raman

Hours before Nithya Raman took the stage at Jewish Federation L.A.’s mayoral forum this week, Mayor Karen Bass’ campaign blasted out a press release accusing the council member of skipping a City Council Jewish Heritage Month event to appear on Hasan Piker’s livestream.

The Raman camp’s response: “The Mayor is deliberately spreading misinformation that the public record directly contradicts,” said Liz Garcia, a campaign spokesperson.

Piker is a left-wing streamer on the platform Twitch and a fierce critic of Israel. Raman appeared on his stream on May 15, where he asked her if she thought Israel was committing genocide in Palestine. She said she did.

That same day, Raman missed a Jewish Heritage Month event at City Hall. Debbie Paperman, who is on the executive board of Democrats for Israel Los Angeles, said Raman told her that she had not been feeling well.

The Bass campaign, citing the fact that Raman appeared on Piker’s stream the same day, fired off an email to reporters claiming the councilmember had lied about her reasons for missing the Jewish heritage event.

The Raman campaign said that Raman was, in fact, ill.

Video from the May 15 council meeting shows Raman was present at the start of the meeting, but no longer at her seat during the heritage event, in which Councilmember Bob Blumenfield celebrated Jewish athletes. More than an hour later, Raman was back in council to make a speech and introduce other speakers for Hapa Day, celebrating people of mixed Asian and Pacific Island heritage, during which she said she wasn’t feeling well.

Raman’s team said she was still at City Hall during the Jewish Heritage Month event, but that she left council chambers due to her illness.

She felt better later that afternoon, the Raman camp said, allowing her to appear on Piker’s show.

Paperman said she wasn’t convinced. “It happened that you were sick for the multiple hours this was going on and you happened to get better to go on this psycho’s stream?” said Paperman. “I don’t believe that.”

Piker, meanwhile, shot back at the mayor for using his name to try to dissuade voters from supporting Raman.

“Karen Bass is deploying the same nasty tactic that Donald Trump used recently at a press conference, wondering out loud why any Jewish person would vote for Democrats, due to my presence in the big tent,” he told The Times in a text message.

Piker said he will vote for Raman, though he supported Bass against billionaire Rick Caruso in 2022.

“I was also a fan of [her] past work in Cuba,” he told The Times. “Karen Bass used to be quite the radical.”

Bass swings up in new poll

Bass will need to rely on undecided Republican and conservative voters to propel her to a mayoral victory, a new poll paid for by a group supporting her found.

The incumbent mayor is trailing Raman by 4 percentage points, 39% to 35%, with a quarter of the electorate still undecided, according to the initial results from an FM3 Research poll that was commissioned by the Central City Assn.’s PAC, an independent expenditure group supporting the mayor.

When the pollsters gave likely voters additional, critical information about both candidates, Bass shot up by 5 points and took a narrow lead over Raman, 40% to 39%, with 21% undecided, according to FM3.

“The undecided voters — including many that say they will refuse to make a choice between Bass and Raman by Election Day — are disproportionately: Republicans, conservatives, 65+, homeowners, Democratic women over the age of 50 and those who do not hold a college degree,” wrote the research company in a polling memorandum.

The poll surveyed 809 likely L.A. voters from Sept. 21-28. It has a 3.5% margin of error.

“The mayoral race remains a statistical tie,” said Nella McOsker, the president of the Central City Assn. “Our poll demonstrates that some of the most reliable voting blocs swing to Bass once they fully learn both candidates’ records.”

A poll conducted between Sept. 15 and Sept. 20 by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, found Raman was ahead 39% to 28%.

Raman allies engage in trash talk

A woman walks out of her home carrying a full garbage bag, then starts venting about the high cost of trash pickup.

“Karen Bass has nearly bankrupted L.A., so the city doubled my trash fees. Isn’t L.A. expensive enough?” the woman says angrily, before slamming the lid on a black trash bin.

That message is at the heart of a campaign video created by Streets For All, a transportation advocacy group now spending about $1.2 million to promote Raman and tear down Bass.

That ad is missing a key piece of information: Raman voted to hike those trash fees several times last year, even as two of her council colleagues spoke out against them.

“I was one of two no votes,” said City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who is supporting Bass’ reelection, in an interview. “She never once pushed back.”

Rodriguez called the ad misleading, saying it implies that Raman was an opponent of the fee hikes.

Michael Schneider, who runs the Streets For All campaign committee, defended the 14-second spot, saying council members hiked the trash fees to make up for bad budget decisions made by the mayor — including her support for a $2.6-billion upgrade of the Convention Center.

The council boosted the trash fee to $55.95 per month last year for small apartment buildings, up from $24.33. For single-family homes, the monthly fee was also hiked to $55.95, up from $36.32.

The city’s budget advisors said the increases were needed in large part because the monthly fees had not been increased in 17 years. As a result, L.A.’s residential trash customers were not being charged the full cost of garbage pickup, leaving the city budget to cover the difference.

“Kick it in the Park” gets Olympic makeover

L.A.’s summer of 2026 will be remembered for stifling heat, innumerable Dodgers injuries and, especially, World Cup watch parties.

Teams, corporate sponsors and the city of Los Angeles welcomed in the world, producing large crowds and kumbaya moments — with fans of opposing teams partying side-by-side in (relative) peace and harmony.

Mayor Karen Bass’ “Kick it in the Park” events drew a total of 45,000 fans over the length of the quadrennial soccer tournament. A survey of about 2,000 of them registered overwhelming support for the free shindigs.

Paul Krekorian, executive director of the mayor’s Office of Major Events, declared victory in a meeting with City Council members this week. He also said that substantial planning is already underway to bring the city even more viewing parties and “activations” during the 2028 Olympics.

While the city hosted a maximum of three viewing parties a day during the World Cup, it plans to stage as many as 15 a day when the Olympics come to town. A list has been drawn up of possible locations for the festivities — spread around every corner of the city and distant from Olympic venues to avoid overcrowding.

Among the possible viewing party locations: MacArthur Park, the Greek Theatre, Pan Pacific Park, Leimert Park Plaza, Koreatown, Penmar Recreation Center, Echo Park Lake, Angels Gate Park and the Watts Towers.

Given the welter of Olympic events, it will be a challenge to schedule the parties, whose centerpieces are usually big screen projections of the live events, with food and live performances often thrown in.

State of play

— SPLIT ON GAZA: Bass and Raman split on Tuesday over whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza during the Israel Gaza war. The two candidates gave their opinions during a forum hosted by Jewish Federation Los Angeles. Raman said she agrees with the experts who use the term, while Bass said she would not use the term genocide to describe Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza.

— WILDFIRE FAILURES: A long-awaited independent investigation commissioned by Gov. Gavin Newsom offered the most in-depth review of the Jan. 7, 2025, Palisades and Eaton fires, describing the chaos and poor communication that made firefighting, rescues and evacuations even more difficult. The 724-page report also cited the Los Angeles Fire Department’s failure to fully extinguish the Jan. 1 Lachman fire, which reignited days later, and Los Angeles County’s failure to provide timely evacuation alerts in Altadena.

— ESTAMOS CON WHOM?: Recent polling by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, found that likely Latino voters favor Councilmember Raman over incumbent Bass by a wide margin — 45% to 21%, with 34% undecided. That’s an even bigger lead than Raman had over Bass with voters overall in the most recent Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.

— VOTER GUIDES: The Times released its much-anticipated voter guides for the November election this week, including a mayoral guide and a guide to the Council District 9 race, among many others.

— OLYMPIC OBSCURA: The nonprofit organizer of the 2028 Summer Olympics, LA28, has provided less information in its annual reports than it agreed to in a 2021 contract with the city. The group has stopped reporting the contracts it signs over $1 million, leaving taxpayers with less information about the work going into the Games. LA28 says it has provided all necessary info.

The city also asked LA28 to take out a $650-million insurance policy, and agree to cover any potential losses above that amount, should the Games be canceled by a calamity.

— LAPD BLUES: Secret recordings documenting LAPD officers making racist comments have renewed questions about whether the force, which is now less than 50% white, has made forward progress on stamping out prejudice in its ranks.

— STORM’S BREWING: L.A.’s sanitation agency is bracing for the coming ‘Super’ El Niño, which could wreak havoc with the city’s Hyperion sewage treatment plant.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program went to East Hollywood in Hugo Soto-Martínez’s district on Tuesday, where they moved 61 people indoors near Beverly Boulevard and Madison Avenue. On Thursday, Inside Safe moved 27 people indoors near Louvre Street and Ralston Avenue in Pacoima in Rodriguez’s district.
• On the docket next week: On Wednesday, the City Council’s transportation committee will be discussing an independent evaluation of the city’s Vision Zero Program.

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.

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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is in the fight of her political life, facing a vigorous challenge from City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a savvy campaigner who was until recently a close ally.

Raman publicly endorsed Bass at the start of the year, then launched her own mayoral bid weeks later, saying the city “can’t seem to manage the basics.” She came in second behind Bass in the June 2 primary election, edging out the flashier and more attention-grabbing Spencer Pratt, a onetime reality television star.

Now, Raman and Bass — both Democrats — are heading toward a generational showdown.

Bass, 72, is a veteran lawmaker who served in Sacramento and Washington D.C., before coming to City Hall. She’s drawn support from more traditional corners of the city’s political establishment, including Los Angeles County’s Democratic Party and its Federation of Labor, which represents hundreds of thousands of workers.

Raman, 45, arrived in L.A. in 2013 and launched a City Council bid six years later. She’s been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and other groups that are newer to city politics, including Streets For All, which seeks to expand the city’s bus and bike lane network.

Bass has been dogged by high unfavorable ratings since the Palisades fire, which broke out in January 2025 while she was out of the country, destroying thousands of homes and leaving 12 dead. She has faced criticism over her handling of the wildfire response and recovery work.

Since the primary, the mayor’s political challenges have intensified.

The Lineage cold-storage warehouse fire broke out in June, causing communities on L.A.’s Eastside to cope with the stench of rotting meat for two months. The latest homeless count showed an increase in the number of people living on the street, dealing a setback to a mayor who staked her reputation on the issue.

Raman contends that Bass is simply a bad manager, pointing to those crises and other problems facing the city.

“I respect very much her long career of public service,” Raman said. “But the election has to be about results.”

The mayor isn’t backing down.

She says Raman has little to show for her three years running the council’s powerful housing and homeless committee. She contends that Raman is on the wrong side of the issues — particularly public safety — and does not work well with others.

“It says something that you do not have strong working relationships with any of your colleagues. Not one,” Bass said. “Each council member had a story to tell about how difficult she was to work with.”

Two social media influencers who filed an ethics complaint against Tom Steyer’s California gubernatorial campaign have submitted new complaints to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission and the Los Angeles Ethics Commission, accusing Nithya Raman’s mayoral campaign of paying influencers without proper disclosure.

Their complaints, it turns out, received a legal assist from the campaign of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass.

The metadata for a draft of their filings last week revealed that they had been created with the help of the law firm used by Bass’ election campaign.

Kaitlyn Hennessy, who filed the complaint with Beatrice Gomberg, acknowledged to The Times that the Bass campaign steered them to the Kaufman Legal Group, which helped prepare the complaint.

Bass’ campaign said it is picking up the tab for the legal work but wasn’t paying Hennessy and Gomberg for their efforts.

The complaint focused on posts by comedian and TV personality Adam Conover and influencer-turned-Raman staffer Eric Cheng, along with a host of so-called “meme” accounts, which repost content created by others, sometimes at the behest of political campaigns.

The Raman campaign said it has done nothing wrong and denied any wrongdoing on behalf of Cheng. Conover also denied any wrongdoing.

The Bass campaign’s decision to cover legal costs for the complaints is unlikely to pose ethics issues, according to legal experts consulted by The Times, provided the payments are reported by the campaign in its disclosure reports, which the campaign said it intends to do.

“As long as a campaign is transparent in reporting its expenditures, there’s nothing inherently wrong for a campaign to have its lawyers file an ethics complaint for the campaign or somebody else with their informed consent,” said Jeffrey Daar, a former president of the L.A. Ethics Commission.

Conover’s posts promoting Raman already attracted scrutiny in ethics complaints filed in May by former L.A. City Council candidate Dylan Kendall. The investigations into those complaints, to the FPPC and L.A. Ethics Commission, are ongoing.

Conover told The Times that payments made by the campaign to a company connected to him were not for his posts but for video work one of his staffers did for Raman’s campaign. They initially were described in Raman’s campaign filings as payments for online ads but later were amended to say they were for video production services.

A spokesperson for Raman’s campaign said Cheng is paid for work he does for the campaign, not for posts on his personal social media account, and that it had gotten guidance from L.A. Ethics Commission staff on Cheng’s disclosure requirements to ensure it was in compliance.

The spokesperson added that Cheng voluntarily posted on his social media account that he would be joining the campaign before his employment began.

The L.A. Ethics Commission and FPPC declined to comment on the status of the complaint or the prior one brought by Kendall.

Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school who also previously served as the president of the ethics commission, said that because news of an ethics complaint can have a political impact before its merits have been evaluated, it is important to view filings late in an election cycle with greater scrutiny.

“Whenever I see that there’s an ethics complaint filed this close to the election, I always pause for a minute,” she said.

California is one of the few states in the country that require social media influencers to disclose if they have been paid by a political campaign to create content. L.A. rules are even more strict.

Political groups are required to notify paid creators of the requirement.

New state legislation signed into law last month gives the FPPC the power to refer alleged violators to law enforcement for possible misdemeanor charges, and violations can be penalized with a fine of up to $5,000 per instance. The L.A. Ethics Commission can levy fines of up to $15,000 or three times the amount of money at issue.

There are no such rules for paid social media content sponsored by a federal candidate or political committee.

The FPPC last month concluded its investigation into Steyer’s campaign and found that it had properly followed the rules, but it did say that several social media influencers, including Cheng, the Raman staffer, had not properly disclosed payments from the Steyer campaign.

Hennessy and Gomberg are continuing to investigate improperly disclosed social media posts in races across the country, including the L.A. mayoral race, because of their concerns about the corrosive impact this content can have on the electoral process, Hennessy said.

“It’s really disappointing to me, because you see how this impacts races,” Hennessy said. “When you have this undisclosed content, people don’t understand that what they’re watching is an ad.”

Last year chef Debbie Lee debuted her long-awaited pocha in Highland Park: Yi Cha, one of L.A.’s best new bars, where Lee serves modern Korean bites that pair with artful cocktails and imported soju. Now she’s opened Mokja, a tandem cafe and market for Korean-leaning coffees, sandwiches, pastries and pantry goods. Enter Mokja through Yi Cha’s back alley and find sweet corn iced lattes, coffees topped with misugaru cold foam, and banana matcha lattes served alongside oxtail hand pies, Seoul-style breakfast plates, gochujang short rib onigiri, tomato-muchim pork belly BLTs, and a DIY ramyun station. In a hurry? Grab Lee’s premade bibimbap, mayak eggs, mandu, japchae and more from the refrigerators. If you’re shopping for your home, find coffee, mochi mixes, ice cream, hot sauce, black sesame spreads and other goods from local makers, plus imported Korean Oreos and chips, on the shelves around the cafe.

California Deputy Atty. Gen. Marissa Roy has a lead in the race to replace Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, who lost her seat in a historic primary rout this spring, new polling shows.

Among likely Los Angeles voters, Roy leads by 10 percentage points over her rival, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, following the pair’s shocking electoral upset in June, according to a poll released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times.

The spread closely mirrors City Councilmember Nithya Raman’s breakaway lead in her bitter fight to unseat Mayor Karen Bass, who has outraised her for months.

But that’s where the similarities end.

The mayor’s contest has been called a “knife fight” for its no-holds-barred campaigning. It has also drawn sustained — and occasionally sensational — national attention since Raman’s buzzer-beating entrance in February.

By contrast, the city attorney’s race remains all but unknown: More than two-thirds of likely voters are still undecided, versus about a third who remain uncommitted in the mayor’s contest, polling showed.

L.A.’s top litigator commands a budget of nearly $200 million, plays a role in shaping city ordinances, and wages court battles on behalf of the public. The city attorney also prosecutes misdemeanors — a job most other cities keep separate. Each year, the office weighs some 120,000 violations, deciding whether to file charges and how to pursue them.

More recently, city attorneys across the country have championed activist litigation, spearheading suits against the Trump administration, among others.

Yet, few local voters know the job exists, and fewer still know the candidates by name.

Seventy percent of likely voters said they had no opinion of either McKinney or Roy — a fairly typical result for a down-ballot race, experts note.

Still, new data about voter priorities could signal how those undecideds might shake up the race in its final weeks.

Roughly a third of L.A. voters rank “moving homeless people indoors” and “crime and public safety” as top priorities, respectively; just slightly less say “fixing streets, sidewalks, streetlights and other city infrastructure” is essential.

McKinney, 58, pitches himself as a law-and-order moderate with plans to use the city attorney’s prosecutorial power to reduce disorder and move unhoused people off the streets. He manages more than 300 people at the district attorney’s office and spent decades in the courtroom securing high-profile convictions — advantages that he contends outweigh his lack of civil litigation experience.

Roy, 34, campaigns with an aura of sunny progressive pragmatism, arguing that the city can rein in ballooning liability in part by tackling its vexing infrastructure issues. She nods to the recent $17-billion settlement with Meta — a case her team at the attorney general’s office led — as evidence of the kind of ambitious, public interest litigation a large municipal attorney’s office could join.

Those disparate visions — along with crucial endorsements and influxes of cash — helped the pair define clear brands and constituencies going into the primary.

Both also got a boost from nationwide anti-incumbent fervor, staking sides across a mutual opponent whose name recognition had turned sour while rarely taking aim at each other.

But the general election is a different animal.

Although the Los Angeles electorate has been moving leftward for years, primary voters typically skew older and more conservative than those who show up for the general election, experts said.

Polls suggest that fact could create an uphill battle for McKinney, whose sway is biggest among conservatives, about 19% of the city’s electorate.

Some 21% of Republicans and nearly 30% of self-identified MAGA voters favored McKinney in the most recent poll, while Roy is favored by 25% of Democrats and by 3 in 10 voters who identify as progressive or democratic socialists.

By contrast, about a quarter of Republican voters now say they favor Bass for mayor, while Raman has a 14-point lead among Democrats. (Both are about equally underwater with MAGA voters.)

Like Raman, Roy has deep ties to the city’s insurgent democratic socialist political machine and hard-won endorsements from its progressive clubs. She has also successfully courted L.A.‘s influential unions and got an early boost from the L.A. County Democratic Party when it endorsed her this spring.

McKinney is endorsed by the city’s powerful police union and championed by L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser and Noah Goldberg, giving you the latest on city and county government.

It’s one of the most exacting tasks to face a left-leaning candidate running for office in L.A.: filling out the Democratic Socialists of America’s questionnaire.

During the candidate endorsement process, the DSA’s L.A. chapter issues a lengthy form that ends with a spate of yes or no questions, mainly around hot-button topics: Do you support Medicare for All? Do you favor the policies of the Green New Deal? Would you put a halt to police exchange programs with Israel?

When filling out the form, mayoral candidate Nithya Raman voiced support for all three. But unlike some DSA-endorsed candidates, the council member declined to give a yes or no answer on an assortment of other topics, opting for longer explanations.

Raman, a DSA member, declined to check either box when asked if she would work as mayor to repeal a law prohibiting homeless encampments near schools. She did the same on whether to divert funds from law enforcement into other public services.

She also declined to say yes or no on removing police from K-12 schools, and on banning the use of facial recognition and other surveillance technologies.

The answers offer the latest sign that Raman has been proceeding with caution on some of the DSA’s litmus test issues. Raman, who tweeted “defund the police” six years ago, said in February that the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department should not get any smaller.

Appearing Wednesday in Pico-Union, she said she was proud to have the DSA as part of her coalition but also described herself as politically independent.

“I’ve made sure that the decisions that I’m making, the votes that I’m taking, are ones that are based on an understanding of how these policies are actually going to improve the lives of Angelenos,” said Raman, who received the DSA endorsement earlier this month.

Mayor Karen Bass, Raman’s opponent, did not seek the endorsement, saying she was not aligned with some of the group’s positions.

Raman’s questionnaire stands in contrast with those of some of her DSA colleagues.

Hugo Soto-Martínez answered nearly every yes-no question posed by the DSA during his first run for City Council in 2022. Ysabel Jurado did the same during her successful council campaign two years later.

So what were Raman’s longer answers? On homeless encampments, she wrote that she has repeatedly voted against increasing the number of locations where tents are prohibited — and doesn’t want to saddle homeless people with criminal records that could stifle their ability to find permanent housing.

Regarding cuts to the LAPD, Raman said she would expand the city’s network of unarmed crisis response teams, ensuring that “trained professionals” — not police officers — respond to mental health and substance use calls.

On campus police, Raman said schools “should never default to armed officers for discipline or student well being.” And on facial recognition software, Raman said she would prohibit surveillance technologies that lack “clear evidence of need and completely enforceable safeguards for civil rights and privacy.”

“I will also require real oversight and consent before the city deploys any of it,” she wrote.

Raman even declined to say yes or no when asked if she wants noncitizens to vote in local elections. But she explained in writing that she voted earlier this year to put a proposal from Soto-Martínez on the ballot that would give the council the ability to enact noncitizen voting for city and school board elections.

The council later dropped that measure.

Picking apart the Paramount deal

Raman and Bass weighed in recently on the deal struck by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Paramount Skydance Chief Executive David Ellison on the studio’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Both mayoral candidates said Paramount should be held accountable for the promises contained in the settlement, which requires the company to distribute 30 films per year in theaters for the first two years after the merger, then 32 films per year for the next three years.

Of the two, Raman sounded more dismayed by the deal.

“There was a better outcome than this,” Raman told reporters at a recent news conference. “But this is the outcome that we have, and now it’s incumbent upon us to fight for the best results for workers here.”

For much of this year, Bass and Raman voiced concern that the merger would trigger mass layoffs within the film and television industries. But last month, Bass began calling for the two parties to engage with each other in good faith, saying too many productions had come to a standstill, putting people out of work.

“The prolonged uncertainty around this decision has already led to job losses and left workers wondering what it would mean for their futures,” Bass said in a statement this week.

The settlement alleviated the anxiety felt by some at City Hall that Paramount might follow through on its threat to leave California.

Bass’ stance aligned her more with IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, whose leaders voiced their own concerns about uncertainty while appearing with the mayor at City Hall last month.

Raman was more in sync with Writers Guild of America West, which denounced Bass for pressing Bonta to seek a resolution, saying “industry workers deserve a mayor who believes in upholding the law.”

Bass’ campaign is supported by IATSE Local 33 and the California IATSE Council, which said earlier this year that the mayor has “done more to bring our jobs back to Los Angeles than anyone in city government.”

On Thursday, the Writers Guild endorsed Raman, saying she is a “true pro-labor candidate who walks the walk.”

State of play

— POLLING PRESSURE: A new poll put Raman decisively in the lead in the mayor’s race, showing her with a double-digit advantage over Bass. The findings will ramp up the pressure on Bass and her allies to go sharply negative against Raman while courting the huge number of voters who say they are still undecided.

— MAKING THEIR CASE: Bass and Raman sat down with The Times for two separate, wide-ranging interviews, discussing issues like homelessness, the Palisades fire and the biggest mistakes they’ve made in office.

— PEOPLE MOVER POSTPONED: The opening date of the People Mover train being built at Los Angeles International Airport has been delayed yet again, with contractors now aiming for early January. The 2.25-mile automated train, which has been over budget for years, was originally supposed to open three years ago.

— EXECUTIVE ORDER: Bass ordered a review of the LAPD’s dealings with mentally ill people this week, saying the training that police officers are receiving is “woefully inadequate.” The mayor said she was particularly troubled by a July 29 incident in which police fatally shot a man who approached them with an aluminum bat.

— HURDLES TO HOUSING: Why has housing production been lagging in L.A.? Real estate developers pointed to a list of reasons, including high interest rates, pandemic-era policies like rent freezes and Measure ULA, the voter-approved tax on high-end property sales.

— TRUMP REBUFFED: An appeals court blocked the Trump administration from stopping the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from applying for millions of dollars in federal funding. The agency had applied on behalf of homeless service organizations from across the county.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to the area around 11th and Irolo streets, a location represented by Councilmember Heather Hutt.
• On the docket next week: Bass and Raman are slated to appear Tuesday at the Skirball Cultural Center for the 2026 Jewish Los Angeles Mayoral Forum. The event is hosted by the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, the Skirball Cultural Center, ADL Los Angeles and other groups.

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.

Political polls are like weather forecasts. They’re worth passing consideration, maybe, but you’d have to be a fool to bet your house on their accuracy.

And yet there’s something that rings true about the recent poll suggesting that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is in deep trouble among likely voters as she tries to hold on to a job that Councilmember Nithya Raman is trying to snatch away from her.

Here are the numbers, as compiled by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times:

Raman: 39%.

Bass: 28%.

Undecided: 33%.

Bass has naturally tried to debunk the poll. What else could she do, when her supporters are outnumbered by people who can’t make up their minds? Bass would need to dominate the undecided vote to have a chance, but given her high unfavorability rating, that’ll be hard to do.

On the other hand, Raman certainly hasn’t put things out of reach, despite the fact that Bass carries the baggage of the Palisades fire and has made only minimal progress on her signature issue — homelessness. Election day is less than two months away, and Raman has failed to convince anywhere near a majority that she’s the answer.

So what do Raman and Bass need to do between now and Nov. 3?

Some speculate that Bass may need to step up the negative attacks.

I beg to differ.

We need both candidates to be bolder, more creative, more convincing, and to tell us things we haven’t heard before.

All the recent L.A. mayors I’ve known had their faults and failures, whether the task was filling potholes, building out transit or addressing the high cost of housing. But among their best qualities, Dick Riordan was arrogantly confident, Jim Hahn had a steady hand on the tiller, Antonio Villaraigosa was tireless and passionate, Eric Garcetti was a long-range thinker on earthquakes, water and energy.

L.A. needs a mayor with all of those qualities. A cheerleader. A task master. A ball buster.

Running the second-largest city in the country is no easy task, because many of the problems at street level begin well beyond local control, related in part to an economy that leaves too many people behind.

But if you want to lead a world-class city, you need to have world-class answers on the big stuff like housing and homelessness and on the basics, too, like fractured sidewalks and neglected parks. Most voters don’t give a hoot about which candidate is more of a socialist or a moderate. City Hall is broken, and they want to know who can fix it.

On Wednesday, I checked the same sadly neglected area around City Hall that I wrote about in April and found only minimal improvements. Graffiti has been washed from the Frank Putnam Flint fountain, but it remains a broken-down monument to neglect, as it has for most of the past 60 years. And all around it, most of the little placards identifying native plants are broken or missing.

The L.A. Mall is still a largely abandoned wreck, with broken planter boxes and weeds at street level. A woman with two shopping carts told me she’s been homeless for 5½ years. The restaurant next to the nearby police department is shuttered; the restaurant across the street from it is long dead, and the once-vibrant downtown — which generated revenue that benefited every neighborhood of the city — is gasping.

I drove down Hope Street, south of 12th Street, because a reader who lives in that area and has told me about repeated fires at abandoned properties. A tractor was clearing debris from a recent blaze.

I drove west on Olympic toward Alvarado, an area I visit regularly to see a friend. Streets are strewn with trash. They’re always strewn with trash. At Olympic and South Lake, where encampments line the street and a fire once spread into a church parking lot, destroying vehicles, there’s a concrete triangle that was heaped with trash. It’s always heaped with trash, like a municipal dump on a busy thoroughfare.

Next I headed west on Wilshire to the RFK Memorial I wrote about 10 months ago, near the site of the 1968 Bobby Kennedy assassination. It remainsfenced-off, with trash and graffitiand with overgrown vines covering tributes to Kennedy. The city was going to help the school district clean things up. Then the school district took on the task.

It’s still a mess. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s an indictment. And so is the fact that in Studio City, where frustrated neighbors complained for five years that an abandoned property had been taken over by squatters, it took a recent fire to get City Hall’s attention.

The property, since cleared, is in Raman’s district, and she and Bass traded accusations about who had dropped the ball.

“As far as homelessness goes, I don’t see either candidate really showing a clear vision to solve this,” said Kayt Miranda, whose home was damaged by the fire at the abandoned property. “I mean, it’s a tall order, and I wouldn’t want to be in charge of that. But I’m not hearing anything from either of them that sounds like it will work or hasn’t been tried already.”

To be fair, Bass and Raman have each had lots of success on homelessness, with thousands of people being brought indoors. That job is not easy, especially given the number of people with mental illness and addiction issues. I know this from personal experience, having spent a year trying to steer a friend in from homelessness.

But the pace is too slow and the cost too high. As my colleague David Zahniser reported earlier this year, $300 million had been spent on the mayor’s Inside Safe program since December 2022, and as of last December, 40% of the 5,800 people who had been housed were back on the street.

And that was with an estimated annual cost per person of $82,000. Raman, who had supported the program, became a critic of it and touted a less expensive strategy that itself has been criticized for its slow pace, as Times City Hall reporter Noah Goldberg wrote in August.

Not long ago, a homelessness policy expert suggested to me that if we could figure out a way to double the nearly $1,000 Social Security Disability subsidy many homeless people get, it would open some doors in a housing market they’re now priced out of. Too expensive? It’s cheaper than what we’re doing.

I’d like to hear the candidates rethink the playbook like that, double down on what works and drop what doesn’t.

I’d like to hear from a candidate with a realistic plan to get L.A. out of the cellar in park rankings nationally, to break up the 10-year logjam for a sidewalk repair and the two-year wait to fix a street light.

All those undecided voters know exactly what they want.

A mayor who says fix the busted fountain by the end of the week, or else.

They want someone to win their vote.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

A stunning new poll showing Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman gaining a double-digit lead over incumbent Karen Bass in the mayor’s race is increasing pressure on Bass and her allies to go sharply negative against her opponent and to seek support from conservative and undecided voters to narrow the gap.

The poll, conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times, showed Bass trailing Raman by 11 percentage points — with 28% of likely voters saying they supported the mayor while 39% said they would vote for Raman. The remaining 33% were undecided, an unusually high number this close to the Nov. 3 election.

“The bottom line is this is a huge shot in the arm politically for Raman — and it’s not a good day for the mayor,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. City Council member who now runs the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Dan Schnur, a former Republican political consultant, said the poll could have instant negative effects for the mayor’s fundraising ability as potential supporters might now view Raman as the favorite in the race.

“The most immediate tangible result of a poll like this is that Bass’ greatest advantage was her fundraising and it now becomes much more challenging to raise money,” he said.

Bass, appearing Wednesday at a news conference in Hollywood, said she’s seen multiple polls that show a tight race. She said that Raman is “absolutely not” the front-runner in the race.

The mayor said she is working to highlight the city’s progress in making rent more affordable, pointing to newly released numbers that show that more than 10,000 units of housing with restricted rents have been built since she took office in December 2022.

“The No. 1 issue to Angelenos continues to be lack of affordability, and our primary way of addressing that from the city is housing,” she said. “So we are absolutely addressing affordability.”

Others in the Bass camp seemed more anxious about the poll results.

“It put a pit in stomachs,” said one supporter close to the Bass campaign who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the poll. “But there is still an outside chance for Bass. It’s not total doomsday.”

The supporter said that the Bass campaign truly doesn’t believe Raman’s lead is that big, but that the poll was still “not good news,” especially for fundraising.

Mike Bonin, a progressive former L.A. City Council member who now runs the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles, said Bass needs to focus on winning over voters who chose former reality television personality Spencer Pratt in the primary election in June. Many of those voters are now on the fence.

Pratt received 26% of the vote in the primary, and most of the voters who cast ballots for him — 63% — say they still haven’t decided whom to vote for in the runoff, the poll found. Among the Pratt voters who have decided, 22% favored Bass compared with 16% for Raman.

Bonin said he expects Bass and her allies to attack Raman’s progressive views in order to reach Pratt voters. Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and opposed raises for Los Angeles Police Department officers that had been championed by Bass.

“The nature of the attacks will try to reach the Pratt voters particularly since they are the largest bloc of undecideds and they skew conservative,” Bonin said.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing LAPD officers, is already airing campaign ads critical of Raman over her opposition to a law barring homeless encampments next to schools. In the coming days, the group will also roll out commercials highlighting Raman’s ties to the DSA, which has endorsed her mayoral bid, said union spokesman Tom Saggau.

“Our own poll told us that the Pratt folks were very much undecided, and that when they heard more about Nithya’s record, and her co-governing with DSA, they moved off of her,” he said, adding that his group still views the race as a dead heat.

Raman, not surprisingly, cheered the poll results.

“This poll reflects the momentum we’re seeing on the ground. Angelenos are ready for change and want to see a City That Works,” Raman said in a post on Instagram.

Raman campaign officials said the poll probably will help their fundraising efforts, which they said had already been gaining momentum over the last few weeks. And Schnur, the former GOP political consultant, said the wide lead allows Raman to spend more time touting her own credentials instead of disparaging Bass.

“For the most part Raman has the front-runner’s luxury of putting out a positive message and reinforcing her own credentials,” Schnur said.

Estevan Montemayor, who is running the pro-Raman Estamos con Nithya independent expenditure group, said his group’s role will be to inform voters about Raman’s positives while the Bass campaign attacks.

“They’re gonna come after Nithya and we’re gonna be here to tell her success story,” he said.

Bass supporter Stuart Waldman, chief executive of the Los Angeles County Business Federation, said the large number of undecided voters this close to the Nov. 3 election is worrying but also leaves an opening for Bass to gain ground.

“Any swing in any direction could make a big change,” Waldman said. “We have no idea who’s going to vote. … Usually by this point in time, everything has tightened up.”

In courting those undecided voters, however, Bass is burdened by high unfavorability numbers, according to the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.

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

Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant, said that Bass needs to accept responsibility on core issues upsetting Angelenos about her tenure, such as homelessness and the 2025 Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. In a recent interview with The Times, Bass said her biggest mistake as mayor was being in Ghana when the fire began amid high wind warnings.

“You have to say, ‘I hear you,’” he said. “Voters don’t think Karen gets that they are mad about things that happened during her term.”

Then, Murphy said, he believes Bass needs to attack Raman as being more establishment than Bass.

Murphy noted that Bass has frequently attacked Raman for being “at City Hall longer than I have,” which he called a powerful message to voters who are considering Raman because they want change. Raman was elected in 2020 and Bass in 2022.

Other polls taken in the campaign have shown a closer race than the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.

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

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

The Bass campaign cited some of those polls when responding to the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll Wednesday, calling it an “outlier poll” and accusing the pollsters of getting it wrong.

“In the primary … they got it wrong and undercounted Karen Bass’ support,” campaign spokesperson Alex Stack said in a news release.

Stack added that polls conducted online, like the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll, “systematically [undercount] working-class families, seniors, and non-English speaking communities who regularly turn out on Election Day.”

Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Berkeley IGS Poll, defended the methodology, saying he has spent 45 years polling in California and eight years running the Berkeley IGS Poll.

“What would you expect from a campaign down by double digits? They attack the poll,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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