Not long ago, campaign strategist Estevan Montemayor was a staunch defender of Karen Bass.
During his first mayoral campaign in 2022, Montemayor worked with Communities United for Bass, a campaign committee that spent $6 million on television ads, text messages and other voter outreach efforts.
The 35-year-old political consultant launched another expensive outside campaign this year — this one to support council member Nithya Raman and oppose Bass. Asked about the shift in allegiance, he said he had become disenchanted with the mayor because of his handling of the homeless, the city budget and finally the Palisades fire.
“That’s when I realized on a personal level that she wasn’t capable of being in a leadership position,” Montemayor said.
Bass, a 22-year political veteran, spent much of her failed re-election campaign touting her ability to work with others. She blocked support from unions, business groups and immigration advocates. She frequently pointed out that 14 city council members were lined up behind her and not for Raman, who won Tuesday’s election and will be sworn in next month.
Yet some of Bass’s political relationships disintegrated during his four-year term, sometimes dramatically. These key colleagues and supporters turned against her, then helped orchestrate her political demise.
Early in Bass’ tenure, Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath supported the mayor’s work on homelessness and even introduced her during his State of the City address. But she ultimately became one of Bass’s fiercest critics and, behind the scenes, encouraged Raman to run. Horvath publicly supported Raman two weeks before the election.
The Western States Regional Council of Carpenters invested nearly $2.3 million in efforts to get Bass elected four years ago, producing television ads and campaign signs promoting him. This time around, the group sponsored a committee that spent five times that amount to support Raman, posting content on the “Burned by Bass” website.
Then there is Raman herself. The city councilwoman has supported many of the mayor’s initiatives and campaigned with her during her bid for re-election in 2024. Although she had supported Bass for mayor, she then launched her own last-minute mayoral bid, saying the city “can’t handle the basics.”
Bass said she was blindsided.
“I had no reason to see it coming,” Bass responded when The Times asked him about Raman’s decision to challenge her. “Why would I see it coming if someone publicly supported me?”
Bass’s supporters say that, in some ways, she actually expanded her coalition this time around, drawing support from individuals and organizations that had opposed her in 2022, including real estate developer Rick Caruso, her former opponent, and the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez (D-Los Angeles), who supported Bass and campaigned with her, said it was unfair to say that “because she lost a few friends, that’s why she lost the race.”
“Losing the trust of your voters, that’s the biggest loss,” Gonzalez said. “In fact, voters didn’t feel like they were in a better situation than they could or should have been. »
Opposition from Montemayor, the Carpenters, and other former supporters was only part of the struggle Bass faced during his campaign. She has always had a high disapproval rating stemming from key events during her administration.
The mayor faced voter outrage following the Palisades Fire, which broke out in January 2025, destroying thousands of homes and killing 12 people. Pacific Palisades residents expressed particular fury when Bass left the country days early, when weather forecasts predicted dangerous winds and increased fire conditions. But it also angered Boyle Heights residents, exasperated by noxious odors that persisted following a massive fire at a cold storage facility.
Bass also drew criticism over his handling of municipal spending — granting a series of staff raises and then running into a billion-dollar deficit, which led to the elimination of more than 1,500 vacant municipal jobs. One of these wage programs allowed thousands of municipal civilian workers to obtain an increase of approximately 24% over five years.
Then there was the mayor’s fight against the homeless. From the start, Bass made it a top priority, launching an expensive program to bring people indoors. By August, 42% of program participants had returned to the streets.
Bass declared a citywide state of emergency regarding homelessness the day she took office, promising she would lock arms with the region’s political leaders, including the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
Two years later, despite Bass’s protests, supervisors voted to withdraw almost all of their money from a joint city-county agency created to address the crisis.
Bass told the Times she was initially caught off guard by the supervisors’ proposal to take the money away and direct it to a new county homeless department.
Leading the charge was Horvath, who had served alongside Bass on regional homelessness councils. Horvath, appearing with Raman last month, dismissed the mayor’s message about relationship building, saying she “promised arm-strapping but only demanded loyalty.”
On election night, Horvath said that at no specific point did she turn against the mayor.
“I did my best to build a relationship with the mayor. It wasn’t a problem,” she told the Times. “I mean, the truth is this mayor has made it clear that she does not respect the voices and perspectives of young people.”
Stuart Waldman, who heads the Los Angeles County Business Federation, offered a different vision. He said Bass was good at maintaining relationships, meeting with business leaders and answering their calls. But in many cases, Bass would accept a proposal only to let it languish in his office, he said.
“Bass was saying she wanted to do something, and then it would end up in the hands of her team and never see the light of day,” said Waldman, whose group endorsed Bass on Tuesday.
Last year, business leaders contacted the mayor’s team to express concerns that the City Council’s plan to raise the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to $30 an hour would wreak financial havoc on the city’s hospitality industry.
After the council approved the increases, these business leaders responded with a ballot proposal to repeal the city’s business tax, which generates more than $800 million a year for city services. They used this measure as leverage to persuade the mayor and city council to reverse the wage increase.
When Bass learned of the business tax repeal, she was “truly shocked by the depth of our frustration,” said Areen Ibranossian, a political strategist who represented hotels and airlines in the negotiations.
“It did not appear that she was aware of the continued calls from the business community on this issue,” he said.
Worried about losing the business tax and having to significantly cut city services, Bass and the council reached an agreement to delay the $30 wage hike for 18 months. Although business groups were happy with the compromise, leaders of Unite Here Local 11, the hotel workers’ union, were furious.
The union, which supported Bass in 2022, backed Raman in August.
Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, cited the minimum wage cut as one of the reasons his union abandoned Bass.
“She signed the law that took money out of people’s salaries,” he said.
For the record:
11:05 a.m. November 8, 2026An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect number of doors Unite Here Local 11 knocked on in support of Nithya Raman’s mayoral campaign. A union leader said the group had knocked on 200,000 doors.
Petersen said his union knocked on 200,000 doors as part of Estamos Con Nithya, a pro-Raman campaign committee set up by the carpenters’ union. That group was also frustrated with Bass, saying she failed to require certain labor standards for construction workers in Executive Directive 1, her initiative to speed up the construction of affordable housing.
“There were no labor standards or worker protection requirements in Karen Bass’s ED1, which resulted in worker exploitation, including unpaid wages, cash payments, use of unlicensed contractors, labor brokers, and failure to pay the City of Los Angeles minimum wage,” Pete Rodriguez, second general vice president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, said in a statement.
Alex Stack, a Bass spokesman, said the demands made by the Carpenters would have increased the cost of producing affordable housing, while slowing down approval at City Hall. A mayor’s job, he said, is to “do what’s good for all of Los Angeles, not just the group that supports it.”
“She sat down with the Carpenters and Unite Here, listened and made decisions that benefited Los Angeles — not just any one group,” Stack said. “No one got everything they wanted. This is what governing looks like.”
Montemayor, who had worked on the pro-Bass 2022 committee, oversaw the Carpenters’ campaign, spending nearly $12 million to promote Raman and demolish Bass. Before that, he had served as Horvath’s chief of staff, overseeing the supervisor’s office during and after the Palisades fire.
Following the disaster, tensions arose between Horvath’s office and the mayor’s team. In a series of text messages, Horvath and Montemayor expressed frustration with Bass’ office over what they saw as a lack of coordination and communication about wildfire recovery efforts from City Hall.
At one point, Montemayor expressed irritation after the mayor’s team announced the removal of security checkpoints on the Pacific Coast Highway, then backtracked amid an outcry. “What you have done is created more chaos, not less,” Montemayor wrote.
Earlier this year, hours after Raman announced his surprise campaign to oust Bass, Montemayor posted an image from “Game of Thrones” on Instagram that serves as shorthand for cold revenge: “Tell Cersei…I want her to know it was me.”
On election night, as Bass began to trail Raman in the vote count, Montemayor posted the meme again.
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