It’s the biggest slate of democratic socialists Los Angeles has ever seen.
The L.A. chapter of Democratic Socialists of America is looking to push City Hall further left by backing candidates for city attorney and four City Council seats in the June 2 primary. Their aim, DSA leaders say, is to see the adoption of progressive policies on homelessness, rent control and public safety — and to have a socialist city attorney to make those policies stick.
“The vision is to really imagine and really try to think about the concrete steps, about making a city that works for working-class Angelenos,” said Sean Wakasa, a UC Riverside graduate student who is DSA’s local co-chair.
Wakasa said the group sees the city attorney’s office as especially crucial. It is endorsing DSA member Marissa Roy, a deputy state attorney general, against incumbent City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto.
“Part of the reason why we’re really excited about having a city attorney win and having a socialist as a city attorney is that we get to also enforce the existing progressive policy that we already have,” he said.
Business group leaders and others say they are alarmed about the prospect of democratic socialists gaining more clout in City Hall. Four of the current 15 council members, including mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, were elected with DSA support. City Controller Kenneth Mejia was also recommended, although not formally endorsed, by the group.
“The city’s not a better place to live than it was before the DSA folks. It’s worse,” said Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. “Homeless are running rampant, costs are going up, no one’s building. It’s problematic.”
Waldman said a particular concern with DSA members is what he called their aversion to compromise.
“Most DSA elected officials are unwilling to meet with the opposition,” he said. “They believe what they believe. They’re not going to change. They’re not going to move. And so it makes it harder for deals to get cut.”
DSA could potentially hold six council seats after the June 2 primary and Nov. 3 general elections. Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez were elected with DSA support in 2022 and have the group’s backing again as they seek reelection this year.
DSA is also backing public interest attorney Faizah Malik against incumbent Councilmember Traci Park in her Westside district, and community organizer Estuardo Mazariegos for the seat now held by term-limited Curren Price, in a district that includes the Convention Center. The group recommended but didn’t formally endorse Raman for mayor.
DSA co-Chair Leslie Chang credits several factors for the group’s rising influence, saying COVID-19, Trump administration policies and the Ukraine war led people to become disillusioned with their political leaders. DSA’s push was the answer to those frustrations, she said.
The group also received a boost with the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor.
DSA-backed council members have worked with other left-leaning council members to cap rent increases on rent stabilized properties to 4% per year, impose a $30-an-hour minimum wage for airport and hotel workers and expand an unarmed crisis response pilot program, which deploys trained mental health professionals to some emergency calls instead of police.
But they’ve been unsuccessful in other endeavors where they can’t pull moderate democrats to their side, often lacking the power to limit anti-encampment zones around the city and block police contract increases.
Chang said that if DSA candidates win, the group expects the city attorney’s office to go after landlords that violate rent ordinances. And it expects the DSA-backed council members to oppose LAPD wage and operating budget increases and instead work to maintain wage increases for workers.
“Having more democratic socialists on City Council is, I think, going to be better overall for the way the city is managed and run,” Chang said.
Kamy Akhavan, managing director of the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, said DSA’s rise is a symptom across the country of political polarization — red cities are getting redder and blue cities like L.A. are getting bluer, he said, especially in states where one party has a supermajority.
Without enough conservatives to force compromise, contrasting ideas have to come from somewhere else, Akhavan said.
Maria “Lou” Calanche, who is one of the candidates challenging Hernandez for reelection, called many of DSA’s policies too ideological to be effective. They make her — a self-proclaimed lifelong progressive — look moderate, she said.
She pointed at the open-air drug market in MacArthur Park, which recently underwent a federal raid, as an example of what she said are DSA’s weak homelessness policies.
“They are basically trying to become a political machine,” Calanche said. “So everything that they are working against, they are becoming.”
Hernandez declined to comment, but Chang didn’t dispute the assertion that DSA is seeking to gain power. The distinction, she said, is that the group is trying to do so through grassroots activism, not through big-money donors, and is focused on serving the everyday workers of L.A. and not special interests.
DSA’s increasing power has thrown it into the political consciousness — recent AI videos supporting Spencer Pratt feature characters with “DSA” stamped on the backs of their jackets as thuggish masked enforcers and “Star Wars” storm troopers fighting L.A. residents for Mayor Karen Bass and their shared opponent Raman.
Chang laughed when asked about the videos but admitted they were unsettling to view at first. DSA takes up space in the conservative consciousness, she said, because its grassroots support is a foreign strategy to its right-wing counterparts.
Even if DSA wins all its endorsed races, Wakasa said, its new power could be diluted if the city charter reform commission process results in additional council seats, but Wakasa said DSA is focused solely on winning its races.
Even with its sights on these six races, DSA has no intention of slowing down and will start seriously considering supporting candidates for county, state and even national seats, Chang said, to continue expanding its reach.
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