By Michael R. Blood
Contributing Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) — In her bid for mayor, Nithya Raman ran as an outsider. The democratic socialist didn’t win a single endorsement from her 14 colleagues on the city council. The police union opposed her, and the Democratic establishment lined up squarely behind the incumbent, Karen Bass.
She now has to show she can lead.
As mayor-elect following a stunning upset, Raman will need to navigate political rifts in balkanized City Hall while taking on an array of problems that have defied her predecessors, including a long-running homeless crisis, an exodus of Hollywood jobs and boundless miles of crumbling streets and sidewalks — all with a strained budget.
Appearing before reporters for the first time as mayor-elect, Raman was succinct about her upcoming agenda.
“Homelessness, housing costs and public safety,” she said. “These will have to be the priorities that I take on in the city.”
Even after the campaign, the millennial, India-born Raman will be a new face to many Angelenos in a city that tends to shrug at local politics. But how she governs the nation’s second most populous city will be closely watched nationally, especially as she prepares to welcome the world to L.A. for the 2028 Olympics.
When she takes office in mid-December, Raman will join the vanguard of democratic socialists in municipal government that includes Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle. Janeese Lewis George also was elected Nov. 5 as mayor of Washington, D.C.
While she is expected to steer the city to the political left, she has been outspoken about her willingness to break from the Democratic Socialists of America when she believes their agenda conflicts with interests of the city.
“My independence will always be paramount,” Raman said at a candidate forum in September.
Local policial analyst Caroline Heldman said Raman needs to propose concrete solutions to address the day-to-day headaches that frame life in L.A., whether potholes or thousands of broken streetlights or clearing homeless encampments.
“She didn’t win the election by positioning herself as being really ideologically distinct from Karen Bass,” Heldman said. “She positioned herself as the pothole politician, very similar to Zohran Mamdani. I see her taking a page out of his playbook.”
Raman, however, never had the star power known as a Mamdani trademark. The contest in L.A. was relatively low key and overshadowed by turmoil in Washington and the fight for control of Congress.
Mike Bonin, a former L.A. city council member and executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, described Raman as philosophically progressive but temperamentally moderate.
“She got painted in this campaign as a crazy socialist idealogue or a flip-flopper with no core values,” said Bonin, who served with Raman from December 2020 to 2022. But, he said, “she wanted to work with people. She is very focused on results.”
That said, she has not yet delivered a financially detailed plan on how she will take on some of the city’s persistent maladies.
There are few issues in L.A. — where driving is part of everyday life for most residents — that prompt more grumbling than traffic and potholes. In 2013, former Mayor Eric Garcetti, campaigned on a “back-to-basics” platform to deal with street paving, yet little happened.
Under Bass, the city began focusing on filling potholes rather than resurfacing streets. Raman has said she will recast that policy, but how much money will go toward streets — and how quickly they can be repaved — is not yet known.
In remarks on election night, before she was declared the winner, Raman depicted a city in statis and broadly sketched her vision for what Los Angeles could be.
“L.A. stopped being a place where we could build things, where we could open things, where we could film things, where we could create things,” she said. Raman added that she wanted to revive “that ambitious Los Angeles, that joyful Los Angeles, that creative Los Angeles, that entrepreneurial Los Angeles.”
On the City Council, the reaction to her election was somewhat muted. Councilwoman Traci Park, who voted for Bass and said she had “concerns about the leadership and effectiveness” of both candidates, said in a statement she looked forward to working with Raman in a city with “great challenges.”
Raising 10-year-old twins with her TV writer and producer husband in Silver Lake, Raman’s unlikely rise to the city’s top post came at least in part because she was running against a wounded incumbent at a time when voters nationwide were eager for change. Bass was undone by the deadly Palisades Fire, which ignited when she was out of the country and caught the fire department unprepared.
Raman, a Harvard University graduate and trained urban planner, also may have been served by her experience with having founded a homelessness outreach nonprofit in L.A.
Mayors in L.A. don’t have the clout of their counterparts in New York and Chicago — power is shared with the city council. Bonin described it as an accordion, which can expand or contract depending on who holds the office.
He said former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, widely known for his chatty personality and charm, “swung for the fences.” Bass, by nature a compromiser, was different. Raman will set her own course.
“I can’t think of a mayor who had to take office with so many problems,” Bonin said. “Everybody leaves unpopular. … It’s not a job that makes you well loved.”
Michael R. Blood writes for the Associated Press.
