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Nithya Raman, a progressive urban planner, entered Los Angeles politics with a bang when she was elected to city council in 2020, defeating an incumbent Democrat endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
More than five years on, the 44-year-old is making waves again with her last-minute entry into the LA mayoral race. Raman filed to run just hours before the deadline – after recently endorsing Mayor Karen Bass for re-election – to the surprise of constituents, and political allies and opponents alike.
The bombshell development came after the race had finally appeared to be swinging in Bass’s favor, following months of criticism over the city’s handling of last year’s wildfires and ever present frustrations about homelessness and housing. Several competitors had recently announced that they would not run, seemingly easing Bass’s path to victory. That also presented an opening for Raman.
It’s rare to have a serious contender join a race so late, the veteran LA journalist Jim Newton noted, but Raman immediately emerged as one of the strongest and well-known candidates. While running for city council, Raman had received endorsements from stars Jane Fonda and Mindy Kaling.
Media outlets have drawn inevitable parallels between her and Zohran Mamdani, another Democratic Socialist. Raman said in a statement to the Guardian that she viewed running for mayor is an “extraordinary opportunity” to make Los Angeles more affordable and “to govern with urgency and accountability”.
Her candidacy has changed the calculus of the race, and fueled fascination with the race and her split with Bass. In a lengthy interview with Raman, the NBC Los Angeles political reporter Conan Nolan suggested that, to Bass, the development was not unlike Brutus’s betrayal of Julius Caesar.
“I don’t think we should talking about the future of LA in the context of friendship or betrayal,” Raman said. “We need to be talking about the issues that are facing us and how we can fix them.”
Now the question is whether she can build a campaign that will resonate with voters, particularly when key portions of the city’s liberal base have already aligned with Bass.
“A lot of folks on the left are taken aback by her candidacy because it was so sudden [and] because at the present moment with the current chessboard, it threatens the traditional progressive coalition in Los Angeles,” said Mike Bonin, who spent nearly a decade on the Los Angeles city council.
‘Voters are angry’
Progressive politicians and policies swept Los Angeles and other major cities in 2020. That year Los Angeles elected a new district attorney (though he would later lose his campaign for re-election).
Raman’s victory over David Ryu, a well-funded incumbent, stood out. Raman, a director of Time’s Up, an anti-sexual harassment organization founded amid the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, had received an endorsement from Bernie Sanders and centered her campaign around housing and homelessness.
Her team included more than 2,000 volunteers who knocked on 80,000 doors across a sprawling district that stretches from Silver Lake to the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley in what she described in an interview with the Guardian as a record number of door-knocks. The win drew comparisons to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“She ran in 2020 as a total outsider with no establishment backing and defeated an incumbent for the first time in a couple [of] decades,” said Bonin, who is now the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs (PBI) at Cal State Los Angeles.
Raman won by mobilizing new voters and received more votes than any council candidate in history, he added.
While in office, she has continued her focus on housing issues, and serves as the chair of the council’s housing and homelessness committee. Some of her positions have shifted during her time in office, but despite moderating in some areas and frustrating the left, voters still view Raman as a progressive, Bonin said.
Fernando Guerra, a professor at Loyola Marymount University and the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles, said that Raman has appeal among key political factions including liberal establishment Democrats, DSA members and moderate business Democrats.
The mayoral race comes during a challenging chapter for the city.
Last year, unprecedented wildfires sparked in the hillsides of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, and tore through communities, killing 31 people, destroying more than 16,000 structures and displacing tens of thousands of people.
Bass and other LA leaders faced intense criticism for the response and handling of the fire in the Palisades, which falls under the city’s jurisdiction. Scrutiny has intensified in recent months, after the Los Angeles Times revealed that a controversial after-action report evaluating the department’s response to the wildfires was edited to understate the shortcomings of agency leadership and the city.
Sources told the newspaper that Bass, concerned about the city facing legal liabilities, was behind the significant changes to that report. The mayor denied those allegations, describing the Times’ reporting as “dangerous and irresponsible” and relying on “third-hand unsourced information to make unsubstantiated character attacks”.
Last summer, the city saw widespread ICE raids that brought life in many immigrant neighborhoods to a standstill, and Trump ordered the deployment of the national guard to the city, against the wishes of Bass and the California governor.
In recent mayoral cycles, re-election for the incumbent has been almost a foregone conclusion, said Guerra. But in past times of crisis – such as the 1994 Northridge earthquake or the 1965 uprising in Watts - the challenge for the political establishment is how they manage that, he said.
While Bass had received praise for her handling of the raids, frustrations have continued to mount in the city.
“In the weeks leading up to the filing deadline, there was a palpable sense that voters were in what I describe as a ‘hangry’ mood,” Bonin said. “They’re angry over a lot of things. They’re angry over the response to the fire, the quality of city services.
“I think there was a lot of hunger for a real contest in the mayor’s race.”
From ally to challenger
While more than 40 people have thrown their hat in the ring for the city’s top office, a group of leading contenders has begun to emerge: Bass; Rae Huang, a community organizer, DSA member and housing advocate; Adam Miller, a tech leader and nonprofit founder; Spencer Pratt, a Republican reality TV star turned advocate for Palisades fire victims; and Raman.
But high-profile challengers, including Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer Bass faced off against in 2022, have announced they would not run. The evening before the deadline, it appeared Bass would likely win the June primary and avoid a November runoff, even though some polls had suggested significant dissatisfaction with her leadership.
“And then, boom, Saturday morning. It was the political event that was on nobody’s bingo card,” Bonin said of Raman’s late entrance to the race.
That’s largely because Raman and Bass have been allies. She backed the mayor in her first campaign for mayor, and Bass endorsed Raman’s campaign for re-election to city council in 2024. And Raman recently described Bass as the most progressive mayor LA has ever had.
The shift fueled criticism among Bass’s supporters. Yvonne Wheeler, the president of Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, described Raman as an opportunist, according to a Los Angeles Times report.
“With Donald Trump’s ongoing war against the people of Los Angeles, our working families and immigrant communities, now is not the time for distractions from a political opportunist – especially one who backed the mayor’s re-election campaign just weeks ago,” Wheeler said.
Raman has said she admires Bass and supported her re-election, but that she’s felt a “call from Los Angeles … for change across the entire city”, she told NBC Los Angeles political reporter Conan Nolan.
“I feel a sense of frustration and even despondency among Angelenos that something is wrong in the city, that things are worse than they were before. I can feel that every single day when I go out and talk to my constituents,” she said.
In a video announcing her campaign, Raman said the city could no longer manage the basics, and was doing too little to address the housing shortage, and that Los Angeles was at a “breaking point”.
Bass has defended her record as mayor, with her website stating that she stood up against ICE raids and pointing to decreasing street homelessness, the lowest homicide rate in the city in 60 years, and a record fast clean up after the wildfires.
Bonin said it was a mistake for Bass allies to focus on the betrayal angle: “Voters do not give a shit how one politician treats another politician. Voters care how elected officials are treating them.”
While observers might have thought Bass faced a greater risk from a self-financed moderate, the mayor is more vulnerable from the left, Newton said.
“[This] is a liberal city and getting more liberal all the time. That’s why people are taking this seriously,” said Newton, who has chronicled Los Angeles and its politics for decades.
Raman, Newton said, has her work cut out for her running in a citywide election. She needs to raise significant funding, mend fences with allies caught off guard by her decision, and show voters how she went from being a Bass supporter to an opponent.
Bonin agreed, saying Raman needs to build an organization from scratch without the city’s traditional progressive coalition, which has for decades included labor and the Black community.
“Both are squarely in Mayor Bass’s camp,” Bonin said. “[Raman] has definite pathways to victory. She can definitely put together a coalition. But it does raise the pretty big question of what does it mean to be a progressive in Los Angeles?”
Raman’s entry, regardless of the outcome, shows how much LA politics have shifted in recent decades, Newton noted.
“Nithya Raman would not be a serious candidate for mayor in LA 20 years ago, when we still had Republicans on the city council,” Newton said, adding that the city has gotten younger and its immigrant population had grown. “The electorate is bigger, and as it’s gotten bigger it’s become less the provenance of homeowners.”
That might hold the key to a Raman victory, renters and residents who are pro-housing development. “That’s a tough coalition to knit together. I’ve tried,” Bonin said. “But given that the mayor has other parts of a progressive coalition, that might be what Raman tries to assemble.”
Raman is still in the early stages of her campaign with a limited website. But, so far, she has emphasized delivering the basics in the city, expanding housing, and responding to residents’ desire for change.
“The response over the last two weeks has been incredible, with hundreds of volunteers signing up to propel our people-powered campaign,” Raman told the Guardian. “It’s clear that many Angelenos want change. Our campaign is about bringing new leadership to city hall that’s ready to take responsibility, build for the future, and deliver for the people who call this city home.”
