Nithya Raman, a progressive on the Los Angeles City Council, surprised even some of her closest allies when she announced hours before the filing deadline that she would run for mayor this year.
Chief among those allies? Mayor Karen Bass.
Since then, Ms. Raman, 44, has tried to distinguish herself from Ms. Bass, while also emphasizing the Democratic values they share, in contrast to the Republican reality television star Spencer Pratt.
Here are five things to know about Ms. Raman:
1. She beat an incumbent to win her City Council seat in 2020, helping to spur a wave of progressive victories in Los Angeles. Ms. Raman’s first victory was powered by a surge of younger, highly educated renters, who were frustrated with high housing prices amid the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. She was elected with the most votes of any City Council member in history at that point, and her campaign was credited with helping to build momentum for other young progressives. But her tenure on the City Council has at times been a liability in her campaign for mayor. Mr. Pratt, in a televised debate, described Ms. Raman as a “random City Council member who’s been a failure for six years.”
2. She attended Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied urban planning. Ms. Raman’s appeal to voters has been rooted in her approach to housing and homelessness, which she says has been shaped by working with residents of slums in India. She has trumpeted significant reductions in encampments and said that Ms. Bass’s signature program, Inside Safe, borrowed aspects of her district’s homelessness strategy. She frequently says that she wants to increase the city’s housing supply, which has earned her the backing of the YIMBY, or “yes in my backyard,” movement.
3. She has emphasized her experience as a working mother. Ms. Raman, who has 10-year-old twins, has said she felt compelled to run for mayor in large part because she felt as though young people were losing the opportunities that she appreciated in Los Angeles. She has also said that she understands the struggles of young families better than Ms. Bass does.
4. Her husband works in Hollywood. Ms. Raman is married to Vali Chandrasekaran, a television producer and screenwriter. Throughout her campaign, she has drawn on her Hollywood connections by making social media videos featuring local actors and other entertainment workers, emphasizing that she understands the existential plight of those who work in Los Angeles’s creative industries.
5. She has drawn comparisons to Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York. Like Mr. Mamdani, Ms. Raman is relatively young, an immigrant (she was born in India) and has been aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. But she has had a strained relationship at times with the organization’s Los Angeles chapter, which stopped short of a formal endorsement, though it recommended that Angelenos vote for her. She also has not generated the level of raw excitement that Mr. Mamdani did during his candidacy, and she struggled in the one televised mayoral debate.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
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