It was 8:40 a.m., and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles was in stop-and-go traffic in the back of a black SUV.
She was already an hour and a half into her day one morning last week, which started with the dismantling of a quarter-mile-long homeless encampment. As local merchants embraced her, an amputee, a toddler and 43 other people were moved to shelter.
Now, she was headed to Pacific Palisades, to give a rebuilding update at the spot where the Jan. 7 wildfires leveled a library. Scrolling on her phone, she sorted through details of a nearly $1 billion projected city budget shortfall.
One crisis. And then another. And still another. All while a fourth, no less real or urgent, loomed in the background — her own political future as she runs for re-election next year.
As Los Angeles has emerged from the January wildfires, its mayor has worked overtime, straining to speed up recovery, while the Trump administration takes aim at liberal-run cities, global uncertainty rocks the economy and Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Olympics and part of next year’s World Cup.
But as challenges mount, Ms. Bass has struggled to gain traction. The fact that she was out of the country during the wildfires in January still haunts her.
She has tried to explain why she flew to Ghana three days before the fires, even as meteorologists warned of worsening conditions: The trip was short. The White House had asked. The fire chief had not adequately briefed her. The truly dire warnings did not begin until she was in the air. She flew home as fast as she could. She never would have left had she known this would not be an ordinary windstorm. Her family, too, was affected — her brother, a resident of Malibu for 35 years “lost everything,” she said.
No matter. She has been in public life since 1990, when she was a physician assistant pushing the city to mobilize against the crack cocaine epidemic. But the one thing Angelenos know about her now is that she was on the other side of the world as a hurricane-force firestorm erupted in Pacific Palisades, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in her city.
On Monday, as she delivered her annual State of the City address, Ms. Bass sought a kind of reset, trying to galvanize Los Angeles for a daunting immediate future while acknowledging the trauma she said she shared with her nearly four million constituents. The firestorm, she said, “reminds us how the world can change in an instant.”
“The aftermath of this disaster weighs on our city, which already had huge challenges before us,” she said. “But I want you to know that I see it. We are not here to gloss over difficulties. We are here to meet them head-on.”
She told residents that the recovery in the Palisades “is on track to be the fastest in California history,” and that rates of homelessness and crime have significantly fallen. Then she pivoted to the city’s fiscal issues, which she said would require a “fundamental overhaul of city government” and the likelihood of layoffs.
In an interview days before the speech, she said that she regretted her absence when the fires started.
“If you have a member of your family that has an accident, or who’s sick, and you’re out of town — it doesn’t matter where you were or why you were there, you feel terrible that you weren’t there when you were needed,” Ms. Bass said. The only antidote, she added, was to “get the job done.”
It’s an open question whether residents of the nation’s second-largest city will give her the chance to do so when they vote for mayor in June 2026.
For decades, she has been among the most popular politicians in Southern California, a pragmatic Democrat known for forging consensus across party lines. But a new survey by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed that nearly half of the city’s residents viewed her “unfavorably,” compared with fewer than one in three last year.
She said that last month, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former media mogul who was one of her key backers when she took office in 2022, told her he would take a break from politics next year. A spokeswoman for the firm handling his political giving had no comment on the conversation, but did not deny the mayor’s account.
In interviews, voters, political experts, civic leaders, critics and allies expressed both deep personal affection for Ms. Bass and doubts about her prospects. Some reserved judgment.
“The next election is 14 months away, and she has time to turn her fortunes around,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles city councilman and county supervisor who directs the Luskin school’s Los Angeles Initiative, which conducted the U.C.L.A. survey.
Others were less optimistic.
“It’s difficult to see a situation in which she gets re-elected,” said Dan Schnur, a political analyst who teaches at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. “Angelenos are notorious for not paying attention to politics, but when it does break through and reach their collective consciousness, it tends to have an outsize impact.”
However admirable her work may have been at the start, he added, “when Angelenos needed a mayor, she wasn’t there.”
There was a time, early on, when Ms. Bass seemed to be in the job she was born for. A liberal celebrity in a liberal town, she had sailed into office, winning by 10 points over a billionaire who had spent more than $100 million on his campaign.
A favorite of the Biden administration, she had federal connections. A former legislative leader, she had seen California through the 2008 financial crisis. A former congresswoman, she had worked the levers of power to lower crime, fill potholes and win over the city’s powerful public employee unions. On her watch, homelessness declined for the first time in six years.
Then her luck turned. As embers the size of plates flew through the Palisades, incinerating some of the priciest real estate on the planet, it emerged that she was at the inauguration of Ghana’s new president.
Rick Caruso, the developer who had lost to her in the mayor’s race, publicly condemned her, and the owner of The Los Angeles Times posted inaccurate claims on social media that she had cut the Los Angeles Fire Department budget. A filmed confrontation at the airport, in which a Sky News journalist peppered her with questions that she ignored, went viral.
By the time she got back to Los Angeles, she was facing a full-blown political and public relations crisis that seemed to intensify with every step she took to correct it. A furor erupted after she picked a civic leader to lead the first phase of the city’s recovery, and a deal in which nonprofits would pay him $500,000 for three months of work became public. Then the fire chief lashed out, unsuccessfully appealing her dismissal. Then Nicole Shanahan, a billionaire who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in last year’s presidential election, began funding a recall campaign.
The fire recovery process is gaining momentum, with more than 700 properties in Pacific Palisades cleared of debris and approved for rebuilding, and initial permits issued at a clip faster than those of the Camp and Woolsey fires in 2018. But fresh troubles are demanding attention.
Last month, the mayor led a city delegation to Sacramento to ask state lawmakers for help preventing deep budget cuts and layoffs, the result of longstanding structural fiscal issues aggravated by fire costs, tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and legal liabilities.
It is too soon to know the contours of the 2026 election, according to political experts. Mr. Caruso has not said whether he will run again, and at least one of his backers from 2022, the union representing rank-and-file police officers, recently endorsed Ms. Bass.
“She’s been a partner,” said Tom Saggau, a spokesman for the union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents some 9,000 members of local law enforcement. “She said she’d improve public safety, and she has followed through.”
Organized labor could help make up for the financial support that major donors provided last time, when Mr. Katzenberg alone put nearly $2 million into an independent committee that backed her campaign, according to local political consultants. But that relationship could be strained if the state fails to bail the city out.
Also, in Los Angeles, mayoral victories typically require the support of coalitions across demographics, and the U.C.L.A. survey released last week, conducted in March, indicated her support had plummeted among white residents and had slipped in every other racial and ethnic category except for Black residents.
“The Black vote would be solidly hers, but it’s only 6 or 7 percent of the vote,” said Dermot Givens, a longtime Los Angeles lawyer and political consultant. “You can’t win an election with just the Black vote in L.A.”
Still, her supporters point out that she has a track record of success with the kind of issues the city is now confronting, which require deep understanding of government, long-term thinking and negotiation.
“She has time to consolidate her base, and she’ll be involved in things she is skilled at — dealing with fiscal emergencies and getting government to address long-simmering crises,” said Manuel Pastor, who directs the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. “She’s uniquely suited for this moment. It won’t be easy, but I do think that she can turn the page.”
Ruth Menjivar, a preschool teacher who lives in the city’s Pico-Union district around the corner from the huge tent camp that city crews dismantled, was skeptical as the mayor arrived to survey the removal. Ms. Menjivar said she voted for Ms. Bass in 2022 but will not do so again unless the encampment remains permanently cleared. “There have just been so many promises,” she said.
Down the block, Brian Joseph, who has a 10-year-old son, tended his front garden in the morning sunshine with his beagle, Marlo. The mayor had erred, he said, but who hasn’t?
“She needs to step up,” he said. “She has to own it. But if she does that? We’re going to forgive her.”
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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