Nithya Raman, a rising star among West Coast progressives and a Los Angeles City Council member, announced on Saturday that she will run for the city’s top office, shaking up a race in the nation’s second-largest city that had appeared to be all but settled and posing a formidable generational challenge to Mayor Karen Bass.
Ms. Raman, 44, who has been compared to two New York politicians, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, made her announcement just hours before the city’s noon filing deadline, capping a week in which several serious contenders drop from the race or announce that they would remain on the sidelines.
On Thursday, Austin Beutner, a former Los Angeles school superintendent and well-known civic leader, stepped back, citing the recent death of his 22-year-old daughter. The same day, Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer who had lost to Ms. Bass in 2022, confirmed that he would not seek a rematch. And late Friday, Lindsey Horvath, a county supervisor whose district includes the affluent communities ravaged by the Palisades fire last January, said she had decided against a run.
The announcements had appeared to create a clear path for the re-election of Ms. Bass, 72, a nationally known Democrat, former member of Congress and Los Angeles native whose popularity fell precipitously last year after it emerged that she was out of the country when the Palisades fire erupted.
Without the other establishment leaders on the ballot, her most potent contenders would have been political newcomers: Spencer Pratt, the millennial reality television villain and Palisades fire victim who has become one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s loudest critics; Adam Miller, a tech executive and co-founder of an affordable housing nonprofit; and Rae Huang, a housing advocate who is challenging Ms. Bass from the left.
Ms. Bass’s approval ratings have improved as she has fought immigration crackdowns and defied the Trump administration in the heavily liberal city. And Los Angeles has demonstrably rebounded since 2022, when she inherited a pandemic wasteland of emptied business districts, smash-and-grab robberies and sprawling tent camps. On her watch, unsheltered homelessness has declined for two years.
But internal polls shared by would-be challengers still reflect a desire for fresh leadership in the city, which now confronts other problems: skyrocketing housing costs, crushing lawsuits, crumbling infrastructure, the show business contraction, widespread displacement from last year’s wildfires and a politically hostile White House. All as millions of visitors prepare to descend for this year’s World Cup and the 2028 Olympics.
“Los Angeles is really at a breaking point, and people are feeling it in the most basic of ways,” Ms. Raman said in an interview shortly before her announcement. “I have incredible, incredible respect for Mayor Bass, but I also want to talk about the fact that we can do it better. We can fix this.”
Ms. Raman swept into office in 2020, not long after the coronavirus pandemic upended the lives of Americans and as millions protested for racial justice. Los Angeles’s housing crisis felt insurmountable and homelessness had been on the rise. Part of a restive and progressive generation of political newcomers, Ms. Raman sought to harness the power of the city’s large and rising population of renters — a new development in a place where single-family homeowners had historically held sway.
She was armed with a master’s degree in urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had experience working in the slums of India. When she was elected, upsetting an incumbent with the help of grass-roots volunteers who knocked on tens of thousands of doors in the district, she had received more votes than any council member in the city’s history.
After a bruising political fight over redistricting in 2021, she represents a district that encompasses a diverse array of neighborhoods, including some where immigrants live in dense apartments and some in the fast-growing San Fernando Valley, where wealthy Hollywood executives live in hillside bungalows.
That diversity, Ms. Raman has said, has given her unique insight into the needs of vastly different communities in the city of nearly four million. As part of the 15-member City Council, she is among the nation’s most powerful local officials.
And like Ms. Bass, whose involvement in politics grew out of her years as a community organizer in South Los Angeles and a physician assistant confronting the crack epidemic in the 1980s, Ms. Raman has remained in close touch both with the Democratic establishment and the majority-minority city’s grass roots.
Though separated in age by decades, the two officials share a similar charisma and pragmatism, and they have aligned philosophically on issues such as the importance of helping homeless people move out of encampments before helping them find longer-term housing. In 2024, when Ms. Raman ran for re-election, Ms. Bass’s endorsement anchored her mailers and campaign videos.
“The mayor and I are very aligned on our values,” Ms. Raman said in the interview. “I think both of us really care about the city’s most vulnerable. We want the city to shine.”
But, she said, poorly executed policies and red tape had complicated progress on issues from affordable housing to potholes. People in Los Angeles “have incredible values,” she said. “But we don’t deliver on those values in ways we can feel.”
Born in India and married to a television screenwriter, Ms. Raman has attracted support both from the city’s tech and entertainment industry and small-dollar donors. And she is expected to appeal both to younger voters angry about affordability and to moderate-conservative voters in Pacific Palisades who blame Ms. Bass for the city Fire Department’s inadequate preparation last year.
She has also talked about how being the parent of young children has informed her work in a city that has become increasingly unaffordable for families.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
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