The job was not an obvious next step for a veteran member of Congress. Had city leaders not asked, she might never have considered it. Yet on that October day in 2021, with the pandemic still threatening, it seemed that Karen Bass, the daughter of a postman, had spent her whole life building to that moment as she kicked off her campaign for mayor of Los Angeles.
Hundreds of people crowded the auditorium of a downtown trade school. Some had supported her since 2010, when she won her first House race. Some dated to her rise to Assembly speaker in 2008. Others knew her through the nonprofit she built in the 1990s as a physician assistant organizing against the crack cocaine epidemic.
“Los Angeles, you have called me home, and I’m ready to serve,” Ms. Bass said.
Five years later, Ms. Bass — who, at 73, has never lost an election — is in the fight of her political life for a second term as mayor. One of the most popular progressives in California when she took office, she has struggled to recapture the city’s faith since historic wildfires erupted while she was out of the country in January 2025.
A standoff last summer with the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the Trump administration’s deportations somewhat reassured this liberal city. So did a reduction in unsheltered homelessness and crime rates.
But then a fire at a cold storage warehouse burned for more than a week in June, blanketing the storied Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights with a rotten-meat stench that wafted over the freeways. An epidemic of sinkholes highlighted the city’s aging infrastructure. The Trump administration also has repeatedly lashed out at the city — all with the 2028 Olympics looming.
An annual survey conducted early this year by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that residents across the county were less satisfied with their quality of life than at any point in more than a decade.
“Politics are never fair, right?” said Jim Newton, a former head of the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times and lecturer on public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But there’s something particularly painful about the fact that it has been so costly to her that she wasn’t here during the fires.”
Ms. Bass’s defenders say that many of the city’s issues predate her administration and were controlled by state or county officials. Still, she has shouldered much of the blame for the city’s problems. Now, with less than two weeks until the Nov. 3 election, she has fallen behind in the polls to Nithya Raman, 45, a Harvard-educated member of the Democratic Socialists of America who has served for six years on the 15-member City Council.
In a city where incumbent mayors rarely face a serious challenge, Ms. Bass has spent the year fending off well-funded opponents. During the primary, she was attacked relentlessly on social media by Spencer Pratt, 43, a Republican influencer, former reality television star and Palisades fire survivor. Ms. Raman’s supporters include the race’s top donor, Aaron Sosnick, a hedge fund manager who wants the car-centric city to install more bike lanes.
“The race is tight, absolutely,” Ms. Bass acknowledged in a recent interview, hours before a fund-raising event hosted by former Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff. “I have to deal with a lot of the issues and uncertainty and instability caused by what is happening in the White House, but then there are also mistakes that I made.”
The main mistake was inadvertent but fateful. On Jan. 7, 2025, wildfires exploded in Pacific Palisades, claiming the lives of 12 people and destroying thousands of homes. It was a catastrophe for the city — one in a barrage of wildfires across Southern California — but Ms. Bass was out of the country, attending the inauguration of a new president in Ghana at the invitation of the Biden administration.
She rushed back and tried to explain that she never would have left had she grasped what was coming. But Palisades residents — many of whom had voted for her opponent, a civic leader and billionaire in nearby Brentwood — were stunned and then hostile, and her political opponents seized on the opening.
The fire chief, whose unionized firefighters also had backed her opponent, blamed budget cuts for inadequacies in the fire response that firefighting experts and independent reviews later attributed to the department. Her fire recovery czar went public with his criticism of her after he was forced out amid clashes over compensation and the scope of his authority. Other civic leaders complained that she overemphasized consensus and failed to project authority by letting other officials speak first in news briefings.
Ms. Bass replied that the chief had failed to explain the scope of the peril and that the city had moved with record speed to fast-track rebuilding. Her defenders added that good leaders were also inclusive. But by April, her popularity had tanked, and it never recovered.
“The question I heard over and over, there and across the entire city, was: ‘Where is our mayor? Where is our mayor?’” Ms. Raman said in a televised debate this month.
Looking into the camera at the debate, the mayor unexpectedly apologized again, her most direct admission of failure since the disaster.
“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.”
Most analysts agree Ms. Bass still has an uphill fight, but haven’t counted her out either. Around one-third of voters have not made up their mind.
“Although Mayor Bass’s administration has been defined by the Palisades, it’s still a close race,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at U.C.L.A. and a longtime civic leader. “A large number of undecided voters, who are not happy with Bass but who are uncertain about what a Raman administration would represent, will likely decide this election.”
Many in that bloc appear to be affiliated with Mr. Pratt, who won more than a quarter of the primary vote with his outsider stance and calls for law and order. Both Ms. Bass and Ms. Raman have maneuvered rightward to capture that support.
Ms. Bass has touted the police union’s endorsement, never mind her years championing police reform in Congress. Ms. Raman, whose movement argues that cities overspend on traditional policing, has sought to distance herself from an impromptu video in which she and a left-wing supporter appeared to suggest the police chief was a “fascist.”
Mr. Newton, from U.C.L.A., noted that Ms. Bass maintained a core of stalwart supporters. Many have stood with her since 2006, when a car crash claimed the life of her 23-year-old daughter, who would be roughly the same age as Mr. Pratt and Ms. Raman today. The mayor, who now lives with two stepdaughters and three grandchildren in the city’s official mayoral residence, has said the loss put her politics and life into perspective.
If she wins, she told The New York Times, “it will be because people took a specific look at my opponent’s record, and were concerned about the stability of our city a year and a half from the Olympics. And about untested leadership.”
And if she loses?
She said she would “fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen.” But, she added, “I’ve never needed to be in office to work on these issues.”
“I turn the page,” she said.
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