It was a sprawling street festival in the cultural heart of Black Los Angeles, and Mayor Karen Bass was making her campaign pitch again and again.
Standing on a stage spanning the width of Crenshaw Boulevard, Bass urged the predominantly Black audience at the annual Taste of Soul gathering to send in their ballots, telling them about her roots in South L.A. and her crusade to reduce homelessness.
“I ran for mayor because I didn’t want to see our people on the streets,” said Bass, clutching the microphone in 90-degree mid-October heat. “We’re only 9% of the city, and we’re over 30% of the people in those tents.”
Bass, the first Black woman to serve as Los Angeles mayor, is in the fight of her political career, facing a vigorous challenge from Councilmember Nithya Raman, who initially endorsed the mayor only to launch her own campaign at the 11th hour. To win the race, Bass will need to drive up turnout among the city’s Black voters and across her home turf in South Los Angeles.
The latest Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll found that Bass has closed an 11-point gap and is now in a dead heat with Raman. Yet the mayor continues to be dogged by stubbornly high disapproval numbers, leaving some of the city’s Black civic leaders on edge about Bass’ prospects — at a time when Black representation is already decreasing at City Hall.
City Councilmember Curren Price, who is also Black, steps down at the end of the year and regardless of the election’s outcome, his successor will be Latino. That will leave the council with two Black members out of 15 for the first time since 1963, not counting temporary vacancies, according to archivists in the City Clerk’s office.
Karim Webb, who served until February as one of Bass’ airport commissioners, said it’s been painful to see the mayor in such a vulnerable spot. The unease felt in the community is not simply because Bass is Black, he said, but because she has spent her whole life fighting for South L.A., especially the people there who are living on the margins.
“To have a Black woman champion, a native Angeleno who’s been involved in politics since high school, potentially taken out in this way — it’s heartbreaking. It’s angering. It’s how a lot of us feel about America,” said Webb, a principal with the firm Webb Investments.
City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a friend and ally of Bass since 1995, said Black Angelenos have benefited from the mayor’s work on public safety, economic development and construction of affordable housing.
Homicides have been cut in half citywide and long-neglected commercial corridors, including Crenshaw Boulevard, have seen a burst of new construction, said Harris-Dawson, whose district is about one-third Black.
“Having someone in the mayor’s office who’s familiar with our neighborhoods and thinks about our neighborhoods makes a significant difference,” he said.
Raman, a rising political star backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, has built up a huge advantage in and near her own home turf — neighborhoods such as Silver Lake, Echo Park and Highland Park. But she’s been campaigning for Black votes as well, issuing a policy paper recently promising to protect renters and champion “reparative policies that help Black families build and preserve wealth.”
Like Bass, Raman showed up at Taste of Soul, the mile-long street festival on Crenshaw. She headed over to a booth run by the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters, which is spending more than $10 million to promote her campaign, where workers were handing out Raman lapel buttons — not always successfully.
Raman, a Silver Lake resident, picked up the endorsement of the Black Los Angeles Young Democrats, which criticized Bass over the support her bid for reelection has received from the city’s police union, which has spent heavily on ads attacking Raman.
Raman has also won the backing of Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, which has long pushed for cuts to law enforcement spending in L.A.
Abdullah said she cares deeply for Bass and considers her to be a longtime friend. But she praised Raman for promising to remove Police Chief Jim McDonnell, saying such a move is needed to address a surge in police shootings and expensive legal payouts by the Los Angeles Police Department.
“Nithya has also been willing to listen to and engage community members on key issues, rather than digging her heels in to advance special interests,” she said.
Those types of sentiments have been echoed by younger voters. Efa Akutekha, a 35-year-old digital marketing producer with about 20,000 followers on TikTok, praised Raman’s work strengthening the city’s tenant protections and pushing for an expansion of L.A.’s unarmed crisis response teams.
Although both candidates support such efforts, Bass has also called for an increase in the number of police officers. Raman said she wants to keep the force at current levels.
“I don’t think that expanding the LAPD is the main thing we need to focus on in terms of public safety,” said Akutekha, who lives in Mid-City.
Bass continues to hold a commanding lead among likely Black voters, who favor her over Raman by a 71% to 13% margin, according to the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll.
Bass won her first race for mayor in 2022, at an explosive moment for race relations in L.A. During the final weeks of the campaign, audio surfaced of a conversation between three Latino council members and a high-level labor leader that featured racist and derogatory remarks. In the wake of that scandal, which sparked weeks of protests, some argued that Bass would be a healing force at City Hall.
This time around, Bass has been leaning hard on her South L.A. roots, telling audiences she spent her early childhood at 49th and Central Avenue, a neighborhood that once bustled with Black hotels, nightclubs and other businesses. She has talked about her work forming and then running Community Coalition, which worked to help South L.A. recover in the wake of the 1992 riots that broke out after four police officers were acquitted in the beating of Black motorist Rodney King.
Bass has issued withering critiques of Raman, portraying her as uninformed about Black voters and their history in the city.
Two weeks ago, the mayor seized on remarks made by Raman during an NBC4/Telemundo 52 debate. During that hourlong event, Raman said the LAPD under former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates was the “gold standard” for its noncooperation with federal immigration agencies.
Days later, Bass and other Black leaders gathered at her campaign headquarters to demand an apology from Raman, saying she was glorifying the Gates era, when many Black and Latino residents suffered abuse at the hands of police.
“She has no history and no experience with the city,” Bass declared. “Otherwise she would have remembered Rodney King, she would have remembered 1992, and she would have never put Daryl Gates in her mouth.”
Before the event had ended, Raman had uploaded a video to Youtube accusing Bass of deliberately twisting her words. She said she viewed Gates as a racist and was only speaking about Special Order 40, which was issued by Gates in 1979, barring officers from stopping people for the sole purpose of determining their immigration status.
Days later, Raman began apologizing, acknowledging to CNN that the mention of the former chief’s name “causes real pain” for many in Los Angeles. “I should not have said it,” she told the outlet.
Former City Councilmember Bernard C. Parks, who held office from 2003 to 2015, dismissed the criticism. A former police chief himself, he said it was clear from Raman’s debate remarks that she was praising Special Order 40 and not Gates.
Parks, who is Black, has endorsed Raman. He said Bass has underperformed on homelessness, the Palisades fire and the city’s soaring legal payouts. He also voiced dissatisfaction with the condition of the city’s streets and sidewalks.
“Just drive down La Cienega,” he said. “You almost need a new alignment on your car.”
Bass has been working to rally her base in recent weeks, holding a get-out-the-vote rally last weekend at her campaign headquarters in Baldwin Hills attended by U.S. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles) and Councilmember Heather Hutt.
Trina Traylor, a manager with the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, showed up at that rally looking to donate her time. In an interview, she said she knocked on doors for Bass four years ago and believes that the mayor’s work has made her neighborhood safer.
Traylor pointed to the mayor’s Inside Safe initiative, which cleared a longstanding homeless encampment on Western Avenue at 88th Street, not far from her home.
“It used to be really filthy — nasty, stinky. There was a lot of drug activity. Now that it’s clean we can walk down that street,” said Traylor, who was speaking for herself, not her nonprofit. “I can walk my dogs now in my neighborhood.”
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