If I had to sum up this year’s midterm elections in one word, it’d be “upset.” From Senate races to governor’s seats, we’ve seen countless surprise victories over the last week. It appears the upsets haven’t ended, as Nithya Raman is projected to beat incumbent Karen Bass to become the next mayor of Los Angeles.
KTLA reports that Raman has steadily increased her lead over Bass as more votes are tallied. While votes are still being counted and the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office still hasn’t declared a winner, members of both Raman’s and Bass’s teams expect Raman to win once the final votes are in.
This outcome is only somewhat surprising. The Los Angeles electorate’s thirst for change was already on display when reality TV star and noted crystal connoisseur Spencer Pratt gained serious traction during the primary election.
The initial vote count appeared to place Pratt as Bass’s opponent for the mayor’s office. Raman pulled off a come-from-behind victory as more ballots were counted. A similar scenario has played out in the midterms, as Bass held a narrow lead on election night that has disappeared as more votes are counted. As it stands, Raman currently holds 51.7% of the vote.
According to Politico, Bass had the support of the political establishment in Los Angeles, but she was increasingly unpopular with Los Angeles voters. Much of the criticism Bass faced came from her handling of the Palisades and Eaton fires, as well as the homeless problem and increased cost of living. Bass is very much an establishment Democrat, whereas Raman is a member of the progressive Democratic Socialists of America.
From Politico:
It isn’t just Raman, 45, upending the political power structure in LA. Other progressives have already locked down two other citywide posts: Marissa Roy, a DSA member, trounced her centrist rival to become city attorney, and Kenneth Mejia, the city controller, won his reelection bid outright in June as the top vote-getter in the city.
Together, the trio fit the profile of an increasingly-powerful constituency in Los Angeles: young progressives who wear their anti-establishment status as a badge of honor.
“I’m so damn proud to be the only one in City Hall who supported Mayor Raman,” Mejia said at Raman’s election night party. “They were like ‘Yo, the entire political establishment is supporting Mayor Bass. And I’m like, ‘So? She’s got Kenneth Mejia. She’s got the people.’”
It was a degree of swagger new for progressives in Los Angeles — and a major break from Bass, who ran on a brand of conflict-averse consensus-building.
With the DSA picking up several notable offices in Los Angeles, there’s concern among Los Angeles’s political establishment about what the future holds. “It’s making a lot of people nervous. It’s the unknown,” a veteran at L.A.’s city hall told Politico. “The established power structure is concerned about what happens next.”
“Pick your descriptor — it was a monsoon, an earthquake, a leveling, a restructuring. It was all of the above,” Kurt Petersen, co-president of the hospitality union UNITE HERE Local 11, one of the few major labor groups backing Raman, told Politico. “The political class of Los Angeles was absent at the Nithya Raman party because they were all with the incumbent … [But] even though every city councilperson said they were standing with Karen Bass, not very many of the people they represent followed them to the polls.”
Raman pitched a hopeful vision of L.A. while speaking to her supporters on election night.
“We watched friend after friend, family after family, leave [Los Angeles] because they couldn’t afford to stay here anymore,” Raman told her supporters on Tuesday night. “That’s the cynicism that started to take over this city. That started to make us believe that L.A.’s problems weren’t just bad, but they were permanent. That L.A.’s best days were behind us.”
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