Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and her former ally, Nithya Raman, clashed on Tuesday in a hard-hitting debate that highlighted the high stakes and raw wounds still confronting the nation’s second-largest city. Los Angeles has endured nearly two years of assaults by the Trump administration and ongoing trauma from the 2025 wildfires, and both issues surfaced during the hourlong exchange.
Ms. Bass, 73, a veteran Democratic lawmaker and Los Angeles native who has never lost an election, repeatedly attacked Ms. Raman’s readiness for the city’s top political office, calling her “not ready for prime time” and charging that she lacked the experience and relationships to lead the city and keep residents safe, with the 2028 Olympics looming,
Ms. Raman, 45, a Harvard-educated member of the Democratic Socialist movement who has served for six years on the City Council, charged that Ms. Bass had mismanaged the city and overspent on homelessness programs and the police.
She also reminded viewers that the mayor had been “missing in action” at the start of the Palisades fire, which turned into an inferno while Ms. Bass was out of the country — an absence that severely damaged the mayor’s approval ratings.
Here are four takeaways from the debate:
Does L.A. need experience or a fresh approach?
With voting already underway and polls showing her in an uphill fight, Ms. Bass went on the offensive, attacking Ms. Raman as unserious, indecisive and lacking the kind of alliances necessary to be effective in Los Angeles’s fragmented power structure.
Ms. Raman, she said, had “produced very little” in her time on the City Council and had ideas that threatened the safety of Los Angeles, such as replacing the police chief with the Summer Olympics less than two years away. Defending her own record, she said crime rates were near record lows and homelessness had declined significantly on her watch.
Ms. Raman lashed back, retorting that Los Angeles “cannot afford another four years of decline, of mismanagement, of excuses.”
Echoing the famous debate line used by Ronald Reagan, a former Los Angeles resident, when he was running for president in 1980, Ms. Raman asked: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
The 2025 wildfires are still smoldering politically.
When Ms. Bass took office in 2022, she was among the most popular politicians in California. But she was traveling to Africa at the behest of the Biden administration when the Palisades fire erupted in January 2025. After Los Angeles residents learned of her absence, her approval rating plummeted and never fully rebounded.
Ms. Raman pointedly noted that she was in the city’s emergency operations center and seeing to the needs of evacuated constituents throughout the disaster. “The question I heard over and over, there and across the entire city, was, ‘Where is our mayor? Where is our mayor?’” she said. “You will not have to ask, if I am mayor, where our mayor is. I will be on the front lines.”
Ms. Bass apologized for her absence — her most direct acknowledgment of failure since the disaster, which killed 12 people and destroyed or contaminated thousands of houses. “I am so profoundly sorry that I was not in my city when my city needed me,” she said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of the lives lost, the families that lost their homes, and the families where the home is still standing but they’re not able to be in it.”
Both were playing to Spencer Pratt voters.
A Republican influencer with a huge social media account, Mr. Pratt, who lost his home in the Palisades fire, placed third in the primary, running as a brash outsider and a law-and-order candidate. His supporters now dominate a bloc of undecided voters that could swing the election — if they actually turn out.
Ms. Bass played to the law-and-order portion of Mr. Pratt’s base, reminding the audience of a recent video in which Ms. Raman and a left-wing supporter appeared to suggest that the mayor and the police chief were “fascists.”
Ms. Raman courted the outsider contingent, charging that data on surveillance technology, officer-involved shootings and other concerns was harder to obtain under Ms. Bass’s administration. “We need to restore trust in our law enforcement,” she said.
Nobody mentioned the democratic socialists.
The Democratic Socialists of America have scored a string of victories since last year’s election of New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani. If Ms. Raman were elected, she would govern alongside at least three democratic socialist council members on the 15-member City Council and possibly a city attorney who belongs to the D.S.A.
The left-wing movement didn’t come up during the debate, and Ms. Raman framed some aspects of its agenda, such as significantly increased housing density and reduced funding for policing, as matters of affordability. If elected, she said, she would not seek to repeal an anti-camping law that she had voted against, and that has been used to disperse homeless encampments. And she said the city’s “mansion tax,” which she had initially supported, should be changed to include exemptions for apartment developers.
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