On election night, Nithya Raman seemed as if she was prepared to lose the second spot in the Los Angeles mayoral race to the reality TV star Spencer Pratt, whose viral campaign appeared on track to upend the contest.
“Many thousands of votes will be counted in the days ahead, and we may not get an answer we like. But regardless of what happens next, nobody can take away what all of us have built together,” Raman, a progressive Democrat who sits on the LA city council, told her supporters.
Now in a twist fit for Hollywood, it is Raman who will be advancing to the November election to face off against her one-time political ally, incumbent mayor Karen Bass, for the chance to lead the second largest city in the US.
It was a shake-up in a race that has been defined by the unexpected. Raman rocked the Los Angeles political establishment in February when she threw her hat in the ring hours ahead of the deadline and just weeks after endorsing Bass in her re-election campaign.
Raman, an urban planner, said she had felt a call for change across the entire city from Angelenos, and that the city was at a “breaking point”: unable to manage the basics and adequately respond to homelessness and a housing shortage. Media outlets were quick to draw parallels between Raman and and New York’s Zohran Mamdani, another democratic socialist.
Given Raman’s political history, she was instantly one of the most recognizable candidates in the race. She had a high profile since winning her first election in 2020, when she unexpectedly defeated an incumbent Democrat endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
But as the race unfolded, it was Pratt’s campaign that grabbed headlines.
Pratt, best known as the bad boyfriend on MTV’s The Hills, lost his home in last year’s deadly Los Angeles wildfires. He became one of the most visible and vocal critics of the city’s response to the disaster and Bass’s leadership, arguing the city did not do enough to prepare for the fire and was falling short in helping residents with recovery.
In January, he launched his campaign for mayor, putting wildfire frustrations front and center, while also harnessing anger over longstanding issues in the city, including the cost-of-living crisis and an enduring homelessness emergency.
Polling has found that the majority of Los Angeles residents feel the city is headed in the wrong direction. Los Angeles remains one of the most expensive cities in the US, and is short 270,000 affordable housing units.
While Bass has overseen a 17.5% reduction in people living on the streets, many Angelenos remain frustrated at the staggering scale of the crisis with nearly 44,000 unhoused people in the city.
Pratt made gains with voters in recent months thanks to viral campaign ads that made their way into feeds across the US and a better than expected debate performance.
His lack of government experience and the fact that he was at least at one time a registered Republican (although NBC LA recently reported he changed his party preference to independent), running in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, proved to be less appealing to voters.
A recent endorsement from Trump was thought to hinder, rather than help his campaign. Raman pointed to that support while campaigning, and in her election night speech, arguing that the “Maga machine” had seen “an opportunity in Los Angeles to buy a foothold in our beautiful city to advance a dark agenda”.
As he fell behind in votes, Pratt appeared to adopt a move from the Maga playbook by sowing doubt in the results of the election. In a social media post, he seemed to suggest that Raman’s lead in the race came from votes from the entirety of the city’s unhoused population.
Los Angeles is deeply Democratic, and as the veteran LA journalist Jim Newton told the Guardian earlier this year, Bass was more vulnerable from the left.
“[This] is a liberal city and getting more liberal all the time,” Newton said in February.
Raman has an intense battle ahead of her as key portions of the city’s liberal base and large unions have already aligned with Bass.
