‘an Earthquake’: Nithya Raman’s Rise Jolts La’s Political Establishment

LOS ANGELES — Nithya Raman’s widening lead over Karen Bass in Los Angeles’ mayoral race is scrambling the political hierarchy of the nation’s second-largest city, even before the race is called.

If her lead holds — and Raman and Bass allies alike now expect it to — Raman’s victory will mark the latest win for the ascendant left and a stinging blow to a Los Angeles political establishment that rallied around Bass despite her deep unpopularity with voters.

“Pick your descriptor — it was a monsoon, an earthquake, a leveling, a restructuring. It was all of the above,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of the hospitality union UNITE Here Local 11, one of few major labor groups to back Raman. “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, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, was leading Bass by a 26,000-vote margin as of Wednesday evening, a lead that has steadily grown as more votes are counted. Ballots counted after Election Day tend to come from younger, more progressive voters, who have favored Raman over Bass by wide margins in recent polls.

And 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.

“Karen Bass built her case around experience and relationships,” said Jeremy Oberstein, a Los Angeles-based political strategist. “Nithya and Marissa represent a generation of leaders whose political careers have taken shape amid a housing crisis, growing frustration with government, a certain alienation that the changes we are seeing in terms of the climate, in terms of transportation, in terms of basic quality of life, and economic issues are not keeping pace and not improving people's lives. And so I think they'll have an opportunity to turn that impatience into progress.”

The prospect of a progressive triumvirate is unnerving some of the city’s labor and business interests, said one City Hall veteran who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about private conversations among the political class.

“It’s making a lot of people nervous. It’s the unknown,” the person said. “The established power structure is concerned about what happens next.”

Raman began her political career disrupting the standard practices of City Hall, toppling an incumbent in 2020 and becoming the first DSA-aligned city councilmember. That win was the foreshock to this week’s earthquake, a sign that mobilizing younger voters and renters could outmaneuver Democrats’ traditional campaigns.

At her watch party on Tuesday, the crowd was overwhelmingly young, hardly the typical local politics voter. Mejia and county Supervisor Lindsey P. Horvath, two millennial politicians who defied Bass’ overwhelming support with elected officials, took the stage at Raman’s event. And Raman gave shout-outs to coalition partners of every size — from labor heavyweights like the Western States Regional Carpenters Union and Unite HERE Local 11 hotel workers to smaller groups such as the the Park La Brea Residents Association, California Armenian American Democrats and Gen Z for Change.

"Even though the Democratic Party wasn't always with me," Raman said, "a lot of Democrats were."

Given Bass’ unpopularity with voters, who soured on her during the city’s historic wildfires in 2025 and groaned at her handling of a separate cold storage facility fire this sumer, many observers say the mayoral race was a referendum on the incumbent instead of an affirmation of Raman’s candidacy.

“[City Councilmember] Monica Rodriguez would’ve won, Rick Caruso would’ve won, a whole host of other people would have won,” the City Hall veteran said, “but Nithya stepped up and she did it.”

Raman’s affiliation with the DSA inevitably conjured comparison to fellow democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, a political phenom whose victory last year in the New York mayor’s race laid the groundwork for a new wave of progressive candidates in the midterm elections.

The comparisons were always imperfect, however. Raman does not share Mamdani’s deftness and charisma as a candidate, nor did she make sweeping progressive promises like free childcare. She ran more as a technocratic urbanist, centering her pitch on issues like streetlight repair and expediting building permits.

And her relationship with the DSA, both locally and nationally, has at times been fraught, as she faced accusations of not being sufficiently progressive on the Israel-Palestine issue. But the local chapter eventually endorsed her campaign, and now members believe Raman’s climb — along with a string of other wins across the June primary and November election — has ensured the progressive group has firmly claimed a spot in the city’s political hierarchy.

“In one year we were able to beef up an electoral program so that we could win city attorney, mayor, Congress, and the rest of those downballot races — including two or three LA City Council races,” said Noah Suarez-Sikes, a member of DSA-LA’s leadership. “That is really what’s exciting, because it means that DSA-LA has built the collective strength to be a power player in the city and improve the lives of everyday people.”

Over the course of the campaign, Raman framed being spurned by her colleagues as a positive, a sign she was a disruptor to a status quo that voters were sick of. But now, she is poised to inherit a city mired in a homelessness crisis, a skyrocketing cost of living and crumbling infrastructure. And the 2028 Olympics loom large, ramping up the pressure for Raman to deliver results quickly.

All of which presents a new challenge for Raman: She won as a self-described outsider, but can she govern as one?

“She will walk into a City Hall where her colleagues largely lined up against her, and that's a real headwind,”Oberstein said. “But those relationships are not frozen in place, and I think a few early successes … will bring some of her skeptics around and open a path to reconciliation.”

Some relationships may be harder to mend than others, particularly among outside interest groups. The city’s police union, for example, threw itself into a fierce anti-Raman campaign. But most business groups who backed Bass deliberately avoided going negative against Raman, hoping to avoid burning bridges with the likely mayor-to-be.

“The door is open. Our hand will be out to work together and make amends and move forward because we can’t afford not to,” said Areen Ibranossian, a longtime City Hall staffer who now runs political strategies for the business community. “I’m hopeful, I’m optimistic. City Hall is going to function. It has to.”