Election Day produced what seemed like dream results for the democratic socialists of Los Angeles.
Nithya Raman, a member of the progressive movement, was elected to lead the city, following a hard-fought battle against Mayor Karen Bass. Marissa Roy, also a democratic socialist, easily won her race for city attorney — a role that, while lesser known, wields significant power.
The two will join a city controller aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America and three democratic socialist City Council members, making the small but ascendant D.S.A. as powerful as it is in any major American metropolis, joining New York, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pledged to remake urban government.
“It’s hugely exciting,” said Frances Gill, a member of the D.S.A.’s national political committee who lives in Los Angeles. “It marks strong potential and possibility for how we build the socialist movement in L.A.”
But Ms. Raman is no sure bet to advance a strictly democratic socialist agenda as mayor. Throughout her campaign, she maintained an arm’s-length relationship with both the national organization and the Los Angeles chapter, and D.S.A. members in turn expressed skepticism about whether she was ideologically aligned enough with the group’s priorities.
Her relationship with other left-leaning leaders in the city could also present challenges. All three of the other members of the D.S.A. on the City Council backed Ms. Bass for mayor, for instance.
Ms. Gill acknowledged that the decision to back Ms. Raman had been “contentious within the organization — that’s no secret.” But she pointed out that the D.S.A. itself is far from monolithic, and ultimately, she said, the group claims the mayor-elect as one of its own.
Political analysts say that, especially in Los Angeles, where virtually everyone is a Democrat, conflicts between leaders and the groups that have helped get them elected are unavoidable.
“When a movement is this successful so quickly and has so many of its allied candidates winning, there’s inevitably kind of a creative tension between the policy positions that the organization has and the governing actions of those who win,” said Raphael Sonenshein, an expert on Los Angeles government and an architect of the 1999 city charter overhaul. “That’s the stage that’s probably coming.”
Ms. Raman’s campaign downplayed her connection to the D.S.A., saying it was just one of many groups that had helped propel her to victory. It cited several major labor unions whose members knocked on thousands of doors trying to persuade Angelenos to vote for Ms. Raman.
“I just don’t want the interest in D.S.A. to overshadow the real work that those partners did,” said Ian Manheimer, Ms. Raman’s campaign manager.
Ms. Raman announced on the last day possible that she would challenge Ms. Bass, a longtime Democratic politician whose popularity plummeted in the wake of last year’s devastating Palisades fire and never recovered.
In the midst of a tight primary campaign, the D.S.A. declined to formally endorse Ms. Raman, instead opting to merely “recommend” that voters choose her in the absence of better options. Ms. Raman was an imperfect candidate from an ideological perspective — she hadn’t been sufficiently vocal about opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza, some argued, or about targeting Israel with boycotts, divestment and sanctions. But the group said in its voter guide that she was most closely aligned with its practical goals in the city.
In particular, they agreed with her pitch to reduce spending on the Police Department and increase funds on basic services, like paving streets, planting trees and investing in public transit.
But members of the group were frustrated when she sought changes to Los Angeles’s mansion tax, which she had originally championed, because it had the unintended consequence of squashing apartment construction. Some in the organization thought she was caving to developers, exposing perhaps the biggest policy rift between Ms. Raman and the D.S.A.
While democratic socialists believe that housing should be “decommodified,” or taken out of the private sector’s hands, Ms. Raman has frequently talked about how important it is to make it easier to build — and make money from — multifamily housing. The city needs more housing, and she has said that requires buy-in from for-profit developers.
Ms. Raman was also criticized by some on the left for staying mostly silent on Proposition 40, which would have taxed billionaires’ wealth, a measure that was backed by the D.S.A. It was defeated this week. Liz Garcia, a campaign spokeswoman, said that Ms. Raman supported the measure but was not vocal about it because she was focused on her own race.
It took the local chapter of the D.S.A. months before it finally endorsed her in the general election.
Ms. Raman, for her part, has toed a line between courting the group’s base of highly educated millennials and distancing herself from the more extreme associations that come with the label of democratic socialist.
She has appeared in videos with D.S.A.-aligned influencers, comedians and podcasters. And progressive organizations, including what was then a much smaller D.S.A., were instrumental to her grass-roots campaign for the Los Angeles City Council in 2020, when she ousted an entrenched incumbent.
But she has also carefully framed her own rise as a natural trajectory from a Harvard graduate with an urban planning degree from M.I.T. to mayor of the nation’s second most populous city. Her decision to join the D.S.A., she has said, came after she found that the organization was one of the few that prioritized addressing the city’s catastrophic housing crisis.
California voters were more inclined to support candidates described as progressive than as mainstream Democrat and were evenly divided on whether they were more inclined to support candidates described as democratic socialist, according to a poll released in August by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
As she celebrated her victory with her team on Thursday, Ms. Raman told reporters that she was already hard at work mending fences with people including the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Jim McDonnell. At various points this year, she said she would replace him because of the department’s handling of protests against federal immigration enforcement in the city.
Her opponents said that plan was naïve, arguing that it would leave the department, one of the nation’s biggest law enforcement agencies, rudderless ahead of the 2028 Olympics.
She has since tempered her determination to oust him. She said she wanted to ensure “that we are prepared to deliver that service at the level that Angelenos expect when I take office,” adding that “I know Chief McDonnell is committed to that.”
(The Los Angeles Police Department’s union spent big sums to oppose Ms. Raman.)
While Ms. Raman has been hesitant to commit to governing as a democratic socialist, Ms. Roy, the city attorney-elect, more explicitly campaigned with the D.S.A., and her agenda closely aligns with the group’s priorities. She also has unusual autonomy to enact it.
The office, which has roughly 1,000 employees, has two main functions: It acts as legal representation for the mayor, the City Council and other city departments, and it can sue people and businesses on behalf of residents.
Ms. Roy said that she plans to sue more bad landlords and employers that take advantage of their employees, and to hold police officers accountable when they violate department policies.
She didn’t explicitly campaign alongside Ms. Raman, Ms. Roy said, but she is open to collaborating when she feels the mayor’s interests are aligned with those of her constituents.
On Tuesday, under the soaring arches of Los Angeles City Hall’s Council chambers, Ms. Raman’s City Council colleagues, none of whom backed her in the race against Ms. Bass, congratulated her one by one. A few acknowledged that they had opposed her campaign but said they were ready to move on.
“Our city will thrive if we can have a relationship where we can work together, we can build together, we can disagree with each other and come back to the table to move our city forward,” said Eunisses Hernandez, a D.S.A.-backed Council member.
“The trees, the streets, the lights, the sidewalks — you know I never shut up about that,” Ms. Hernandez added, smiling at Ms. Raman from across the horseshoe-shaped dais. “I have been following what you’re saying, and I’m excited to advance those things, too.”
Orlando Mayorquín contributed reporting.
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