Democratic socialists just seized control of Los Angeles — a city drowning in homelessness, fleeing jobs, and crumbling streets — and the worse things got, the more voters rewarded them.
Nithya Raman defeated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass to become LA's first democratic socialist mayor, part of a Democratic Socialists of America sweep that also captured the city attorney's office, a U.S. House seat, and multiple council positions. America's two largest cities will now be run by DSA-aligned mayors. The organization that helped create the dysfunction now gets more power to deliver more of it.
Raman won with 53.56% of the vote, a margin of nearly 68,500 votes out of more than 961,000 counted, according to the New York Post. She ran as an outsider without a single endorsement from her 14 city council colleagues, opposed by the police union and the entire Democratic establishment. It didn't matter. Bass was so damaged by her handling of the January 2025 Palisades fire — she was out of the country while the city burned — that voters were ready to hand power to anyone else.
"If there hadn't been the Palisades fire in January of last year, I don't think Nithya would have run. And I don't think Karen Bass would have been defeated," said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles initiative at UCLA's Luskin School, as reported by The Guardian. He called the fire "the poster child for all that people are unhappy about."
The Guardian framed the result as a "blue tsunami" and a triumph of grassroots organizing. What it buried: the city DSA is inheriting is a disaster. SFGATE reported that Raman must now confront a long-running homeless crisis, a Hollywood jobs exodus, miles of crumbling streets and sidewalks, and a strained budget. Raman herself was succinct: "Homelessness, housing costs and public safety. These will have to be the priorities."
DSA-LA knocked on more than 110,000 doors and saw its membership surge from 6,000 to over 8,000 in a single week, according to The Guardian. The organization now boasts a mayor, a city attorney in Marissa Roy, a congresswoman in Angela Gonzales-Torres — who defeated incumbent Jimmy Gomez — and enough council seats to reshape city governance. Burbank now has the first socialist-majority city council on the West Coast.
The geographic divide tells its own story. KABC-TV's precinct analysis shows Raman's support concentrated in East LA and parts of the San Fernando Valley, while Bass held the west side and the Palisades — even the neighborhood that turned on her over the fire still voted 70% for the incumbent. The city is balkanized, and the new mayor will govern a divided City Hall where she has no natural allies.
Raman has already shown signs of the tightrope ahead. The New York Post reported she sidestepped questions about whether she still intends to oust LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell — one of her most controversial campaign pledges. She also faces a fractured relationship with Jewish Angelenos after telling progressive commentator Hasan Piker that she believes Israel committed genocide, according to SFGATE. The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles called on her to "rebuild trust with Jewish Angelenos that was strained during the campaign." Meanwhile, some within DSA thought her Israel position wasn't tough enough.
A U-Haul was spotted outside Bass' official residence at the Getty House the day after her concession — a fitting image for a city where normal people have been packing up and leaving for years.
The question now is whether DSA's army of precinct walkers can govern as well as they campaign. Every socialist experiment in American city politics starts the same way: with promises to fix what the last regime broke. Los Angeles just handed the keys to the people who helped break it.
