Nithya Raman paused when the question came during a debate with Mayor Karen Bass in Sherman Oaks. What does she need to work on, she was asked by the moderator, to improve as a politician?
“What I know I need to keep working on is that in order to make sure that your ideas aren’t stopped, you have to invite people in before you try and put them forward,” she said after giving the matter some thought.
It was a moment of frank self-reflection for the Los Angeles City Council member hoping to be the next mayor.
A graduate of Harvard and MIT, Raman is widely regarded as one of the smartest people in City Hall. She has spearheaded significant legislation during her six years on the City Council, including initiating the city’s Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance in 2021 and leading the push last year to update the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance, lowering the annual maximum allowable rent increases.
At the same time, she gets poor marks from her council colleagues, her progressive allies and community leaders in Politics 101: Working with others, forging alliances and listening to other points of view.
“She is not a natural-born politician. She’s much more attuned to governing than politicking,” said Rick Cole, who was a deputy mayor when Eric Garcetti had the job and is now a Pasadena City Council member. “But she’s a quick learner and she has learned some lessons and has a huge amount of upward potential because of that.”
Surprise announcement
Raman entered the June 2 mayoral primary race right before the filing deadline, and just weeks after her endorsement for Bass had been announced.
She declined to be interviewed for this story. In a statement, Raman said that she was aware that her “last-minute entry into the race ruffled some feathers in City Hall, including for many people I respect. But like many Angelenos, I felt frustrated by the direction of our city, and I don’t think it’s OK to wait four years to change course.”
“I have led the passage of some of the most significant legislation in recent history in L.A.,” her statement said. “Working with my council colleagues, we passed the strongest renter protections in America, lowered rent increases for the first time in 40 years, enacted a Sanctuary City ordinance to protect immigrants, created a homelessness oversight bureau, and established independent redistricting to reform City Hall.”
Raman had won her two elections to the council with the support of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. But she didn’t reach out to the group’s leaders for support until after she declared her candidacy, said Leslie Chang, the co-chair of the DSA‘s L.A. chapter.
“DSA sees politics as a collective,” Chang said. “That is very much the case when someone is running for office. It should never be about an individual doing something on their own.”
Chang has said she is backing Raman, but the DSA opted against an endorsement and simply recommended Raman to its members.
Raman hasn’t been endorsed by any of the 15 council members in the primary, where polls show she and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt are in a close race for second place in an expected runoff with Bass. All the other DSA-backed council members — Hugo Soto-Martínez, Ysabel Jurado and Eunisses Hernandez — endorsed Bass.
“When you want to move fast, you move alone,” Hernandez told The Times two days after Raman joined the mayoral race. “When you want to move right, you move with the people.”
But Raman signaled from the get-go that she understood the city’s political establishment would not be with her.
“I was an outsider when I first ran and I think I’ll be an outsider in this race and I’m OK with that,” she said after she announced her candidacy in February.
Mayoral platform
Raman has criticized Bass’ Inside Safe program to address homelessness, saying it’s too costly. She has pledged to take a data-driven approach on that and other thorny issues, including streetlights that are out and pothole-riddled roads. Raman, whose husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, is a prominent television writer, has also promised to bring Hollywood jobs back to the city by lowering fees and streamlining permitting.
She also believes the city has to dramatically expand the creation of new housing, reduce red tape for developers and introduce “gentle density” into single-family zoned neighborhoods.
Raman emigrated from India to the United States as a child. She attended Harvard and then MIT for a graduate degree in urban planning.
Before joining the council, Raman started a nonprofit called SELAH, which works to address the needs of homeless Angelenos in Silver Lake, Echo Park and Hollywood. Before that, she interned for the city, working to track the amount Los Angeles was spending on its homelessness response.
Raman was considered a top contender from the moment she entered the race, but recent polls have shown her hovering around second or third place as she battles with Pratt for an expected Nov. 3 runoff against front-runner Bass.
‘14 more just like me’
When Raman first joined the council, her colleague Monica Rodriguez took her out to dinner with their husbands to Momed in Atwater Village.
They shared a few bottles of wine. Rodriguez said that despite the fact that Raman had unseated her ally, David Ryu, in Council District 4 — the first time a council candidate ousted an incumbent in 17 years — she wanted to build a relationship with Raman.
But Rodriguez, who has endorsed Bass for mayor and is a frequent critic of Raman, said she was taken aback by Raman’s attitude at their dinner.
“She was like, ‘The only problem with this council is there needs to be 14 more just like me,’” Rodriguez recalled.
Raman doesn’t remember saying that, nor does it sound like something she would say, a spokesperson for Raman said.
Not long into Raman’s first term as a council member, a major scandal broke: the release of a secretly recorded audiotape in which three Latino members of the City Council, including the council president, could be heard making racist comments.
Along with slurs against Blacks, Jews and Armenians, the council members discussed putting Raman’s district “in the blender” to make it harder for her to win reelection.
It was a rude awakening to the sometimes cutthroat nature of city politics.
“She walked into such a hostile environment,” said a former staffer for Raman, who asked for confidentiality to discuss dynamics on the council. “I don’t think it was any secret other council members had a high distaste for her the moment she walked in.”
That episode had an affect on how Raman worked with other council members, the former staffer said.
“She had a real chip on her shoulder of feeling bullied. She perceives so much opposition as bullying so it’s like, ‘Why does everyone pick on me?’ on one end and then extreme ego, ‘I’m the only one who’s right and everyone else can’t see it,’ on the other end.”
‘This person has not built consensus’
Raman has also struggled to gain the support of some neighborhood groups in her district.
Debra Matlock, who runs the Los Feliz Improvement Assn., said Raman’s office responds quickly to problems in the community but lacks the kind of warm bedside manner that politicians use to endear themselves with constituents.
The late Tom LaBonge, who represented the district from 2001 to 2015, was an old-school politician who knew everyone’s name in the neighborhood and attended every meeting of the improvement association, Matlock recalled. Raman, she said, usually sends a deputy.
“I think there’s this long shadow of feeling like you were seen by LaBonge,” Matlock said. “That is hard to get out from under.”
Matlock’s view is echoed over the hills in the San Fernando Valley. The board of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. was accustomed to regular meetings with the district council member, president Matt Epstein said. Raman, he said, has met with the board just twice in six years.
Raman and the group are at odds on several issues, especially on housing policy. Raman believes the city must increase density in single-family neighborhoods, while the homeowners group would prefer to limit such development to commercial corridors.
Raman drew boos from the group in 2024 when she asserted that it wouldn’t make a difference for student safety if a homeless camp was located five feet or 500 feet from a school. Raman, running for reelection at the time, rolled her eyes at the response.
“It’s not about political differences,” Epstein said. “A true leader is someone who leads. You need to build consensus and this person has not built any consensus.”
Amos Marvel, the vice president of the Reseda Neighborhood Council, counters that Raman has shown a genuine concern about homelessness and housing issues in the district and that her office was very responsive during immigration raids over the summer.
“She’s smart as a whip and she’s listening and trying to work on things that are pragmatic and having real impact on people in our community,” he said.
In comments on background, several council members said Raman doesn’t seem to have an interest in the kind of politicking needed to advance her agenda. Bass brought that critique out into the open during a Politico event last week.
“She doesn’t know how to build relationships with her colleagues on council, which is why she doesn’t have any support,” Bass said. “And if you want to be the mayor and you can’t get along with people who are your colleagues on council, I don’t know how you’re supposed to govern at all.”
Raman’s supporters acknowledge she has shortcomings when it comes to retail politics, but say those should not overshadow her strengths.
“She has the courage to do what she thinks is right and not just consider the political dynamics,” said Jesse Zwick, a Santa Monica City Council member and Raman’s former communications director.
But those decisions — like running for mayor at the last minute and challenging the Democratic incumbent — have political consequences especially when they represent major departures from her previous stances.
From ‘defund the police’ to stay the course
On policing, her stance has evolved from when she first ran for council and called for the LAPD to be transformed into a “much smaller, specialized armed force.” She posted “defund the police” on Twitter in 2020, but has since sometimes voted in favor of budgets that increase the department’s budget.
She has said she now thinks the LAPD should not shrink any further, saying its size of about 8,600 officers is right, but she voted in January against hiring an additional 170 cops, citing budgetary concerns.
She also opposed Bass’ 2023 contract for the police union, saying it would “bankrupt” the city. She cites the union deal often for the city’s budgetary issues.
The back-and-forth on LAPD issues has led to frustration with Raman on the left for not being more radical, but also opposition from the police officers’ union in the mayor’s race.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League has released anti-Raman ads on social media calling her “Flip Floppin’ Raman.”
She has shifted on other major issues as well.
In January, Raman introduced a council motion calling for reforms to Measure ULA, also known as the mansion tax, that taxes property transfers of more than $5.3 million to raise money for affordable housing production and homelessness prevention initiatives. She was supportive of ULA when it first passed.
She argued the tax is stopping needed development in the city because it applies not only to mansions, but apartment buildings as well. She believes the sellers of newer apartment buildings should be spared from the tax.
But some who worked on ULA said Raman didn’t consult them first.
“It was my understanding she was going to reach back out to us and have more discussion before that motion went forward,” said Cynthia Strathmann, the executive director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a group that has worked with Raman in the past. “I was not happy it went forward in the way it did.”
Still, Strathmann said Raman takes principled stances, even when they disagree or when Raman doesn’t consult the group.
“She very much takes positions based on what she thinks is the right thing,” Strathmann said. “The positive side of that I would say is that it doesn’t seem to be very Machiavellian, but on the negative side I would say she doesn’t always stop to get input even from allies. That has certainly caused hard feelings.”
Those on Raman’s side of the ULA issue said it was important that she put the motion forward.
“Someone had to force the conversation,” said Azeen Khanmalek, who runs Abundant Housing LA and is a Raman supporter.
The council declined to take up Raman’s motion and instead sent it to committee, but later the council created another panel to study the tax and whether it needs to be reformed.
Raman has also softened on no-camping zones in the city. As a council member she has voted against dozens of the zones, but during the mayoral debate with Bass she said she would not stand in the way of council members approving them if she were elected mayor.
“It is waffling,” Melina Abdullah, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, said about Raman’s changes on LAPD and no-camping zones. “We want to be sure we can hold her to her word. Right now we haven’t been able to.”
But Mike Bonin, a progressive former council member, said that what others see as waffling is really a politician willing to change her positions.
“She looks at every issue independently,” he said. “She really needs to think through things. That’s completely reasonable and responsible.”
Times staff writers Melissa Gomez and David Zahniser contributed to this report.
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