Nithya Raman, a 45-year-old democratic socialist who tapped into widespread dissatisfaction with the quality of life in the nation’s second-largest city, will become the new mayor of Los Angeles, according to The Associated Press.
Her victory over Karen Bass, the 73-year-old incumbent, was a sweeping success for a new generation of progressive leaders and the arrival of younger Angelenos as a political force.
A Harvard-educated policy expert who served six years on the City Council, Ms. Raman had harnessed the frustration of younger voters and renters who increasingly have found themselves priced out of the famously expensive city.
Polls consistently showed Ms. Raman ahead by a wide margin with voters under 35.
The result also reflected a rejection in key parts of the city of Ms. Bass, a Democrat who for two years had waged an uphill battle for re-election. The outgoing mayor, who had represented Los Angeles for more than two decades in the State Legislature and Congress before her 2022 election, had been out of the country, traveling for the Biden administration, when wildfires erupted across Southern California in January 2025.
The disaster all but leveled the star-studded Los Angeles enclave of Pacific Palisades, and many survivors never forgaveher for being absent during a time of crisis.
Six months later, a violent crackdown on immigrants in Los Angeles by the Trump administration set off protests that the White House then seized upon to deploy some 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines into Southern California. Throughout the occupation, which lasted until the end of the year, the Republican president and his allies clashed with Ms. Bass, a Democrat.
The partisan tension shored up her support, but not enough to fend off a serious challenge. After a civic leader from Pacific Palisades entered the race and then withdrew in the wake of a family tragedy, Ms. Raman, a South Asian immigrant with a screenwriter husband and two children, jumped in.
A member of the Democratic Socialists of America — a far-left movement that has taken offsince the election of New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani — Ms. Raman channeled Mr. Mamdani and San Francisco’s more centrist mayor, Daniel Lurie. Los Angeles was “broken,” she charged, and the mayor had fallen short on basic quality of life issues, such as potholes and malfunctioning streetlights.
Ms. Raman distanced herself in some ways from the D.S.A., supporting changes to a local “mansion tax,” for instance, that would have benefited one of the D.S.A.’s usual targets, apartment owners. But she also pledged to replace the police chief, whose crowd-control tactics were denounced by the D.S.A. during immigration protests.
Ms. Bass seized on that promise, calling it reckless with the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028, and tried to portray her challenger as “untested” and “not ready for prime time.”
Ms. Bass, a lifelong progressive who had championed police reform in Congress and once sued the Los Angeles police for spying on her, found herself relying for backing on entrenched City Hall interests, such as the police union and downtown businesses. When Spencer Pratt, a Republican influencer, reality television villain and Palisades fire survivor, placed third in the primary, she tacked right in an attempt to capture his law-and-order base.
Ms. Bass’s 2022 opponent, Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer and civic leader, showed her some support, urging voters to reject the D.S.A. and Ms. Raman.
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