With mail-in voting just days away, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and challenger Nithya Raman are stepping up their efforts to reach Latinos, whose votes are expected to be a decisive factor in the Nov. 3 election.
The candidates are courting Latino leaders and hosting rallies in Latino neighborhoods. Both campaigns are also getting crucial assists in targeting Latino voters from independent expenditure groups, which aren’t bound by the same contribution limits as campaigns are.
“Latinos are about a third of the voters in L.A.,” said Fernando Guerra, a professor of political science and Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University. “While they show preferences, they are not deeply committed to either candidate, so they are the quintessential swing voters who decide late.”
Recent polling by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, found that likely Latino voters favor Councilmember Raman over incumbent Bass by a wide margin — 45% to 21%, with 34% undecided. That’s an even bigger lead than Raman had over Bass with voters overallin the most recent Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.
Raman’s 24-point lead among Latinos contrasts sharply with the results of the June 2 primary, where Bass carried 35 Latino majority neighborhoods compared with seven for Raman.
The mayor’s campaign disputed the methodology of the poll, which was conducted online in both English and Spanish Sept. 15-20. An August poll by the mayor’s campaign found Bass up by two points with Latinos. A September poll by the Raman campaign had the council member up by 13 points.
Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack pointed out that the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll showed Bass losing to Rick Caruso in the 2022 mayoral race, and tied with Nithya Raman in the June 2 primary. “She won both elections,” Stack said of the mayor.
A Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll in April 2022 showed Bass trailing Caruso by a single percentage point, within the margin of error. She led the final poll in the 2022 primary by six points. In the runoff that year, the final poll showed Bass leading, 45% to 41%.
In this year’s primary, the final poll showed Bass leading Raman, 26% to 25%, with Spencer Pratt at 22%. When ballots were counted, Bass had 34% to Raman’s 29%.
Mark DiCamillo, who runs the Berkeley IGS Poll, said the new poll numbers reflect the fact that likely Latino voters tend to be younger and are more likely to be renters — groups Raman performs well with. The poll surveyed 427 Latinos and has a margin of error of about 6 percentage points among that group.
Favorability numbers for the mayor among Latinos has varied in polls. The mayor was viewed favorably by 51% of Latinos and unfavorably by 30% in a September survey by the Latino Community Foundation. In the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll, Bass was viewed favorably by 23% of Latinos, while 68% viewed her unfavorably.
The Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll did find that Bass led Raman — 36% to 26% — among one group of Latinos, those 50 and older. Among Latino voters ages 18 to 49, however, Raman led Bass, 60% to 9%.
Latinos constitute nearly half of Los Angeles residents and are expected to make up about 30% of the electorate, according to Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.
Election officials will begin mailing out ballots Friday, and both the Bass and Raman campaigns are stepping up their pitches to Latinos.
Meeting the voters
Late last month, Bass mingled with an older Latino crowd at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park in Montecito Heights, where people enjoyed barrels of hand-churned Mexican ice cream and the mayor took a turn grilling carne asada.
“These are relationships I’ve had my whole life,” Bass said in an interview at the event.
Ruben Torres said he planned to vote for the incumbent, whom he called a fighter. “One thing you cannot buy is experience. She has it,” Torres said. “She knows what she’s doing.”
His wife, Stella Torres, was leaning toward voting for Bass but wasn’t sure.
“My disappointment is on the street. I’m dealing with potholes everywhere I go,” she said. “My block hasn’t been fixed in 30 years.”
To help win over Latino voters like Stella Torres, Bass’ team is reminding voters that she raised her ex-husband’s daughters, who are Latina, as her own. They also plan to focus on Bass’ decades of collaboration with the Latino community, including her start working as a physician assistant in Boyle Heights in the 1980s.
Throughout her reelection bid, Bass has also highlighted her staunch opposition to the raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the streets of L.A. last summer, including her dramatic confrontation with ICE agents in MacArthur Park. New TV ads, in both Spanish and English, will focus on her actions that day.
Matt Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA, said that if Bass can get Latinos focused on the Trump administration and the ICE raids from 2025, she could put herself in good position.
“If she can establish that she is fighting against President Trump, that will be very compelling to Latino voters in Los Angeles,” he said.
Raman leans on “Spanglish” and immigrant experience
Raman, who represents a Hollywood Hills-based district, has pitched herself to Latinos as a candidate who will improve basic city services, make the city more affordable for the working class and protect vulnerable renters.
The council member, who was born in India and immigrated to the U.S. at 6 years old, has touted her experience as an immigrant to relate to the experience of many Latinos in the city.
Raman’s campaign has organized a series of events aimed at Latinos, including one on Sept. 18 at La Cita Bar in downtown L.A., where the candidate swerved in between English and Spanish, saying Spanglish is the official language of the city.
Throughout the campaign, Raman has delivered remarks in Spanish with good pronunciation, though she concedes her command of the language is more conversational than fluent.
“You’re not joining my fight. I’m joining yours,” Raman said. “You work hard. You sacrifice. You save. You do everything you can to give your kids the opportunities that you may not have had yourself, and you deserve a city hall that works just as hard as you do.”
Maya Godoy, an ecological data specialist who attended the La Cita event, said the city needed someone new and energetic.
“We need someone who’s proactive,” Godoy said.
Separate from the campaign, Raman has received a huge boost on Latino outreach from the independent expenditure group Estamos con Nithya. Co-sponsored by the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters, Estamos con Nithya (Spanish for We are with Nithya) has raised more than $6 million. It put out its first Spanish-language ad on Sept. 24, asserting that homelessness has gotten worse under Bass and that the mayor failed to respond adequately to fires, including the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights.
By comparison, Unidos con Karen Bass, an independent expenditure group supporting Bass, has taken in about $500,000 from unions supporting Bass as well as from the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, among others. It has started a canvassing operation throughout the city.
One area where Bass does far outpace Raman is in endorsements by Latino elected officials, a testament to her long career as an activist and politician in the city. Dozens of Latino politicians have lined up behind her, including all Latino members of the City Council.
“Karen has been working with Latinos for virtually the entire time I’ve known her, and I’ve known her for 53 years,” said Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in more than a century and an endorser of Bass. “The long history she has had with that community will prove to be beneficial.”
Lineage fire emerges as a focal point
The massive fire at the Lineage cold storage warehouse in the heavily Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights that made headlines all summer has also emerged as a battleground in the mayoral campaign.
Bass was in Chicago when the fire broke out, and after it was extinguished, The Times reported that one of Bass’ top advisors was working as a crisis communications consultant for Lineage while still serving as an unpaid advisor to the mayor.
The mayor was loudly booed in Boyle Heights when she attended a raucous town hall over the incident in July.
Raman has hammered the mayor on the issue, criticizing Bass for telling Boyle Heights residents the air was safe early on in the fire.
“The people of Boyle Heights have asked what I think are fairly straightforward questions: Was the air safe to breathe or not?” Raman said during an August news conference at the warehouse. “Why were the mayor’s advisors working with Lineage at the same time?”
Bass cut ties with the unpaid advisor, and the mayor’s team has said that on the air quality issue she was just stating what public health officials had determined and that the mayor knows smoke is dangerous.
Allies of the mayor have said that Raman is using tragedy for her campaign.
“She’s a tourist in Boyle Heights,” said Mark Gonzalez, who represents the district in the state Assembly and has endorsed Bass. “She capitalizes on the foundation of my community, and I take offense to that. I don’t know exactly what she’s done to help the community of Boyle Heights as a council member.”
Latinos are split by age, poll finds
Among all Los Angeles voters, one of the most significant findings in the recent Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll was what DiCamillo called a massive “generational divide” — one that was even more pronounced among Latino voters than the electorate overall.
Chris Zepeda-Milan, an associate professor in the departments of Public Policy and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at UCLA, said that the generational divide was unsurprising.
“There is definitely a hunger among younger Latinos for change,” he said. Older Latinos, Zepeda-Milan said, are more focused on name recognition and party affiliation.
He also noted that young Angeleno Latinos have supported left-wing candidates in the past — including Bernie Sanders in 2020.
Pollsters note that their surveys reflect the opinions of voters at the time they are conducted, and don’t always predict the outcomes.
In the 2022 mayoral primary, billionaire developer Rick Caruso outperformed Bass in L.A. neighborhoods that were at least 80% Latino. Caruso flooded the airwaves with Spanish-language advertising, and in the final UC Berkeley/L.A. Times poll before the runoff election, Caruso was up 17 points among Latinos.
A study by UCLA after the election, however, estimated that Bass ended up winning 53% of the Latino vote, significantly above her polling numbers.
The post Bass and Raman court Latino voters as L.A. mayor’s race comes down to the wire appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
