On her first day in office in 2022, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised voters bold action, standing with her allies as she declared a local emergency on homelessness.
That moment of political stagecraft, meant to herald a new era of confident leadership, seems like a political lifetime ago.
Bass, running in the June 2 primary for a second and final term, faces the toughest reelection fight of her political career. Many voters now associate her with an entirely different emergency — the devastating 2025 Palisades fire — and view the response under her leadership as a failure.
“I think the city turned on her after the fires,” said Michael Trujillo, a Democratic political strategist not involved in the mayor’s race. “We saw an office and an administration that was not well equipped for a crisis.”
City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who applauded the mayor at her emergency declaration event, is now looking to unseat her. Reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, whose home was destroyed in the Palisades fire, is waging his own insurgent campaign, portraying homeless residents as a danger to stroller-pushing moms.
Bass’ campaign has acknowledged that it doesn’t expect her to get a majority vote in Tuesday’s election. Even so, Bass said she fully intends to win the Nov. 3 runoff by showing voters progress she has made in clearing homeless encampments, fast-tracking affordable housing and reducing homicides, which are at their lowest since 1966.
“I have been fighting for change from Day One,” she said in an interview. “That’s very disruptive and can get people pissed off. But I’m going to do what needs to be done to address these problems.”
If history is any guide, Bass is in a tough spot.
Former Mayor James Hahn, the last incumbent mayor to be forced into a runoff, lost his 2005 reelection to then-Councilmember Antonio Villaraigosa. Former Mayor Sam Yorty, who was pushed into a runoff in 1973, was defeated by then-Councilmember Tom Bradley, whom Bass cites as one of her heroes.
In recent years, big-city mayors have lost reelection in Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco. Bass is in a similar predicament, with a majority of voters viewing her unfavorably.
Critics say the city’s problems go well beyond the devastating Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Oren Hadar, a Raman supporter who lives in Mid-City, said he is frustrated by his neighborhood’s broken sidewalks, pockmarked streets and decaying infrastructure.
The city’s lengthy repair backlog frequently means that fixes are many years away, Hadar said.
“I just get the sense that the city is kind of falling apart,” he said. “We can’t repave streets. We can’t fix streetlights. It’s just this basic stuff that isn’t getting done.”
Former L.A. Deputy Mayor Rick Cole, who served in the administration of Eric Garcetti, pins some of Bass’ problems on choices she made early in her administration. After Bass negotiated significant raises for police officers, firefighters and the civilian workforce, the city was left with too few dollars to sustain basic services, he said.
Compounding the situation, Bass has been a micromanager, failing to empower her team to “do the job of running the city,” said Cole, who spent nearly three years advising City Controller Kenneth Mejia.
“From A to Z, from animal services to the zoo, the city is shabbier and more dysfunctional than it was three years ago,” said Cole, now a member of the Pasadena City Council.
Bass has pushed back on those arguments, saying that, when she took over from Garcetti, city services already had been suffering from many years of neglect. Over the last two years, her administration has been assembling a long-range plan for repairing streets, sidewalks and other city infrastructure.
The mayor also defended the employee raises, arguing that the city’s financial woes were driven in large part by soaring legal payouts and the drop in tourism and other economic activity that followed President Trump’s tariffs policies and broadsides against other nations.
“You have a choice,” she said. “Do you want a quality workforce? Or do you want a workforce that has one foot in the door and one foot out of the door?”
Moving people indoors
Bass, a community organizer who later became state Assembly speaker and a member of Congress, roared into office four years ago with what seemed like a mandate: Marshal the city’s resources to address the homeless encampments that had spread into nearly every part of the city during the pandemic.
Voters had chosen Bass, founder of the South L.A.-based nonprofit Community Coalition, over real estate developer Rick Caruso, known for creating the Grove, the Americana at Brand and other large-scale shopping complexes. Caruso spent more than $100 million on his campaign, only to lose by about 10 percentage points.
A week after taking office, Bass launched Inside Safe, looking to move homeless people out of sprawling encampments and into hotels and motels — and eventually, permanent homes. She quickly secured $50 million from the City Council to start the initiative, and more money after that.
Even in those early days, there were warning signs.
Bass frequently said her team, in its response to the crisis, was “building the plane while flying it.” She quickly acknowledged that the cost of hotel and motel rooms was financially unsustainable and would require the city to purchase its own temporary housing facilities.
Mercedes Marquez, the mayor’s first homelessness advisor, stayed less than a year. Marquez’s successor moved to another agency a year after that. By the program’s third year, a steadily growing percentage of participants were winding up back on the street.
According to the program’s most recent dashboard, nearly 43% of the people served by Inside Safe have returned to homelessness, up from 32% in December 2024.
Bass credits the program with achieving a 17.5% reduction in “street homelessness,” the number of people living in their vehicles or outside, cutting it from 33,000 to under 27,000.
That figure, reported by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, represents the first two-year decrease in city history.
On the campaign trail, Bass has said she plans to use a second term in office to strengthen Inside Safe’s services to keep more people indoors. She also defended her decision to launch the program without an extensive planning process.
“There was no way in the world I was going to come into office and launch a study. How many studies and papers have there been done on homelessness? The people on the street are the people I used to take care of in the emergency room,” said Bass, a former physician assistant.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson credited Bass with clearing encampments in a way that did not rely on enforcement practices that punished homeless people for sleeping outside.
“She made the case to the voters that she would take street homelessness seriously and actually deliver results,” he said. “And she’s done that.”
It’s unclear whether L.A. will see a third year of progress, given the ongoing struggles facing the homeless authority. But Bass has sought to tackle the issue from another direction, fast-tracking the approval of 100% affordable housing projects, requiring their approval within 60 days.
That effort has spurred the city to green-light more than 40,000 units. About 6,000 have started construction, Bass said last month.
Hiring more cops
When Bass took office, sworn staffing at the Los Angeles Police Department was in free fall. Hundreds of officers were leaving in the wake of protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, without new hires to replace them.
Bass, early in her term, said she wanted to restore the size of the LAPD to 9,500 officers.
Working with the council’s leadership, Bass negotiated an expensive pay package with the city’s police union, hiking starting salaries while offering raises and retention bonuses. Conferring with the personnel department, Bass reduced some of the bureaucratic obstacles to hiring.
By the time the police contract was finalized in 2023, the department had already shrunk to 9,000 officers. In the months that followed, other employees sought equally generous increases.
The city’s firefighters had a “me too” clause in their contract requiring that they receive the same types of increases as cops. Civilian city unions received their own significant package of raises after staging a one-day strike.
Bass began seeing progress in police hiring last year. But by then, the city also faced a $1-billion budget shortfall, fueled in part by increased personnel costs. In her budget for 2025-26, the mayor recommended layoffs for about 1,600 civilian workers.
Looking to avert those cuts, the council slowed police hiring just as recruitment was picking up steam. It did so, in part, to save the jobs of civilian LAPD personnel who specialized in fingerprinting, DNA rape kits and crime scene photography.
By mid-April, the LAPD had 8,640 officers.
Raman, who voted against the raises, seized on the fact that the department is still shrinking, saying it shows the pay increases were costly and ineffective.
The raises “did not get us the public safety results that we wanted,” Raman told an audience in Sherman Oaks. “And now it has impacted our ability to figure out how to keep people safe.”
Bass still views her 9,500-officer goal as the right one. The pay raises, she said, were “absolutely essential” to keep officers from taking other law enforcement jobs. Officers were spending two years with the department, picking up “unbelievable training and experience,” only to leave for other agencies, she said.
“If you believe we need more cops, then you’ve got to pay them,” she said. “If your salaries are not competitive around town, then don’t be surprised that they’re leaving.”
Trial by fire
On the day the Palisades fire broke out, Bass was more than 7,000 miles away, appearing at a diplomatic function in Ghana. The blaze, later determined to be a rekindling of a week-old fire, swiftly spread out of control, destroying more than 6,800 structures in Pacific Palisades, Malibu and nearby areas.
Video from that first week wasn’t favorable to Bass. She stood mute when a reporter confronted her at Los Angeles International Airport about her absence. She struggled upon her return with questions about the emergency response.
Six weeks later, Bass ousted Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, saying she had failed to properly deploy firefighters amid forecasts of dangerous Santa Ana winds.
Bass later admitted to a podcaster that the city had “botched” its wildfire response. On multiple occasions, she said she felt terrible about being in Ghana — and would have stayed had she known what was coming. The recovery was marked by additional stumbles, reversing course on traffic checkpoints, tax relief for wildfire victims and the need for a single recovery chief.
The mayor, long known for relationship building, never clicked with her recovery chief, Steve Soboroff, who left after 90 days. She also had strained relations with Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who also represents the Palisades.
Pratt entered the race in January, turning the spotlight back to the city’s wildfire response. He voiced his rage over an empty reservoir, idled fire trucks and what he called dangerous brush clearance policies.
“My mission is to make sure the Palisades Fire isn’t forgotten in the dustbin of history like we’ve seen with so many other disasters,” he wrote in a social media post, weeks after entering the race.
Bass said she understands the anger, not just from Pratt but residents across the Palisades. She vowed to keep focusing on the rebuilding process, pressing for changes from the insurance industry and seeking funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“My role is to make sure they get back in their houses as soon as possible,” she said.
Trial by ICE
Six months after the fire, L.A. was jolted by yet another crisis — this one courtesy of the Trump administration. Federal immigration agents fanned across the city, apprehending workers at car washes, garment businesses, Home Depots and other locations.
If Bass seemed unsteady in the immediate wake of the fires, she was on more sure footing with ICE.
On June 6, 2025, federal agents raided a downtown garment business, detaining workers and arresting labor leader David Huerta, head of Service Employees International Union California. Bass responded to the scene, where devastated family members were still collecting the belongings of loved ones taken by federal agents, said Martha Arévalo, executive director of Carecen, the Central American Resource Center.
“She was there to offer help, to see what was happening, to make sure that we were OK, to see how she and her administration could help families that were devastated and separated,” Arévalo recalled.
Bass worked with city agencies on strategies for keeping Immigration and Customs Enforcement off city property. When immigration agents moved into MacArthur Park, she showed up on the scene again and demanded that they leave — at one point, speaking on the phone with then-Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino.
“She has shown courage and a commitment to protecting vulnerable communities, rather than demonizing them,” said Angelica Salas, president of the Californians for Human Immigrant Rights Leadership Action Fund.
In the campaign’s final weeks, Bass has ramped up her criticism of her two main opponents, portraying Raman as weak on public safety and saying Pratt lacks the experience to run the city.
The mayor’s approach hasn’t persuaded Garry South, a Democratic political strategist who said he was so appalled by the choices in the mayor’s race that he left that portion of his ballot blank.
Raman, he said, is “completely out of her league.” Bass, on the other hand, “has acted for all the world like a glorified member of Congress whose district just happens to include the whole city of L.A.,” South said.
“She’s never really stepped into the role of strong executive of the nation’s second-largest city,” he said.
Harris-Dawson, the council president, took a sharply different view, saying Bass has been focused on “what’s working in Los Angeles and what can work better.”
“I look at the field. I look at her record. And I talk to voters,” he said. “I think the mayor will be the mayor until 2030.”
The post Mayor Karen Bass is in the toughest reelection fight of her career. She says she intends to win it appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
