NBC News projects that Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman has defeated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, an upset that hands the nation’s second-largest city to a progressive challenger aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.
Raman, 45, unseated Bass, a former six-term congresswoman and longtime fixture of California Democratic politics who was finishing her first term as mayor. The result means three major U.S. cities will be led by democratic socialists: Raman in Los Angeles, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Janeese Lewis George, who won Washington, D.C.’s mayor’s race this week.
Bass faced intense scrutiny over her response to a January 2025 wildfire in the Pacific Palisades, described as the most destructive in Los Angeles history. The blaze erupted while she was in Ghana attending a presidential inauguration and went on to destroy thousands of homes and kill 12 people.
Raman, a former urban planner and activist, accused Bass of mismanaging the city’s homelessness crisis and rising housing costs. She blasted City Hall for what she called “a reluctance to move forward with the transformative policy change that this city needs right now.” Bass argued Raman was “not ready for primetime” after six years on the City Council.
The two Democrats also split sharply over Israel’s war in Gaza. At a September forum co-hosted by the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, Raman said she agreed with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians; Bass rejected that label.
Raman represents a City Council district stretching from the San Fernando Valley to the Santa Monica Mountains. Born in India, she moved to the United States as a child and later attended Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She endorsed Bass early in the year before launching her own last-minute bid; the two advanced from a June primary over reality star Spencer Pratt.
Her incoming agenda will be shaped in part by the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, a high-stakes test of the city’s infrastructure, transit, and security systems.