It wasn’t that long ago that campaign strategist Estevan Montemayor was an enthusiastic booster for Karen Bass.
During her first run for mayor in 2022, Montemayor was working with Communities United for Bass, a campaign committee that spent $6 million on television ads, text messages and other voter outreach efforts.
The 35-year-old political consultant took on another expensive outside campaign this year — this one to support Councilmember Nithya Raman and oppose Bass. Asked about the change in allegiances, he said he became disenchanted with the mayor over her handling of homelessness, the city budget and finally, the Palisades fire.
“That’s when I came to realize on a personal level that she was not capable of serving in an executive role,” Montemayor said.
Bass, a 22-year political veteran, spent much of her failed reelection campaign touting her ability to work with others. She locked down support from labor unions, business groups and immigration advocates. She frequently pointed out 14 members of the City Council lined up behind her and not for Raman, who won Tuesday’s election and will be sworn in next month.
Yet some of Bass’ political relationships disintegrated during her four-year term, at times in dramatic ways. Those key colleagues and supporters turned against her, then went on to help orchestrate her political demise.
Early on in Bass’ term, Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath supported the mayor’s work on homelessness and even introduced her at her State of the City address. But she eventually became one of Bass’ fiercest critics and, behind the scenes, encouraged Raman to run. Horvath publicly endorsed Raman two weeks before the election.
The Western States Regional Council of Carpenters put nearly $2.3 million into efforts to elect Bass four years ago, producing TV ads and campaign signs promoting her. This time around, the group sponsored a committee that spent five times that amount in support of Raman, posting content on the website “Burned by Bass.”
Then there’s Raman herself. The councilmember supported many of the mayor’s initiatives and campaigned with her while running for reelection in 2024. Even though she had endorsed Bass for mayor, she later launched her own last-minute mayoral bid, saying the city “can’t seem to manage the basics.”
Bass said she was blindsided.
“I didn’t have any reason to see it coming,” Bass replied when The Times asked about Raman’s decision to challenge her. “Why would I see it coming if somebody has publicly endorsed me?”
Supporters of Bass say that in some ways, she actually broadened her coalition this time around, drawing support from individuals and organizations who opposed her in 2022, including real estate developer Rick Caruso, her onetime opponent, and the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez (D-Los Angeles), who endorsed Bass and campaigned with her, said it’s unfair to say that “because she lost a few friends, that that’s why she lost the race.”
“Losing the trust of her voters, that was the bigger loss,” Gonzalez said. “Voters basically did not feel that they were better off than they could have been or should have been.”
The opposition from Montemayor, the carpenters and other former supporters was just part of the struggle facing Bass as she waged her campaign. She had consistently high disapproval numbers that stemmed from key events during her administration.
The mayor faced voter outrage over the Palisades fire, which broke out in January 2025, destroying thousands of homes and leaving 12 people dead. Residents in Pacific Palisades voiced special fury that Bass left the country days earlier, as weather forecasts predicted dangerous winds and elevated fire conditions. But she also drew the ire of Boyle Heights residents exasperated over the noxious smells that lingered in the wake of a massive fire at a cold-storage warehouse.
Bass also attracted criticism over her handling of city spending — giving a series of raises to the workforce and then encountering a $1-billion shortfall, which led to the elimination of more than 1,500 vacant city jobs. One of those pay packages gave thousands of civilian city workers raises of about 24% over five years.
Then there was the mayor’s fight against homelessness. Bass made it a top priority from the outset, launching an expensive program to bring people indoors. By August, 42% of the program’s participants had returned to the street.
Bass declared a citywide emergency on homelessness on the day she took office, promising she would lock arms with the region’s political leaders, including the L.A. County Board of Supervisors.
Two years later, over Bass’ protest, the supervisors voted to pull nearly all of their money out of a joint city-county agency created to address the crisis.
Bass told The Times she was initially caught off guard by the supervisors’ proposal to remove the money and funnel it into a new county homelessness department.
Leading the charge was Horvath, who had served alongside Bass on regional homelessness boards. Horvath, appearing with Raman last month, dismissed the mayor’s messaging about relationship building, saying she “promised to lock arms but only demanded loyalty.”
On election night, Horvath said there wasn’t one specific moment when she turned against the mayor.
“I did put forward my best effort to build a relationship with the mayor. It wasn’t one issue,” she told The Times. “I mean, the truth is, this mayor has made clear she doesn’t respect the voices and perspectives of young people.”
Stuart Waldman, who heads the Los Angeles County Business Federation, offered a different take. He said Bass was good at cultivating relationships, meeting with business leaders and taking their calls. But in many instances, Bass would embrace a proposal only to have it languish in her office, he said.
“Bass would say she wanted to do something, and then it would end up in her staff’s hands and never see the light of day,” said Waldman, whose group supported Bass on Tuesday.
Last year, business leaders reached out to the mayor’s team to express their fears that the City Council’s plan to raise the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to $30 per hour would wreak financial havoc on the city’s hospitality industry.
After the council approved the increases, those business leaders responded with a ballot proposal that sought to repeal the city’s business tax, which generates more than $800 million per year for city services. They used the measure as leverage to persuade the mayor and council to roll back the wage hike.
When Bass learned about the business tax repeal, she was “genuinely shocked at the depth of our frustration,” said Areen Ibranossian, a political strategist who represented hotels and airlines during the talks.
“It didn’t seem like she was aware of continued pleas from the business community on that issue,” he said.
Worried about losing the business tax and having to make huge cuts to city services, Bass and the council struck a deal to postpone the $30 wage hike by 18 months. Although business groups were pleased with the compromise, leaders of Unite Here Local 11, the hotel workers union, were furious.
The union, which supported Bass in 2022, endorsed Raman in August.
Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, cited the minimum wage rollback as one of the reasons his union abandoned Bass.
“She signed the law that took money out of people’s paychecks,” he said.
Petersen said his union knocked on 20,000 doors as part of Estamos Con Nithya, a pro-Raman campaign committee set up by the carpenters union. That group was also frustrated with Bass, saying she failed to require certain labor standards for construction workers in Executive Directive 1, her initiative to fast-track the construction of affordable housing.
“There were no labor standard requirements or worker protections in Karen Bass’s ED1, resulting in worker exploitation, including unpaid wages, cash pay, the use of unlicensed contractors, labor brokers and nonpayment of the LA city minimum wage,” said Pete Rodriguez, second general vice president with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, in a statement.
Alex Stack, a Bass spokesperson, said the requests being made by the carpenters would have driven up the cost of affordable housing production, while also slowing down approval at City Hall. A mayor’s job, he said, is to “do what’s right for all of Los Angeles, not just what group backs her.”
“She sat down with the Carpenters and Unite Here, listened, and made decisions that benefited L.A. — not just one particular group,” Stack said. “Nobody got everything they wanted. That’s what governing looks like.”
Montemayor, who had worked on the pro-Bass committee in 2022, supervised the carpenters’ campaign, spending nearly $12 million on efforts to promote Raman and tear down Bass. Prior to that, he had been Horvath’s chief of staff, overseeing the supervisor’s office during and after the Palisades fire.
In the wake of the disaster, tensions erupted between Horvath’s office and the mayor’s team. In a series of text messages, Horvath and Montemayor expressed frustration with Bass’ office over what they viewed as a lack of coordination and communication on the wildfire recovery efforts from City Hall.
At one point, Montemayor voiced irritation after the mayor’s team announced the removal of security checkpoints on Pacific Coast Highway, then reversed course amid an outcry. “What you have done is create more chaos not less,” Montemayor wrote.
Earlier this year, hours after Raman announced her surprise campaign to unseat Bass, Montemayor posted an image from “Game of Thrones” on Instagram, one that serves as a shorthand for icy revenge: “Tell Cersei .. I want her to know it was me.”
On election night, when Bass was starting to trail Raman in the vote count, Montemayor posted the meme again.
