the confidence “to not try to please everyone,” to just make something they thought was cool.

“And then we went, and we did it,” Stew adds, “and now it’s perfect that it’s happening here. It’s the right director. It’s the perfect cast.”

In this way, the show has not only come home to Los Angeles, but it has also come full circle.

“I was talking to a cast member the other day, and I was like, ‘I just try to make theater that my friends like.’ But now I feel like I’m trying to make this show as a thank you letter to Heidi and Stew,” Levingston said, as he sat in the house seats at the Playhouse during rehearsal.

Indeed, rather than re-imagining “Passing Strange,” Levingston dug down to the show’s roots, when Stew and Rodewald traveled from gig to gig as musicians. “One of my earliest images thinking about the show,” Levingston says, “is that I wanted it to feel for the audience as if a bus tour of artists from a band backed up here and just dumped everything from the road onto the stage because the tour schedule said we had to be in Pasadena tonight.”

Will L.A. at long last embrace “The Real” or is this revival of “Passing Strange” looking to move to New York or elsewhere?

“Just ask the song,” Levingston says with a smile.

“I did not do this show because I had some long runway vision of how to take it from Pasadena to Broadway or Chicago,” he says, “but obviously, I want everyone in the world to see it.”

Levingston then mentions the number “Arlington Hill,” which is about being torn between where you come from and where you want to be.

Levingston quotes from the scene, “The Narrator looks back and says to Franklin, ‘Thank you, Brother’…’I want to say thank you for giving me this fugue.’ ”

He then gestures to the theater around us, “That’s the intention here.”

As a Los Angeles City Council candidate six years ago, Nithya Raman gave a firm “No” when asked if she supported the Olympics coming to Los Angeles.

Responding to a questionnaire from the Democratic Socialists of America, Raman added: “There was no vetting of this process, extremely rushed budgeting outreach, and the residents of our city had no say in any of it.”

Once in office, she joined just one other council member in voting against the prime city contract outlining the city’s partnership with the LA28, the private nonprofit hosting the event. And in August she voted against a deal outlining how LA28 would reimburse the city for the extra trash collection, policing and other services that will be expanded during the 2028 Summer Olympics.

My, how time, fortune and politics can change things.

With her election this week as mayor of Los Angeles, Raman won herself a ticket to sit among the dignitaries for the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics on July 14, 2028. And she will be asked to take center stage at the closing ceremony — handing the Olympic flag to the mayor of Brisbane, Australia, host city for the 2032 Summer Games.

In the little more than 600 days before the Games begin, Raman will oversee the city’s preparations.

Those looking for signs of friction might note that the mayor-elect has closely allied herself with City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who has been locked in a battle with LA28 over its failure to publicly report some of the details of its finances.

It’s unclear what position Raman will stake out in that conflict and another one dear to several members of the City Council — getting LA28 to agree to set aside a certain percentage of as much as $4 billion in contracts to businesses based in the city of L.A.

During her run for mayor, Raman did what she has done on many other issues — project a more moderate, conciliatory stance on the Olympics.

“Nithya supports a successful Olympics that showcases the best of Los Angeles and delivers the economic boost Angelenos deserve: more customers for local businesses, opportunities for workers, and lasting improvements in our neighborhoods,” a spokesperson for the mayor-elect said in a recent statement. “She wants residents to share in the excitement and the benefits long after the closing ceremony, but not left to cover the bill unfairly.”

Raman’s rep said she also will “enforce the city’s agreements with Olympic organizers, put strict financial safeguards in place, and make taxpayer obligations public before commitments are made.”

She also pledged that the security around the Olympics will “respect every Angeleno’s dignity and rights, especially immigrants and our most vulnerable neighbors.”

Raman also signaled over the summer that she is ready to be a fan. In an Instagram video, she touted the opening of a new cricket grounds in Pomona, practiced her bowling (like pitching in baseball) and enthused: “The second most popular sport in the world coming back to the Olympics, and coming back, right here in L.A., is really exciting.”

LA28 Chairman Casey Wasserman congratulated the new mayor.

“We look forward to working closely with the mayor-elect, her team, and leaders at every level of government to deliver a safe, secure and fiscally responsible Olympic Games,” Wasserman said in a statement. “With less than two years until the LA28 Opening Ceremony, there is much work to be done. We’re confident that, together, we’ll be ready to welcome the world to Los Angeles and showcase the magic of our city.”

Harris-Dawson is running

It’s still a month away, but the City Council is going to have to cast a pivotal vote: Who should serve as its president under a Raman administration.

City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, in a quick interview Friday, said he will seek the council’s top leadership job for another two years. Harris-Dawson, who supported Mayor Karen Bass in Tuesday’s election, said he was unaware of anyone else angling for the job.

“I intend to be president,” said Harris-Dawson, who faces term limits in 2028.

Meanwhile, council members are still processing the Raman victory and what that will mean for the city. Harris-Dawson said the election revealed a divided city, with newer arrivals to L.A. backing Raman and “people who have been here for generations” lining up behind Bass.

“This race, I think, exacerbated the divisions of the city,” he said. “That showed up a lot more than I was expecting, and the divisions were a lot deeper than I expected.”

Raman’s young progressives

Gen Zers crisscrossed the dance floor, Modelos and seltzers in hand, as the DJ bumped her head to the beat.

But this was no Friday night at Zebulon. This was election night in L.A., and Nithya Raman’s campaign had taken over the plaza outside the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park for the occasion.

“We’ve had a mayor that’s failed young people,” Rutik Shinglot, a 26-year-old working in public affairs, shouted over the noise. “I think L.A. is ready for a change.”

Many of the young progressives at Raman’s election night party at the Greek Theatre had knocked on doors or made phone calls for the now mayor-elect. Unionized UCLA and USC student workers sported bright-pink United Auto Workers shirts. Others wore a red pin brandishing the Democratic Socialists of America’s logo.

Their excitement seems to have made it to the ballot box: Partial returns showed young people ages 18-34 had increased their share of the vote compared with the same early returns in 2022.

The Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll sponsored by the L.A. Times days before the election found Raman led Bass 74% to 16% among voters in their thirties.

Raman struck a chord with young people, many said, by hitting hard on the major issues affecting them: affordability, housing and transit.

The council member took her message directly to them. She frequently campaigned at bars and released ads spoofing popular movies and shows.

She garnered the support of niche progressive celebrities young folks trust, including comedians Brennan Lee Mulligan and Rekha Shankar of Dropout (formerly known as CollegeHumor) who emceed Raman’s election night party.

By clinching the endorsements of both DSA-LA and the regional UAW, she unlocked two major pools of young L.A. progressives — eager to build on national momentum — to campaign on her behalf. Rafael Jaime, president of UAW 4811, said the region’s members had contacted 116,000 voters in support of Raman. DSA-LA knocked on more than 110,000 doors with the help of more than 1,600 volunteers.

At DSA-LA, the endorsement created “a mechanism to build up our canvassing infrastructure citywide,” said Keshav Kundassery, 27, a member of both DSA-LA and UAW 4811. “We need to exercise those muscles right now to be ready for the fight that’s waiting for us in 2028.”

State of play

— THE ROAD TO RAMAN: Bass started election night ahead of Raman but the tide quickly changed. By Thursday, the mayor had conceded and Raman was giving her first press briefing at the Original Farmers Market.

— THE NEW AGENDA: What initiatives will Raman pursue once she’s in office? Bike lanes, housing voucher, new apartments, a new police chief and lots of data crunching. “L.A. has been flying blind when it comes to measuring the impacts of the dollars spent. That is going to change,” said former deputy mayor Rick Cole, a Raman advisor.

— WHERE WERE THE VOTES? We’ve got a preliminary map showing how different parts of the city voted in the mayoral election.

— ROY REIGNS: Deputy Atty. Gen. Marissa Roy romped to victory in her race against Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney. Council aide Jose Ugarte had a lead that’s been steadily shrinking over community organizer Estuardo Mazariegos in a South L.A. council race. Meanwhile, political aide Barri Worth Girvan was leading business owner Tim Gaspar in the west San Fernando Valley.

— SIGNS OF THE TIMES: On election day, Ugarte’s camp released video that appeared to show Mazariegos supporters stealing an Ugarte lawn sign and replacing it with one for Mazariegos.

— CH-CH-CH-CHANGES: L.A. voters approved all eight of the ballot measures that were on their ballot, hiking taxes to pay for the fire department, sending more city money to public parks and giving the council the power to cut the number of weekly meetings from three down to one.

— SECOND TIME AROUND: In a case of ballot deja vu, Los Angeles County voters reelected Sheriff Robert Luna, rejecting former Sheriff Alex Villanueva by a wide margin once again.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to Venice, a neighborhood represented by Councilmember Traci Park, and to Sylmar, which is represented by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.
• On the docket next week: The L.A. County Board of Supervisors will take up a motion Tuesday to lay out steps to fix the county’s restraining order system, in response to reporting by The Times on ways the system fails survivors.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

From the time I met a guy playing a violin near Pershing Square in 2005, and followed him to the Skid Row slab of pavement where he spent his nights, I’ve listened closely to what mayors promised to do about homelessness in Los Angeles.

All of them were going to fix the problem.

Antonio Villaraigosa.

Eric Garcetti.

Karen Bass.

None of them came close.

Each of those mayors invested vast sums of money and manpower and each of them made inroads. To be fair, they collectively helped thousands of people turn their lives around. But the problem is not finite, the waves keep coming, and more than 40,000 people are currently homeless in the city.

That’s one of the primary reasons Mayor-elect Nithya Raman will get a chance to do what her predecessors could not. In the most recent year of accounting, homelessness increased slightly in the city but declined significantly in Raman’s council district.

So Bass is out, and Raman is in after a contentious campaign in which Raman attacked the Bass strategy (which she helped implement) as too costly and ineffective.

“Here’s my promise,” Raman said in a video on her campaign website. “When I’m mayor, we’ll cut tents and encampments in half by the Olympics, and bring everyone in tents and encampments indoors by the end of my first term.”

Really?

Bear with me, because I’m about to explain why I have some hope that Raman might do a better job on homelessness than her predecessors. But I cringe when I hear such grandiose proclamations.

Why?

In 2006, I attended a Skid Row news conference where a gaggle of politicians including Villaraigosa touted a 10-year plan to end homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2013, Garcetti vowed to end chronic homeless, and in 2018, he said: “We can cut this problem in half in five years. And in 10 years … we can end life on the street.”

In 2023, Bass told a CNN audience that by the end of her term as mayor: “My goal would be, really, to end street homelessness. … There’ll still be people in shelters and interim housing, but to at least not have people dying on our streets.”

Have you noticed how these kinds of amped-up promises have played out?

I don’t mean to discourage lofty goals, but we’ve been let down time after time, feeding cynicism. We’re just looking for significant progress, not a miracle.

The hard truth is that homelessness is the result of a raft of problems beyond any mayor’s full control. It begins with an economy built for stark disparity, with the crippling cost of housing, and with untreated mental illness and drug addiction. A mayor can’t magically clear the decks without help from federal, state and county allies, and from strong partnerships on the City Council.

But none of that excuses the paltry returns on big investments. Mayor Bass’ Inside Safe program moved about 6,000 people into motels and other forms of interim housing as of this past spring at a cost of $300 million, and 41% of them had returned to homelessness by the end of May.

Raman wants to mothball that program and use short-term rental vouchers she claims will be far less expensive and more effective. She wants to open doors for City Controller Kenneth Mejia to audit every dollar spent on homelessness. She says she’ll demand a full accounting of county services, use Medi-Cal funds for more street medicine teams, invest in shared housing and case management.

“City Hall has put together a patchwork of programs, agencies, and dollars that were never required to prove they work together, or work at all,” Raman says on her homelessness strategy page. “No agency or program has been required to demonstrate results. No department or office has been put in charge of monitoring the spending.”

Putting a plan on paper is one thing. Pushing it through the teeth of the City Hall grinder without the wholesale shredding of good intentions is a tougher trick. And it remains to be seen whether Raman can wrangle the support of council members who shunned her and unanimously endorsed Bass.

But Raman has a few things going for her, including a penchant for defying expectations. She blitzed two incumbents, first to win a council seat and then to bounce Bass. Then there’s her urban planning education and her work as one of the co-founders of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition. That gave her a street-level study of the challenge as well as the disjointed government response, and she then led the City Council’s homelessness committee.

“I think that situational awareness” will serve her well, said Louis Abramson, a Hollywood resident and Rand researcher who serves as chair of the SELAH board. “She’ll be able to argue from a perspective of expertise.”

Abramson is also hoping Raman will be able to deliver more affordable housing.

“She’s … proven to be uniquely tolerant of the political risks of being a YIMBY, of making Los Angeles a place that can fit everybody who wants to live here,” Abramson said.

At SELAH, and in Raman’s council district, building meaningful relationships with clients has been a central mission. That’s not always fast or easy. Some people are ready to reach for a helping hand; others are severely damaged in multiple ways, and it takes time.

I learned long ago that recovery is not linear. Sometimes it’s one step forward and two steps back. And as one social worker suggested to me, we’re so preoccupied with getting people in the front door, we barely notice when they slip out the back door.

Reversing homelessness does not end with a temporary address. Long-term case management is critical, and so is a sense of purpose and belonging. The formerly homeless people I recently met at Chrysalis, all of them working now, and all of them housed, were a testament to this idea.

I’d love to see Raman find more ways to turn able-bodied homeless people into a workforce that can help address the city’s many needs. I’d love to see her encourage more people to contribute by volunteering for organizations like SELAH, or for faith-based groups and non-profits.

In the case of my friend Nathaniel, the musician, it took me, his friends in the L.A. Phil and various outreach workers a year to convince him to move indoors 21 years ago. He is in a nursing home now, where he listens to music for hours every day and has kept a gallery of photos on his wall, including Beethoven, Bach, and another person with a “B” last name.

Actress Halle Berry.

“She’s beautiful,” Nathaniel said one day when we were going over a list of famous people from Cleveland, his hometown, and he decided that Berry deserved a prominent place on his wall of fame.

My relationship with Nathaniel, Abramson said, “is not an ancillary thing. It is THEE thing. I have come to believe that the human relationship is the necessary pre-condition to this working out.”

True enough, we are too predisposed to think of the ongoing human catastrophe in purely statistical terms. But there’s more truth in people’s stories than in their status, and more community buy-in when we recognize ourselves in each other.

For the 40,000 Nathaniels of Los Angeles, and nearly 4 million of their neighbors, here’s hoping the next mayor of Los Angeles can make a difference.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

“There’s nothing more difficult than taking something that’s really, really good and trying to make it better,” says Daniel Harding, newly appointed music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Harding is perched on a sofa at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in an office that belonged to Gustavo Dudamel for nearly 20 years. The name on the plaque outside the door is now Harding’s, but the decor — particularly the heavy Hollywood Bowl throw blanket that keeps sliding off the cushions behind him — is not. Understandably tired after flying in from Paris the night before, Harding is in town to conduct three concerts of Brahms and Bernstein this weekend.

The LA Phil is heralding a new era after Dudamel left for the New York Philharmonic, having achieved legendary status and leaving a world-class orchestra in his wake. Harding doesn’t officially begin his directorship until the 2027 season, but he has two programs on this season’s schedule.

With Harding’s arrival, the LA Phil has announced a new shared leadership model that represents a departure from the 17 seasons under Dudamel, who served as both music and artistic director. Instead, Harding will split responsibilities with Esa-Pekka Salonen, who holds the title of creative director, and Anna Handler, the new conductor-in-residence. On Wednesday, the LA Phil also announced a new row of artistic chairs: Samara Joy (McLendon) as creative chair for jazz (succeeding Herbie Hancock), Silvana Estrada as creative chair for Latin music, a new position, and Thomas Adés as creative chair for New Music (succeeding John Adams). A chair for film music is still being finalized, and veteran film composer Joe Hisaishi was recently appointed composer-in-residence.

(Hancock and Adams will join Zubin Mehta with emeritus titles. Dudamel holds an artistic and cultural laureate position.)

It’s all very exciting and just a tad chaotic — kind of like a game of musical chairs. Scheduling the interviews and photos for this article has taken nearly four months seemingly because all of these musicians are busy and scattered to the four winds. McLendon is based in Harlem, where she has started a jam session night at a local restaurant. Estrada lives in Mexico City and is currently on tour with her band. Hisaishi lives in his native Japan, and Harding resides in Paris.

President Kim Noltemy’s strategy, to divide labor and empower an array of specialists, is a bold counter to the traditional model of the all-powerful artistic and music director.

“Our new artistic leadership team brings us a remarkable breadth of perspectives and strengths across disciplines,” Noltemy said in a news release about the most recent appointments, “allowing us to imagine new forms of presentation, build unexpected collaborations, and create experiences that challenge, inspire and engage audiences. Perhaps most important of all, this team will amplify the wide range of voices, cultures and genres in Los Angeles.”

It remains unclear just how the new system will work, but all participants seem eager to find the best way as they go, and Harding still emerges as the symbolic head of the system with direct purview over the orchestra itself.

“They have a vision [that] more voices can represent better what they want to do in the future,” says Handler, whom I interviewed at Massachusetts’ Tanglewood music festival in August. “You know, one single voice is not enough to speak for everything they want to do and everyone they want to reach.”

Salonen offers a steady, familiar hand, although neither Harding nor Handler are strangers to this orchestra. Both are well-liked guest conductors, going back as far as 1997 for Harding.

Handler, who turned 30 in April, says that when her appointment was announced, “I think like 25 musicians wrote to me on WhatsApp or on Instagram, and they were all like, ‘This is so deserved,’ or ‘We are so happy, we can’t wait for the projects to come with you,’ or like, ‘We’re so happy you’re part of our family now.’”

Handler embodies the youthful and diverse future of classical music — half Colombian, half German, she speaks fluent Spanish and is interested in new technologies. She is also visibly enthusiastic about the vote of confidence from the LA Phil and the creative sandbox it represents.

“This position for me means a safe space to grow, step by step, and do projects that I couldn’t do somewhere else,” says Handler, who has something “super cool” in mind for a Hollywood Bowl concert next year and is particularly excited to work with children. “You have the Walt Disney Concert Hall which, when you set foot in this building, you are like, ‘Wow, am I in the future? Am I in the present? Am I in the past?’

“The building evokes inside of me a desire to experiment,” she says.

McLendon, 26, and Estrada, 29, have both been contracted to curate four concerts, in different LA Phil venues, for two years. McLendon says she wants to bring some East Coast influence to the L.A. scene, and — in addition to playing with her own septet — she has a dream for “a night where older musicians and younger musicians kind of share the stage in a way that maybe they haven’t done before outside of their respective projects.”

Estrada says one of her goals is exploding the idea many non-Latino people have that “the Latin sound is just one sound.”

“The Latino community is the soul of an entire continent,” she says. “So there are so many sounds and so many stories, really. And I think I’m really excited about, in one hand, bringing all this richness of the Latino culture, but also how this richness reacts to other cultures and to other sounds.”

“I think what is great about the LA Phil and all the venues they have,” Estrada says, “is it’s a really, really beautiful and empowering place to tell any story you want to tell.”

Harding, 51, arguably has the least specific and most challenging mandate.

“The genuine success of everything that’s happened here in the last 20 years is so impressive and so deep,” Harding says, “that coming in and saying, ‘Yeah, I can contribute something,’ that feels like a step. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could be part of the journey as we continue to grow. But yeah, that’s a big challenge.”

The Oxford-born conductor and licensed pilot, who has co-piloted the London Symphony and captained the Orchestre de Paris and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (among other posts on an impressive CV), brings a dry, erudite charm and a different energy than his charismatic Venezuelan predecessor.

“I inherit from him an orchestra that has great energy and flexibility and knows what it is to sell something with what they call ‘sexy music-making,’” says Harding, “and it’s all there to be enjoyed and to be nourished. It’s a huge gift.”

Still, Harding adds: “We all hear different things. We all have slightly different priorities.”

Harding recalls conducting the orchestra two years ago, in a program of Britten and Strauss, and offering tweaks to color and balance: “I thought, yeah, there’s an orchestra which has a way of doing things which is very coherent, but they have so much available space in their musical awareness, and so much technical ability, that if you give them something else to think about or to munch on, the change is strong and quick.”

“Gustavo and I share a lot of things,” he continues, “but any two musicians hear things differently, see things differently, understand them differently — and I think the orchestra is very, very receptive to that.”

Harding is keeping his big dreams and schemes for the LA Phil close to the vest, but teases that one of them “involves one of our chairs, and it involves some of the people who make this town so admired all around the world, and it involves something that chair and I both grew up with. And that’s looking possible, and even if nothing else were to happen, if we make that one happen, I’ll be very, very excited.”

How this game of musical chairs will play out is a mystery, and it will likely take some time — and possibly trial and error — for Harding and his sprawling cohort to find their rhythm together. But the LA Phil is arguably the perfect band to take a big swing and try bold new things.

Handler cites her experience as a Dudamel Fellow, in 2024, conducting “Swan Lake” selections for the orchestra’s youth series.

“I had five performances, and what the musicians said to me about what they liked was that I did something different every time,” she says. “I tried this idea of experimenting for the sake of getting better, but also keeping it alive.”

Barri Worth Girvan, a veteran government employee who ran on a platform of leveraging her experience to advocate for residents, declared victory in the race for Los Angeles City Council’s Third District seat late Friday.

Worth Girvan’s announcement came after the latest vote tally Friday evening showed her widening her lead over rival Tim Gaspar, with 51% of the vote to Gaspar’s 49%.

“I will bring competence, transparency, follow-through, and ethical leadership to City Hall, which Angelenos deserve and too often do not get,” she said in a statement, which also thanked Gaspar for stepping up to run as well.

“I know how City Hall works, and I know how to make it work for you,” Worth Girvan said. “I am ready to hit the ground running on Day One, delivering the services our neighborhoods deserve, and leading with the integrity you have every right to expect.

Earlier Friday, Gaspar’s campaign said he wasn’t yet ready to concede. The campaign couldn’t immediately be reached for comment following Worth Girvan’s announcement.

The current Third District councilmember, Bob Blumenfield, is leaving office because of term limits. The 3rd District seat includes Woodland Hills, Reseda and Canoga Park.

Worth Girvan and Gaspar were virtually tied on election night Tuesday, but on Thursday Worth Girvan began pulling ahead as more mail-in ballots were counted.

Before entering the race, Worth Girvan was L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s district director for three years, handling constituent services on the Westside and in the Valley.

A former insurance company owner, Gaspar is running on a pro-business platform and has been endorsed by the Valley Industry & Commerce Assn. and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a union representing LAPD officers. He’s also been endorsed by Blumenfield, L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, real estate developer Rick Caruso and former Democratic state Assemblymember Bob Hertzberg, Worth Girvan’s former boss.

Worth Girvan was endorsed by the L.A. County Democratic Party and labor unions including the local chapters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Service Employees International Union. She’s also been endorsed by Horvath and former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

In the race for District 9, both Jose Ugarte and Estuardo Mazariegos remain locked in a tight contest. Councilmember Curren Price is also termed out.

District 9 encompasses South L.A. neighborhoods, the Convention Center and USC. But no matter who wins, District 9 will undergo a shift in representation after decades of being represented by a Black council member.

Price is currently facing charges of embezzlement and conflict of interest and he has denied wrongdoing. Price has endorsed Ugarte, his former deputy chief of staff, whose platform includes protecting city residents from federal immigration enforcement and the Trump administration.

Mazariegos is backed by the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s worked as a community organizer for decades and said he’s running to improve quality of life in the city, including by making housing more affordable and spending money on basic services other than policing.

Ugarte’s campaign received outside support from special interest groups including Airbnb, Uber, the California Apartment Assn. and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18, which represents workers at the Department of Water and Power.

Mazariegos was supported by groups including United Teachers Los Angeles and the Progressive Era PAC. Special interest groups have spent more than $250,000 supporting his campaign.

Bold.

That’s what I initially thought when a political novice named Nithya Raman upset an incumbent in 2020 to become the first democratic socialist elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

That’s what I felt when Raman weathered well-funded challengers and loudmouth opponents to win reelection outright in the 2024 primary, despite representing a district redrawn to her disadvantage.

Bold was Raman filing to run for mayor just before the deadline. Taking on her ally Karen Bass, an L.A. institution she had endorsed just weeks earlier. Angering members of the Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter, who hadn’t planned to mount a mayoral campaign this year. Calling out L.A. establishment shibboleths like the pricey Convention Center renovation.

Picking Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” as a campaign theme song despite its stark lyrics of urban despair. Dancing with all the grace of Elaine from “Seinfeld” on primary night, despite being in third place at the time.

“Bold,” I texted a friend when we found out Raman was holding her Nov. 3 election night party at the Greek Theatre — either a brilliant move that would mark the start of a new day for L.A., or the worst venue choice for a political loser since Hillary Clinton threw her 2016 party in a hotel ballroom with a glass ceiling.

Bold was all Raman had going for her. Bass raised more funds and was backed by L.A.’s blue establishment. Haters, from the Los Angeles Police Protective League to the California Post to her fellow City Council members, painted Raman as an immature, insecure pinko wimp who didn’t know L.A. and barely could do her job, let alone run one of the world’s great cities.

But Raman didn’t stop. She left the hipster areas of the city where democratic socialists have found a base and campaigned in districts represented by council members who openly loathed her. She trotted out her imperfect Spanish to show that she wanted to reach Angelenos in any way possible and was vulnerable enough to reveal that she still was learning. Raman even teared up in public, which City Hall insiders have long mocked her for, when crying in the name of trying for a better L.A. is as bold as you can get.

Bold is what this metropolis needs. And bold is what Los Angeles is going to get now that Raman has taken out Bass in a campaign for the ages.

Critics will downplay the victory as more a verdict on a deeply unpopular mayor than an embrace of Raman — a tree stump could have trounced Bass, they’re already saying. But that’s not what heavyweights who have long aspired to become mayor — like billionaire developer Rick Caruso, L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath and City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez — were thinking when they had the chance to run this year and chose not to.

They saw the road to City Hall as too dangerous to risk their reputations on a potential loss. They weren’t bold.

I can’t say I saw any of this coming. I did call Raman the comeback kid of L.A. politics in a September columna, as indefatigable a politician as I’ve ever covered. But she spent the last month of her campaign apologizing for easily preventable gaffes that seemed to confirm all the skepticism about her. The attacks against Raman became nastier and more relentless, while Bass glommed on to anyone she thought might get her more votes, from walking alongside Caruso to standing next to future governor Xavier Becerra at Homegirl Cafe the day before the election.

I told a friend on the morning of the election that Bass probably was going to win. Angelenos wouldn’t be brave enough to go with Raman. As I wrote just a few weeks ago, Los Angeles has long gone with the old for mayor, when it could have gone bold.

Not this time.

As mayor, Raman will need to be bolder than ever. Angelenos yearn for safer streets, an end to homelessness, a renewal of the dreamland that the city has represented for more than a century. They want less of the bureaucracy that has slowed down rebuilding in Pacific Palisades and made running a small business more of a punishment than a reward. They don’t want someone beholden to any ideology other than that the City of Angels needs to be heaven again.

Raman will assume office with nearly half of those who voted, not to mention the entire City Council, having supported her opponent. She needs to go in with the humility to convince naysayers, the conviction to get rid of things and people that aren’t making L.A. better, the smarts to keep what works, the courage to defy the DSA and the vision to make the city believe in itself once again.

Above all, Raman needs to be bold enough to not become another Karen Bass.

The lifelong Angeleno used to be bold when she was an activist in South L.A. pioneering multiracial coalitions and taking on the old guard. She was an effective Assembly member and Congress member. But City Hall sucked out her creativity, her optimism, her drive. She became cautious, then negative. By the end of the race, Bass seemed to be running only so she could say she kept away another DSA insurgent as a final gift to the city.

Bright-eyed outsiders drowning in the swamp — that’s the story of L.A. politics. It’s a story Raman needs to show can come to an end.

“Bold” ultimately is having hope that you can be the one who breaks systems that need to be obliterated. That was the other big note Raman incessantly hit during her campaign, culminating in her election night speech at the Greek.

“Hopelessness can be fatal for a city,” she told an adoring crowd that kept getting bigger and bigger until security closed off the entrances. “But this campaign refused to accept that. You refuse to accept that. You saw hopelessness, and you chose hope.”

Angelenos chose bold. Let’s hope Raman stays bold.

Robert Martinez, a retired IT guy, stepped out of the Eagle Rock Rec Center polling place Tuesday afternoon and said he had just filled in a ballot bubble not for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass but for challenger Nithya Raman.

“You know, I’m not really thrilled about her, either,” Martinez said, but he told me what a lot of people have been telling me.

He wanted a change.

“I saw what happened these last four years,” Martinez said, citing the continuing homelessness epidemic and the broken-down condition of the city, “and I’m hoping something different goes on this time.”

He and thousands of others were ready to roll the dice, and meanwhile, Raman began to catch fire with young progressives who were voting for her rather than against Bass.

Some votes are still being tallied, but it’s now clear that Raman will be the next mayor of Los Angeles.

And that will be remarkable, and fun to watch, for a number of reasons.

She will take over despite every single one of her City Council colleagues having endorsed Bass, which is like the least popular kid in class getting elected school president.

She will take over despite having flip-flopped on several major issues, including Bass’ signature homelessness strategy, which Raman willingly implemented until just recently.

She will take over despite having unexpectedly rescinded her endorsement of Bass and eliciting whispers in and out of City Hall that she couldn’t be trusted.

She will take over despite having lukewarm support from the very organization through which she began her rise, the Democratic Socialists of America.

Raman is either a political savant or someone with really good timing, or maybe a little of both.

Everybody in L.A. knew that Bass was mortally wounded, and ripe for a takedown, but it was Raman who had the killer instinct, a trait that could serve her and the public well, putting everyone in city government on notice.

The mayor, having spent her entire adult life in public service, had made the worst decision of her career by leaving town in January 2025 despite conditions that led to the incineration of Pacific Palisades.

And she had made homelessness her marquee issue with scant progress to show despite throwing billions at the problem.

The mayor’s unfavorability rating was so epic, “undecided” voters were neck in neck with supporters of either Raman or Bass, and even the knuckleheaded former TV reality star Spencer Pratt looked like a solid contender in the primary.

But winning the election may turn out to be much easier than fixing City Hall.

Roads and sidewalks are falling apart. The Palisades rebuild is a maddeningly long work in progress. The homeless count tops 40,000. New housing takes forever. The cost of living swallows paychecks. The budget for just about everything is tight, and more of it will go to parks with the passing of the measure to set aside more for greenery. And the ‘28 Olympics are coming our way.

“You have all of these wicked problems that are difficult to solve in a perfect scenario, and [even more] in a governmental system as tangled and confused as L.A.,” Cal State Northridge political science professor Tom Hogen-Esch told The Times’ Jennie Jarvie.

Tangled and confused is an understatement. Homelessness does not get solved without the help of the county, which generally oversees mental health services and drug intervention and rehab.

On the bright side, it’s possible that L.A. will be able to wrangle more federal assistance now that the bloated carcass of President Trump’s political career is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall.

And Raman will have two key allies in City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who monitors and critiques City Hall’s many inefficiencies, and in Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who is a potential candidate for the new position of county executive.

“You’re right. It is daunting,” Horvath said of the countless challenges. “But I don’t think it was a secret to Nithya when she got into the race.”

Raman’s campaign, Horvath said, was about building power by acknowledging the exasperation of voters rather than building traditional coalitions in what has been an unresponsive political establishment.

“Whether or not you like each other, or formally agree or disagree, when people are able to accomplish change that the public is longing for, everybody wants to be a part of that win,” Horvath said.

Among City Hall’s problems has been a mummified tolerance of arthritic leadership and the rusted machinery of basic services. Raman, for better or worse, might be inclined to push-start the old jalopy, oil the gears and throw department heads overboard if they don’t deliver.

Early on as a council member, Raman told me she was sorting out the fragmented response to homelessness, having identified overlapping services, a lack of accountability, and broken lines of communication and coordination. In her district, homelessness has declined, and she has called out Bass for the high cost, slow pace and low returns of the mayor’s efforts.

“I know this about Raman,” Horvath said. “She is not afraid of a tough conversation.”

She’s definitely going to have them. As a YIMBY who favors greater housing density, there will be pushback in some neighborhoods. And her opposition to bans on homelessness in certain public areas (she prioritizes solving problems rather than relocating them), will test patience. As reflected in the relatively tight election, nearly half of voters are a bit wary about whether Raman would move the city’s policy and philosophy orientation too far to the left.

In San Francisco, according to USC political science professor and pollster Christian Grose, Mayor Daniel Lurie’s popularity has dipped a bit since he took office in 2024 and tackled issues similar to those in L.A., but it remains high. Grose said Lurie won immediate support and high marks among both moderates and progressives by cleaning streets and moving people indoors while also working on longer-term problem-solving.

Raman could conceivably try that formula, Grose said, and take advantage of what figures to be a honeymoon period with voters who are hungry for change. The question will be whether the honeymoon turns into a longer romance.

In Pico-Union, retired airline attendant and interpreter Aurora Corona has seen some neighborhood improvements of late. But she has long been unhappy overall with the lack of progress on homelessness, trash and infrastructure issues like broken street lights.

“It’s not working,” Corona said, telling me she visits other cities that are in better shape and wonders why L.A. can’t sort through its bureaucratic sclerosis. She doesn’t put all of that on the mayor, though, and said that after considering Raman, she voted for Bass even though she wants to see a shakeup.

“Whoever it is, I’d like to see some changes for the better,” Corona said.

In Studio City, Jon Manzanares and neighbors spent five years reporting encampments and myriad problems at an abandoned property. They tried city departments and got no help, and they tried Raman’s office repeatedly, with the same result.

In September, a fire at the abandoned property spread to an adjacent house, and finally, Raman and Bass both showed up and blamed each other.

“Between Bass and Raman, I wasn’t happy with either,” Manzanares said.

He wants a mayor who does a better job of getting homeless people whatever help they need, who respects the frustrations of taxpayers, and who demands more accountability regarding all the money thrown at various entrenched problems.

“I ended up voting with Raman,” Manzanares said. “I feel like Bass had her shot and didn’t do much with it.”

And now it’s Raman’s turn.

Good luck to her, and to nearly 4 million Angelenos hungry for change.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

For Democrats, one of the most delicious ironies of their historic victory in Tuesday’s midterms is that they won many of the congressional districts President Trump and his allies had recently redrawn to favor Republicans.

As the results rolled in on Tuesday evening, one after another of those gerrymandered Republican “safe” districts in Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama got swamped by the overwhelming blue wave.

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom led the charge to push back against Trump’s initiative and redraw as many districts as possible in favor of Democrats. On Wednesday, he bragged on X, “We fought fire with fire. And won.”

While it’s all laughter and high-fives for Democrats now, it’s worth remembering that in the summer of 2025 they were in utter despair.

The GOP’s redrawn maps spelled doom for Democrats

It seemed they had no hope of winning the Senate in 2026. Their razor-thin chances of retaking the House appeared to be dissolving as Republicans simply broke out their Sharpies and started doodling on maps.

Congressional districts are typically adjusted once a decade, after each census. The idea is to reflect where people actually live and distribute representation accordingly.

Redrawing the maps mid-decade was a norm-busting move by Trump and his allies who made little effort to hide that it was a naked bid to tighten the president’s grip on power. He seemed to revel in Democrats’ shock and dismay.

While others were wringing their hands and writing think pieces about the fate of democracy — as Democrats tend to do — Newsom made what felt to many like an indecent proposal.

Newsom’s ‘retaliatory’ proposal

What if California, the country’s most populous state with the most congressional districts, just as cynically redrew its maps to favor Democrats?

But there was a catch: Californians had voted for a ballot proposition in 2008 to take such gamesmanship out of politicians’ hands and entrust the drawing of the maps to a (hopefully) independent, nonpartisan citizens commission. Newsom would need to get voters to approve a new proposition to change the rules.

Local conservatives were outraged.

“Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political ambitions have reached a new low. In his efforts to look like a ‘fighter’ ahead of a potential run for the presidency in 2028, he’s willing to ignore democratic rules in pursuit of political aims,” wrote Lanhee J. Chen, a former Republican candidate for state controller, in the Los Angeles Times.

Even fellow Democrats had serious misgivings, calling Newsom’s plan obviously “retaliatory,” “misguided” and a “moral conflict.”

They were right, of course — it was all of those things. But voters approved the new maps, and it worked.

Tuesday’s blue wave

Californians elected Democrats in all five of the state’s redrawn districts, after Democrat Marni von Wilpert won in what had been the lone holdout, Republican Darrell Issa’s old haunt in San Diego and Riverside counties.

From the start, Newsom understood the moral murkiness of his maneuver and included a provision returning map-drawing to the independent commission after the 2030 census.

Will that actually happen? Time will tell.

But as his party’s victory became obvious on Tuesday night, he didn’t exactly take the high road and start talking about mending fences.

In response to a post on X about Republican losses in districts reworked by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Newsom replied simply: “RON CAN’T DRAW!”

Top stories

Raman’s lead against Bass

California’s billionaire tax

• California’s much-debated billionaire tax didn’t get the support many expected in one of the country’s most liberal states.
• Nearly 56% of California voters rejected the proposal while 44% voted for Proposition 40.
• However, with roughly 6 million votes still needed to be counted, the results are still too close to call.

A new era for Democrats

More news

Commentary and opinion

Editor’s pick

More picks

Things to do

Today’s recipe

With Thanksgiving only weeks away, now is a good time to perfect your favorite recipes that feature sweet potatoes. This sweet potato bread recipe is a good place to start. You can use any leftover sweet potato you have on hand, whether roasted or steamed, or you can microwave until tender a whole one that’s been pricked with a fork, about five minutes on high. Canned sweet potato works, though the bread will be a touch less flavorful.

Question for you

Are you feeling hopeful or anxious now that the elections are over?
Email us at essentialcalifornia@latimes.com, and your response might appear in the newsletter this week.

Photo of the day

Games

Here’s today’s mini crossword, plus our other free, daily crossword puzzle, sudoku, word search and jigsaw games.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Jack Dolan, investigative reporter
Hugo Martín, assistant editor, fast break desk
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew Campa, weekend writer
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

On weekends, 1st and 2nd streets between Alameda and Los Angeles swell with crowds of families, anime fans, sneakerheads and tourists and locals alike in search of ramen or sushi, manga and magazines, matcha, toys, Japanese crafts, groceries, traditional sweets, records, Shohei paraphernalia and vintage fashion.

This is Little Tokyo, one of the most walkable, vibrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles — a historic small town within a big city that has thrived, even if sometimes precariously, through waves of urban development.

The 300 block of 1st Street is known as the Little Tokyo Historic District, a nationally registered designation that’s the heart of the neighborhood. Here more than a dozen buildings preserve the pre-World War II streetscape and represent the social and cultural history of Japanese Americans in L.A.

The block is also an emblematic crossroads, where sweeping changes and cultural preservation converge.

“People want places like Little Tokyo,” says Kristin Fukushima, executive director of Little Tokyo Community Council, a nonprofit focusing on sustainable development for more than 5,000 residents and 400 businesses. “People identify with the culture and character of the neighborhood.”

In 1884 a cook named Hamanosuke “Charles Hama” Shigeta opened L.A.’s first Japanese-owned business, Kame, a 1st Street restaurant that stood where gift shop Bunkado is today. It was the seed of what’s now the largest Japanese American neighborhood in the U.S.

In the spring of 1942, Little Tokyo was emptied almost overnight, its residents forced from their homes and sent to incarceration camps. The businesses and institutions that survived and rose after the war remain part of its foundation, including confectionery shop Fugetsu-Do, Anzen Hardware and Far East Cafe, along with Buddhist temples such as Koyasan and Higashi Honganji.

Echoes of displacement resounded last summer when masked federal agents arrived in Little Tokyo and armored vehicles flanked the Japanese American National Museum — a memorial of historic trauma turned into a backdrop for immigration enforcement sweeps.

Meanwhile, generations of activists have helped save the neighborhood from being erased by eminent domain and real estate development. Every major monument and community space exists because of negotiation between activists, city government and corporate interests. “Asian American civil rights are a critical piece of the history here,” Fukushima says, referring to a movement that fought urban displacement, created services and allied with Black, Latino and anti-war groups for social justice.

The latest chapter of endurance is taking shape at the 1st Street North Residences, a mixed-use development with 100% affordable housing that used to be a city-owned parking lot. But before the 1950s the same land was a neighborhood of Japanese American businesses and homes for a growing Black community. Those buildings were demolished following evictions via eminent domain to make way for police headquarters. Now the project represents a reclamation.

Iconic Little Tokyo restaurant Suehiro and mochi maker Fugetsu-Do are expected to move into ground-floor retail spaces surrounding a cherry tree courtyard and the Go For Broke Monument, a black granite memorial honoring the more than 16,000 Japanese American men and women who served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Philip Hirose is a third-generation owner of Anzen Hardware, an institution that disappeared from Little Tokyo in 2023 but returned to its original location on 1st Street earlier this year. He also operates Azay, a restaurant his mother and late father founded. “Being in Little Tokyo where families have known each other for generations, there’s a lot of interconnectedness,” Hirose says. “You get a kind of gem.”

When asked what it’s like to be part of this neighborhood, one that’s rooted in a century of resilience and renewal, he says, “It feels like everything.”

Just after 11 on election night, Nithya Raman took the stage in a plum-colored dress outshined only by her smile.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had a narrow lead in early returns. But to Raman and her supporters who packed the plaza in front of the Greek Theatre, they had already won.

A blue deluge had swept across the U.S. to clear out the MAGA status quo that has gaslit Americans for too long. The clueless Republican ruling class’ only defense was that the liberal alternative was worse than the crap President Trump fed Americans while calling it apple pie.

Los Angeles is as blue as the Pacific, yet the same anti-establishment wave, fueled by voters frustrated with the high cost of living and a mayor who face-planted during crisis after crisis, had crashed hard here. Raman, a City Council member, was standing on its crest.

A campaign that started on the last possible day, dismissed by rivals as amateurish and given little chance to succeed against an incumbent with decades of experience and the support of nearly the entire L.A. Democratic establishment, was poised to win. Raman, 45, was expected to pull ahead as more ballots from younger, left-leaning Angelenos were counted.

Standing before Raman was the coalition that made her unlikely rise happen — one that, despite the obvious differences between L.A. and heartland politics, paralleled the one that made the Democratic Party’s takeover of the House and Senate possible.

There were the democratic socialists, who embarrassed mainline Democrats in L.A. once again with a blockbuster night for candidates endorsed by the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. In addition to Raman’s strong initial showing, Marissa Roy was ahead in the city attorney’s race, and Angela Gonzales-Torres had a substantial lead in her Eastside congressional matchup against incumbent Jimmy Gomez, a scion of the fabled Eastside Latino machine.

There were young people like Arthur Johnson, a 23-year-old Cal State Northridge student who waited in a long line on campus earlier that day to vote in person, “because I wanted that old-school feeling.” Johnson told me that many of his friends were voting for the first time “because they hate Trump, they hate Karen, and they wanted change, however it came.”

There were Latinos like Eloisa Galindo, 45, of East Los Angeles, who showed me a cellphone video of her hanging a handmade pro-Raman manta — a bedsheet sign — on a freeway bridge over the weekend. In Texas and California, Latino voters turned out in huge numbers, helping to make history in each state by electing one of their own as governor for the first time. Galindo and her fellow members of Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización, a group created to help residents affected by the Lineage warehouse fire, felt that Raman represented a new, better way.

“She paid attention to us, and the mayor didn’t,” Galindo said in Spanish. “We felt discriminated against, we felt forgotten — but Nithya did none of that.”

Galindo and her crew were far in the back but cheered so loud that it practically echoed across Griffith Park. The Four Tops’ ”Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” faded out, and Raman beamed.

“Do you love Los Angeles?” she exclaimed. “Are you ready for an L.A. that loves you back? Look at the space around you. Look at what we built together.”

Her rousing speech surveyed the course of L.A. history, from its striving immigrants to Cecil B. DeMille to LGBTQ+ history to the creation of San Pedro’s harbor. She tied her campaign to an election year in which voters across America “demanded change” because they were “angry about a broken status quo, and the politicians who failed them over and over again.”

Angelenos, she said, have become convinced “that this is the best that we can do. Our City Hall became a place where we became so used to saying, ‘No,’ we forgot how to say ‘Yes.’”

She decried the “cynicism that started to take over this city, that started to make us believe that L.A.’s problems weren’t just bad, but they were permanent. That L.A.’s best days were behind us.”

Raman praised her supporters for believing in “hope” — for a better city, a better future, but also hope that even the most entrenched longtimer could be brought down by people who were just tired of being told their concerns didn’t matter.

She spoke for about half an hour and apologized for going on so long in the chilly weather — but no forgiveness was needed on a night like this. Supporters cried tears of joy and hugged one another, sharing political news of the city and also the country, as the energy in the crowd further amped up seemingly every half-hour. James Talarico won in Texas! Dr. Abdul El-Sayed took it in Michigan? Mississippi was in play?!

Was the blue wave real? Could it hold against an angry, vengeful Trump? On this night, at least, it would.

“We have shown Los Angeles” that it’s “a city that is worth fighting for every single day of our lives,” Raman said.

She ended her speech by inviting her Indian American family to the stage — parents, brother, husband and twin 10-year-old children. Faces of a new, more progressive America, now likely the First Family of L.A. They descended the stairs together, and then a crush of Raman supporters stopped her for photos and congratulations.

Another Motown classic — “Dancing in the Streets” — blared, a song of freedom and boogie and promise from a previous generation.

Early in Raman’s speech, she asked the crowd for a favor: “Will you all get on the dance floor with me?” Many obliged, joining their leader to shimmy to Selena and other SoCal favorites.

Tomorrow would come the hard part: What to do next. But on this night, Raman and blue America would dance.

A few hours later, with more votes counted, she was ahead of Bass.

The scene at Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna’s election night party was mostly buzz cuts, dark suits and high-gloss black shoes. Deputies and politicos chatted over festive music while the local news played silently on a big screen at El Pescador Bar and Grill in Carson, which served as Luna’s campaign headquarters on Tuesday.

When the newscast declared around 9:50 p.m. that the sheriff had won a second term, dozens of friends, family members and colleagues nursing margaritas and tacos burst into a rousing round of applause. After one of the sleepiest sheriff’s races in recent memory, Luna had again cruised to victory over his predecessor, Alex Villanueva.

The vibe Tuesday night was very different than it was at the intimate gathering at his home in Long Beach in June 2022, when Luna learned that his relentless retail politics had fueled a convincing win over the rest of the field in that year’s primary.

Luna has risen far from the low-income neighborhoods on L.A.’s Eastside where he was raised in the 1970s and 1980s, when gangs and violence were rampant. His parents left behind their lives in the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Michoacán, immigrating to the U.S., where he was born in an East Los Angeles hospital.

Luna’s wife Celines said Tuesday she didn’t believe he was going to win when he sat her and their two adult children down in summer 2021 and told them he wanted to come out of his brief retirement to run for sheriff. But “he worked 110% and he never gave up” during both the 2022 and 2026 campaigns, said Celines, who brought cheerleading pom-poms to shake for her husband Tuesday evening.

“He got home after 10 o’clock most nights. He basically worked two jobs,” she said.

All that work paid off Tuesday, when Luna became the first sheriff to secure a second term in L.A. County since Lee Baca, who held the office from 1998 to 2014.

Villanueva, on the other hand, has now lost three consecutive elections, including his last two sheriff bids and his failed 2024 campaign for L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s seat, which Hahn won outright in the primary with nearly three-fifths of the vote. The former sheriff’s brand of sharp-elbowed politics plagued by scandal and vitriol has left him effectively radioactive in county politics, according to some political observers.

Luna, meanwhile, has presided over a period of relative calm at the Hall of Justice. “There are, unfortunately, fractured relationships that need to be fixed,” Luna told The Times four days before he began his first term in 2022. “Sometimes,” he added, “the way you approach governing makes a huge difference.”

Luna has made good on that promise to improve relationships. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors took drastic measures to try to rein in Villanueva’s behavior while he was sheriff, including voting to investigate the department’s activities and freezing millions of dollars in funding. Luna, on the other hand, was endorsed by all five supervisors during this year’s campaign.

“Sheriff Robert Luna has earned the trust and support of voters, and this election is an overwhelming show of confidence in his leadership,” Hahn said in a statement. “Crime is down, he is bringing transparency and accountability back to the department, and he is working closely with me and my colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to make our communities safer.”

A vague sense that the sheriff is “always in the news” for something good was part of what drove Rafael Nolasco to support his candidacy for a second term. The 49-year-old East L.A. native said last month that he planned to vote for Luna, whom he views as a role model for his children.

“Seeing somebody from your background having a position like that, to me it’s amazing,” Nolasco said after talking with Luna outside a taqueria in the neighborhood.

For Luna, campaigning has meant long hours away from his loved ones, so he’s excited to be able to focus solely on his work as sheriff.

“I want to get back to just doing my one full-time job and get reacquainted with my wife and my family. They sacrifice so much,” he said minutes after the sheriff’s race was called Tuesday night. “You’re working so hard, and at one point you take a deep breath and go, my God, how much have I sacrificed? And is it worth it? But tonight it was.”

Luna’s tenure as sheriff will now stretch from the late COVID-19 era through the 2028 Summer Olympics and beyond. He said late Tuesday that he’s got some priorities for his second term, including making more progress on deputy gangs and determining “what are we going to do with Men’s Central Jail.”

The U.S. Department of Justice announced in September that it is investigating conditions at Men’s Central Jail, which has been plagued for years by overcrowding, violence and other issues. Luna has said in the past that he would like to see the aging jail shut down if it is first replaced with a modern facility providing clinical care to inmates.

The sheriff also said he plans to track and adapt to how the broader political changes ushered in by the Democratic wave in the midterm elections Tuesday could impact approaches on immigration enforcement and other federal initiatives with local implications.

But first he said he’s going to take some time to determine the best way forward for his department.

“I’m going to bring my team back together, and we’re going to revisit all of our priorities … We’re going to continue the things that worked, reexamine things that may not have worked,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to do. This is not a finished product.”

For more than a year, Marissa Roy has vowed to turn the Los Angeles city attorney’s office into a massive “public interest law firm.”

Now, she has a sweeping mandate to put that plan into action.

As of Wednesday morning, Roy had nearly double the vote tally of her opponent, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, all but assuring the 34-year-old progressive will walk into City Hall in one of her jewel-toned blazers next year as Los Angeles’ chief lawyer. While the contest has not officially been called, McKinney effectively conceded the race in an interview with The Times on Wednesday.

For decades, the L.A. city attorney’s office has focused almost exclusively on prosecuting minor crimes and defending the city from increasingly expensive litigation. In an interview in May, outgoing City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto scowled when a reporter mentioned Roy’s campaign line about running the office as a “public interest law firm.”

“That’s insane,” Feldstein Soto said, days before her historic primary defeat.

But in Roy, an enthusiastic and tenacious California deputy attorney general, the city will have a proactive top litigator who’s ready to play offense. Roy has promised to take her experience from a years-long legal battle with Meta to aggressively pursue litigation against corporations and landlords for alleged misconduct that harms the average Angeleno.

Long before she announced her candidacy, Roy had begun courting public servants inside the sprawling city attorney’s office to ensure her plan passed muster.

What began as a series of informal coffees at Pitchoun! Bakery downtown quickly evolved into a network of trusted advisors, who helped shape her campaign promises and fine-tune policy proposals so they could be executed on Day One.

“There’s not a single word on my website that they haven’t reviewed first to make sure that we can implement it,” Roy said in an October interview. “It’s why sometimes I won’t take a hard line on something, because I talk to the deputies involved and they say they need discretion.”

Despite attack ads saying otherwise, Roy hasn’t vowed to block prosecution of certain misdemeanor crimes — even though she prefers diversion programs as a way to aid homeless defendants.

She’s been more direct about her plans to protect the city’s immigrant communities from potential future raids and aggressively fight the Trump administration in court when it targets Los Angeles. Given her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America, Roy’s stances on litigation involving the Los Angeles Police Department could also depart from her predecessors’.

The union representing rank-and-file LAPD officers spent millions against Roy. Feldstein Soto also steadfastly defended the LAPD’s widely criticized uses of force on protesters and journalists during immigration raids last year.

Roy also benefits from a deep bench of elected allies across the state, including her current boss, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, and fellow progressive city attorneys in San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland. Many local supporters showed up to toast her presumptive win Tuesday night, already riding high on the blue wave that crashed across the U.S. when the first Los Angeles returns dropped around 8:20 p.m.

The event at Audio Graph Brewery in downtown L.A. had all the energy of a wedding reception, with DSA acolytes munching cookies emblazoned with Roy’s face in icing and union organizers bopping up and down to the viral Slayyyter track “Dance…” as results rolled in.

Roy is an evangelist for affirmative litigation, proactive suits of the type that forced President Trump to cede control of the California National Guard late last year after he deployed thousands of soldiers to quell protests and aid immigration enforcement across the state.

“We need someone who knows how to sue the Trump administration, who also has the relationships and can pick up the phone and call the San Francisco and San Diego city attorney,” Roy said. “We’re all part of this very tiny niche of municipalities suing the federal government. We all became experts [in those methods] together.”

Despite at times amplifying inaccurate claims that McKinney was a conservative, Roy and her opponent shared some policy planks. Both were highly critical of ballooning legal costs under Feldstein Soto, as well as her penchant for hiring outside law firms to fight the city’s battles. Both also said they wanted to revive internal programs the outgoing city attorney had scuttled, such as neighborhood prosecutors and specialized units for handing child abuse and domestic violence.

“This election is gonna go her way, and I’m just really truly grateful for the opportunity to be part of this over the last nine months,” McKinney said Wednesday morning. “I met a remarkable group of people. I learned a lot about the city, the City Attorney’s office, about city politics and I’m a better person for it. I congratulate Marissa on her victory, I wish her well.”

McKinney said he hopes Roy can “uplift that office to be the finest municipal law office in the country,” but also suggested she spend her energy on more than legal combat with business leaders or the White House.

“She’s gonna have to broaden her focus to issues related to public safety, homelessness. Obviously, we both agree that city liabilities need aggressive proactive risk management,” he said.

Meanwhile, Roy could scarcely contain her excitement as she laid out her plan to supporters chanting her name.

“I’m much more comfortable when people chant things like ‘Let’s sue it’, because that’s the work that we’re going to do,” she said.

“Let’s sue it!” the crowd cheered.