Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass narrowly edged out City Councilor Nithya Raman, her former political ally, in the race to lead the nation’s second-largest city, according to early results Tuesday.
Bass, a veteran politician who had been politically weakened following the 2025 Palisades fire, was trying to resist a vigorous challenge from Raman, who stunned the city’s establishment this year by entering the race at the last minute.
Addressing her election night campaign, Bass expressed confidence in her ability to prevail, saying her administration had spent the last four years getting the homeless off the streets, making neighborhoods safer and creating more job opportunities for workers.
“I love Los Angeles, I believe in this city and I will always fight for the city we deserve,” Bass said, speaking to a cheering crowd at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood.
The slight gap between the two candidates does not bode well for Bass, as Raman is expected to get a larger portion of the late-arriving ballots in the coming days. These ballots tend to be cast by the younger voters who serve as his base.
The first ballots counted on election night come from voters who tend to be older and more conservative, a group Bass needs to win by wide margins, said Paul Mitchell, who runs polling data firm PDI.
“These are probably better numbers than the Raman campaign could have expected,” he said. “It was probably the best group of Karen voters.”
In Los Feliz, Raman supporters crowded the Greek Theater plaza, many of them cheering Democrats’ election victories in other parts of the country. Maria Spear, a graduate student who knocked on doors for Raman, said affordability was one of the main issues of the campaign.
Spear, who spends more than half his salary on rent, said Raman “represents the change that I think a lot of people in the city are really yearning for.”
Raman, first elected to the council in 2020, joined the race in February, launching a challenge against someone she had publicly supported just weeks earlier. Since then, the contest has in many ways been a generational fight, with the two men defending divergent positions on public safety, housing production and strategies to end homelessness.
Bass, 73, was supported by much of the city’s political establishment, including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the county Democratic Party. Raman, 45, has aligned herself with groups that have emerged more recently at City Hall, including the left-leaning Democratic Socialists of America and Streets For All, a transportation advocacy group.
In the final days of the campaign, Bass visited locations populated by older voters, including senior centers in West Adams and Northridge, where she danced with elderly Angelenos. Raman showed up in bars, nightclubs and on college campuses, broadcasting her call for change at City Hall.
Bass, who previously served in Congress and the state Legislature, received only 34 percent of the vote in the June 2 primary, a low result for an incumbent. Her disapproval ratings had remained high since the Palisades fire in 2025, which broke out while she was out of the country on a diplomatic mission.
Bass attempted to reverse his fortunes by touting his administration’s progress in reducing violent crime, accelerating affordable housing and reducing homelessness — the number of people living outdoors and in their cars — by 11 percent.
Raman, for his part, offered heartbreaking criticism of the mayor’s record, saying his fight against homelessness has been costly and ineffective. Raman, who has taken credit for a significant reduction in encampments in her own Hollywood Hills district, has pledged to cut homelessness in the city in half by the summer of 2028 and completely by the end of her first four-year term.
Since the June 2 primary election, Bass and Raman have received enormous financial support from outside political interests.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file officers, invested at least $6 million in a political action committee that ran ads criticizing Raman over his approach to public safety, particularly his opposition to a law banning homeless encampments near schools. The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group with funding from Airbnb, invested an additional $2 million in Bass’ promotional efforts.
Raman said these outside campaigns showed that “pay to play” politics dominated Bass’s tenure. The mayor received that political support after giving costly raises to police officers and committing the city to a $2.6 billion convention center upgrade, she said.
Bass said the Convention Center would give the city an economic boost and argued that the police increases prevented the city from losing a much larger number of officers during his tenure.
Raman received his own support from well-funded interests. The carpenters union, whose leaders have expressed anger because Bass failed to incorporate labor standards into his affordable housing initiative, invested $3.8 million in a campaign that savaged Bass over his handling of the Palisades fire, homelessness and other issues.
Hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick, who has advocated for an expansion of the city’s bike lane network, invested $8 million in two committees that promoted Raman, including the one overseen by the Carpenters.
Bass also went on the offensive, hitting Raman over her shifting policy positions on public safety, homelessness, housing production and other issues. Bass repeatedly pointed out that none of Raman’s colleagues supported her, saying it showed she did not work well with others.
Another hot spot in the campaign has been Police Chief Jim McDonnell, who was nominated by Bass to lead the LAPD in 2024.
Raman vowed to replace McDonnell, saying he didn’t “meet the moment” during the federal immigration raids that upended the city. She accused the LAPD of protecting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and mistreating protesters, firing tear gas and less-lethal munitions at them.
As the campaign progressed, Raman gave different answers on his timeline for replacing the police chief. At one point, she said she would wait until 2030, after her term ends. She then walked back that and said she would replace it before 2030, without giving details. She later said she would begin the replacement process from day one.
The race tightened in the final weeks of the campaign. In an October poll conducted by the Institute for Government Studies at UC Berkeley, co-sponsored by the Times, Bass erased an 11-point gap with Raman. The two were tied with 40% support among likely Los Angeles voters, according to the survey.
About a fifth were still undecided.
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