The Plot Twist Shaking Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES — Shakespearean betrayal. Dramatic reversals of fortune. Breathless tabloid coverage. The Los Angeles mayor’s race, at last, has a Hollywood-worthy plotline.

Progressive upstart Nithya Raman’s bombshell decision to run against her purported ally, Mayor Karen Bass, has upended what once looked like a sluggish mayoral race. As Raman scrambles to build a campaign apparatus before the June election, Bass’ supporters have rallied around the embattled incumbent with fresh energy and barely-veiled fury.

“When an incumbent’s allies go this hard, this early, and frame the stakes this aggressively, it tells you they know they’ve got a real race on their hands,” said Jeremy Oberstein, a Los Angeles Democratic strategist.

The sudden emergence of Raman, a telegenic 44-year-old councilmember with ties to the democratic socialist movement, sparked immediate comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who upended conventional wisdom to defeat an incumbent mayor and a former governor with an unabashedly leftist campaign.

But the Los Angeles race offers its own cinematic narratives — either an improbable comeback story or a generational revolt, set against the backdrop of a city reeling from natural disaster, financial precarity and incursion by a hostile federal government.

In the days after Raman’s abrupt announcement, many in Los Angeles’ political class were still wrapping their minds around the reality of a suddenly competitive mayoral showdown.

“Many thought we wouldn’t have to deal with any sort of major fight in Los Angeles, especially given that we are trying to defend ourselves as a city against Trump,” said Mark Gonzalez, a state lawmaker and former Los Angeles County Democratic Party chair.

Bass’ reelection prospects have whipsawed over the past year. Once the most popular elected official in the Los Angeles area, the former congressmember’s ratings took a nosedive during the city’s devastating wildfires, both for a diplomatic trip to Ghana that coincided with the blaze’s outbreak and her unsteady handling of the crisis when she returned. Her missteps have made an enduring mark and continue to resurface in the media; some private polls now show her approval ratings in the 30s or lower.

Serious potential challengers, including billionaire developer Rick Caruso and Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, noisily mulled mayoral runs. But both decided to stay out, leaving Bass for much of the last year without a major opponent, despite her political vulnerabilities. Some saw those decisions as an enormous stroke of luck for the mayor; people in Bass’ camp said it was testament to her political turnaround and inherent advantages as the incumbent.

“There’s a reason everyone took a look at it and blinked,” said Doug Herman, the mayor’s campaign adviser.

Then came Raman’s last-minute plunge into the race, despite endorsing Bass less than two weeks earlier. While acknowledging she shared the same values — and many of the same political positions — as Bass, Raman said the city was “at a breaking point” under the mayor’s mismanagement and failure to address nuts-and-bolts issues such as fixing streetlights.

Despite her new opponent, Bass’ team says it will not change its strategy of touting the city’s progress on homelessness and crime. “She has a really strong record to stand on. I don't think that she needs to pivot from that,” said Jasmyne Cannick, a political strategist and activist who endorsed Bass.

Instead of splintering the mayor's support in the political establishment, Raman’s entry appears to have solidified it. Bass' campaign pointedly sent out a press release touting her endorsements from the majority of Raman’s colleagues on the City Council. And her most stalwart backers doubled down this week, sprinkling their restated support with cutting digs at the insurgent council member.

“Now is not the time for distractions from a political opportunist — especially one who backed the Mayor's re-election campaign just weeks ago,” said Yvonne Wheeler, leader of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, in a fiery statement that “redoubled” the powerful labor group’s commitment to Bass.

Tina McKinnor, a state lawmaker who leads the city’s legislative delegation in Sacramento, chalked Raman’s decision up to “selfish ambition” and questioned her ability to run the nation’s second-largest city.

“I don’t think she’s ready,” McKinnor said.

Many Bass supporters painted Raman as disloyal, particularly after the mayor endorsed her in a tight 2024 reelection campaign. A scathing editorial in the L.A. Sentinel, the city’s largest Black newspaper, blasted Raman as a traitor and concluded “Nithya Raman is not with us.” In Raman’s first major television interview, veteran journalist Conan Nolan mused that Bass’ reaction was similar to Julius Caesar’s in Shakespeare’s drama after being stabbed in the back by a friend: Et tu, Brute?

“I don't think we should be talking about the future of Los Angeles in the context of friendships and betrayal,” Raman said in response. “We need to be talking about the issues that are facing us and how we can fix them and how we can overcome them.”

Depicting Raman as a turncoat may be cathartic — even politicians close to Raman were clearly stung by her out-of-nowhere decision — but some observers question it as a political strategy.

“I don’t think Bass’ folks are serving her particularly well right now,” said Mike Bonin, who served on the City Council and is close to both Bass and Raman. “By rallying around her, they’re all talking about her, not talking about the voters. I don’t know how you get above the 30 percent unless you’re talking about what people want to hear about.”

The rallying around Bass is particularly striking because, as polls have shown, that enthusiasm is not shared by voters. The mayor’s supporters say the sour mood is not unique to Bass and more a reflection of Angelenos’ broader unhappiness with the national political landscape.

But some of Bass’ woes are uniquely her own. Her handling of last year’s fires remains under close scrutiny, especially after an explosive Los Angeles Times story this month that Bass directed an after-action report on the Palisades Fire be watered down to protect the city from liability. Bass strenuously denied the allegation but the widespread attention to the story demonstrated how quickly the barely-healed wounds from the fire can be reopened with a bad headline.

Now, the question for Raman is whether voters will turn to her to channel their frustration.

“The adjective I’ve been using to describe this electorate is ‘hangry,’” said Bonin, who now leads the Pat Brown Institute of Politics at Cal State LA. “They’re angry over a lot of shit but they’re hungry for something else. [Raman] might be able to appeal to voters’ hunger for something different.”

First, Raman must build a citywide campaign on the fly, launching with a bare-bones website. While she is better known than other contenders looking to oust Bass, she still must introduce herself to most of the sprawling city with just three months before primary ballots arrive in people’s mailboxes.

“The response since Saturday has been incredible, with hundreds of volunteers signing up within the first 24 hours. It’s clear that many Angelenos want change,” Raman said in a statement. “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.”

It will not be easy to replicate her stunning 2020 City Council win, when she became the first candidate to oust an incumbent in nearly 20 years. She has since alienated leftist activists who helped propel her to victory six years ago by tacking to the center, most recently by saying the city should maintain the size of its police force. (Weeks before entering the race, she voted against hiring 170 additional officers.)

Some on the left gave a cool reception to Raman’s mayoral bid, preferring to back another democratic socialist candidate, Rae Huang, who has been in the race for longer but has struggled to gain traction.

Raman has also been side-eyed from the right. Her profile in the city has been boosted — for better or worse — by the California Post, the recent East Coast export that is covering the council member with the same conservative-leaning gusto as its sister publication in New York treated its new mayor. The tabloid has played up her democratic socialist ties by sending journalists to stake out her multimillion-dollar home and plastering her photo on its cover with the sobriquet “Red Raman.”

The Mamdani comparisons are irresistible — their shared progressive politics, insurgent campaigns, even their South Asian backgrounds — but Los Angeles political veterans say the analogy misses the mark.

“We're not in the same situation New York was in,” Cannick said. “We don't have a mayor that cozied up to Trump. We don't have a mayor that has turned her back on her democratic and progressive roots.”

Others say Raman, while a skilled candidate, does not have Mamdani’s hard-to-replicate “it factor.”

Still, Raman, whose husband is a television writer, is well-positioned to resonate with LA’s creative class. There were glimmers of celebrity in her announcement post on Instagram, which got enthusiastic comments from stars like Mindy Kaling and Natalie Portman.

Other crucial voting blocs remain up-for-grabs. Chief among them are Latinos, who comprise the majority of the city’s population. There’s also the question of who will appeal to moderate Democrats, including voters who may have gravitated toward Caruso, a Republican-turned-centrist Democrat. Many had hoped for a viable alternative to Bass, but Raman’s democratic socialist background may be too big of a turnoff. Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur who lives on the city’s affluent westside, could emerge as an option but he has virtually no political profile and faces a steep hill to introduce himself.

Another X factor is how the candidates at the edges of the partisan spectrum will perform. If Huang holds onto the dedicated grassroots left, it may siphon progressive votes from Raman. And reality star Spencer Pratt, who lost his home in the Palisades Fire, is pummeling Bass from the right. He is building a sizable social media platform, boosted by conservative influencers and MAGA acolytes, as he tries to consolidate the city’s vastly outnumbered Republican voters to secure a spot in the November runoff. (Bass could theoretically win reelection outright in June if she gets more than 50 percent of the vote, but with this number of candidates, a runoff is essentially guaranteed.)

Those factors will play out over the course of the breakneck sprint to the June 2 election. But what this rollercoaster week has made clear is how Bass and Raman, friends turned rivals, are trying to cast the matchup.

“The mayor’s camp is clearly framing this as stability versus risk. Councilmember Raman wants urgency versus drift,” said Oberstein, the Democratic strategist. “In the end, it’s not about ideology. It’s about whether voters feel like the city is actually moving or just treading water.”

Nicole Norman contributed to this report.