Mayor Karen Bass’s first term was a failure. Voters should reelect her anyway, because the alternative is unthinkable

Consider this, L.A.: if things break a certain way, as of January the city could have a socialist mayor, a socialist city attorney, a socialist city controller and as many as five socialist city councilmembers.

That’s a fate too horrifying to contemplate.

So I’m writing to plead with L.A. voters, don’t screw this up. Vote for Karen Bass. Do whatever it takes, hold your nose, bang your head against the wall, scream into a pillow, drink a large glass of wine. Whatever it takes, check the box for the incumbent.

Karen Bass is a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. I haven’t asked her directly, but it’s safe to assume she wants to avoid the fates of her two recent predecessors. Eric Garcetti’s failure was so complete that President Joe Biden and Democratic Party poo-bahs literally shipped him to the other side of the planet as ambassador to India. Today he’s an advisor to an AI company called Metropolis Technologies that “specializes in parking and commerce infrastructure.” This is a man who thought he’d be in his second term as President right now.

Antonio Villaragosa hasn’t held office since leaving City Hall 13 years ago. He made quixotic runs for governor in 2018 and 2026, garnering a paltry 1.1% of the votes this year. At 73 years old, his career in politics is effectively over.

Bass’s campaign got a jolt of good news today. A new poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found the race in a dead heat, with both candidates around 40% and 19% undecided. While this bodes well for Bass, as it’s a sure bet that many of those polled already cast their ballots by mail, she’s not out of the woods. Over the last three election cycles, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have shown a notable knack for surging from behind as late ballots are counted (nothing to see here, folks, move along).

In short, Bass needs every vote she can get. That means every Angeleno needs to step up.

Betting on (major) course corrections

For Bass, who’s just six months younger than Villaragosa, Mayor of Los Angeles is all but certainly her last job. It’s also the job for which she likely will be most remembered. Right now, those memories are pretty sour, starting, of course, with her abysmal performance before, during and after the Palisades Fire.

She waffled for months about the degree of her culpability. It took far too long, but she’s finally owning it. In an interview with the Current’s Arya Rahimian that ran on Wednesday, she said, “It was just the worst moment ever for me to not be here when my city needed me. It still horrifies me to think about that, and to think about all the loss that people experienced.” It wasn’t quite an apology, but given the ongoing lawsuits and the staggering potential liability the city faces, it’s probably as close as the city attorney’s office will let her get.

In the interview, Bass also acknowledged that her signature homelessness policy, Inside Safe, has largely failed. Unlike Garcetti, who doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on failure, Bass pledged to shift gears. In particular, she said she’d stop the county from placing homeless people from other cities in facilities funded by L.A. taxpayers. Refreshingly, she also signaled a shift away from the failed “housing first” model, which has cost billions while barely making a dent in the crisis. She said that even when the city gets people inside, services are “woefully inadequate.”

Again, it took her longer than it should have, but at least she seems to have started to see the light, and the reality of what many call the homeless industrial complex. To paraphrase John McClean in Die Hard, welcome to the party, Madam Mayor.

Angelenos should give her another chance for a simple reason: she’s running to restore her own legacy. She knows that if she doesn’t change course history will view her as a failure. Toss in the variable of the Olympics and a global spotlight, and that failure would reach historic proportions. She knows this is her last chance, and for once she seems to be playing with a sense of desperation. For a politician, it’s hard to think of a more powerful incentive to get things right.

The horrifying alternative

Even if you don’t buy that argument – and while I’ve talked myself into it, I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t – you should still vote for her, for another simple reason. The alternative is far worse.

Given opportunity after opportunity, Nithya Raman has failed to explain even the basics of how she would govern. As I wrote in my blog last week, she’s taken literally every position on the question of whether she’d retain or fire LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell. Last week, the L.A. Times reported on rumors, which Raman denied, that she would consider replacing McDonnell with disgraced former District Attorney George Gascon, who lost his reelection bid amidst deep discontent with his pro-criminal policies.

Even if it weren’t Gascon, Raman would almost certainly bring in someone equally odious. The LAPD is already a staggering 4,000 sworn officers short of its 12,500 officer ideal. Were Raman to win and follow through on her threat to replace McDonnell the consequences would be catastrophic for public safety.

Raman has made her anti-law enforcement bias clear. In her 2020 campaign, in the midst of the long, hot summer of George Floyd riots, she explicitly ran on a “defund the police” platform. Despite the LAPD’s headcount crisis, in 2021 she pushed to cut 300 new officer hires. In 2023 she voted against a new police contract. Yet again in early 2026, she voted against funding 170 new LAPD officer positions.

Despite publicly claiming to have found religion on LAPD staffing, just two weeks ago she appeared in a viral video with an extremist left wing troll named Ed Choi in which pictures of McDonnell and Bass appeared over the slogan “Only you can stop fascist liars.”

Choi asked Raman what she would do to “defascistize” the city. The same candidate who couldn’t answer a neutral question from an actual reporter about her debate performance (more on that in a moment) answered Choi as if it was a perfectly reasonable query. Incidentally, when Choi isn’t palling around with Raman, he’s attacking local businesses with baseless accusations of racism.

Any questions?

No. Just, no.

There would be another source of the chaos into which L.A. would descend under a Mayor Raman. She is intensely disliked by her fellow city councilmembers, not one of whom has endorsed her. Thirteen of her 14 colleagues have endorsed Bass, including the three other DSA members. That’s a shocking rebuke of a colleague. Traci Park, has withheld her formal endorsement, primarily due to Bass’s decisions related to the Palisades Fire in her district, but has said she plans to vote for the mayor.

Last week, Council President Marquees Harris-Dawson told POLITICO, “Nithya and I vote together 99% of the time. And I’m actively opposing her being mayor. Because I understand what it means to work with her, and I understand how much more difficult it’ll make it for the city.”

Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez was even more blunt, telling the outlet, “There’s a lot of bad will there” (presumably she meant bad blood).

Raman cannot convince her own colleagues and ideological fellow travelers to support her. That speaks volumes about her leadership style and abilities.

The world’s first “capitalist socialist”

For months, the “Democratic Socialist” (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one) refused to say whether she supports capitalism. She dodged the question with the artfulness of Eddie Croft in the ring. Finally, last Friday she told CNN’s Elex Michaelson, “I am both a capitalist and a democratic socialist.” That’s like saying “I am both a Christian and an atheist.” She’s either shockingly delusional or irredeemably disingenuous. Either way, on top of everything else, she’s not a particularly good politician.

This is the same candidate who, when asked about her debate performance literally seconds after stepping off of the dais two weeks ago, claimed she couldn’t remember because she’d been in a “fugue state.” It was one of the most bizarre political moments since the “Dean scream” 20 years ago. Speaking of which, remember when a momentary outburst was enough to sink a candidate? Ah, those were the days.

At this point, Raman is just insulting Angelenos’ intelligence. How can voters trust someone who can’t, or refuses to, answer such a basic question from a reporter to lead the city through, say, the 2028 Olympics? Angelenos deserve better.

The better option is Karen Bass. In a rational world, a true leader would have stepped up and challenged the incumbent. But we don’t live in a rational world, we live in L.A.

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