It’s happening again. In a big American city, a young Indian American democratic socialist is trying to unseat an unpopular Black incumbent on a platform of housing affordability. This time, the arena is not New York City but Los Angeles. Nithya Raman, the insurgent, has fashioned herself as a Zohran Mamdani of the West. Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent, is fighting to stay in office and make sure that lightning doesn’t strike on opposite coasts.
But the similarities mostly end there. In New York, an inspiring young leftist competed against a boorish, but experienced, former governor to replace a corrupt mayor. In Los Angeles, the leftist insurgent isn’t inspiring, and the boorish challenger—the former reality-TV villain Spencer Pratt—is inexperienced. The incumbent isn’t corrupt, just feckless. Despite their overwhelming weaknesses, two of these candidates will advance from tomorrow’s nonpartisan primary, and one will win in the November general election. Los Angeles is unlikely to be better off.
On paper, Raman seems like a natural heir to Mamdanism. In 2020, she became the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America to be elected to L.A.’s city council and the first challenger to unseat an incumbent there in 17 years. Now she’s running as a housing wonk who knows what it takes to deliver affordability.
Unfortunately for Raman, she appears to have neither Mamdani’s charisma nor his mastery of modern campaigning. She has few social-media followers and none of the sleek vertical videos that made Mamdani famous before he was polling well. (Instead, she has posted strange scripted Instagram videos with such captions as “Hayley’s landlord gave her an impossible ultimatum, but Nithya Raman said ‘NOT TODAY! Now she still has her apartment… and a new boyfriend?”) Her website’s homepage features a video of her reading a speech off her phone. Her performance in a televised debate last month was widely panned after she gave word-salad answers to yes-or-no questions such as whether noncitizens should vote in local elections. She was “not ready for prime time and certainly not ready to step up and be mayor of the second biggest city in the U.S.,” Garry South, a longtime L.A. political consultant, told me. Her odds of becoming mayor on the prediction site Kalshi went from 51 percent to 18 percent in the two days that followed.
When I spoke with Raman a few weeks ago over Zoom, I asked for her elevator pitch on why she deserved to be mayor. Here is how her reply began: “You know, I’m an urban planner; I’m a mom; I’m a politician.” Later, after we went back and forth for several minutes discussing the issue of street homelessness, she asked me, “Is this all you wanted to talk about?” It was not, but homelessness consistently polls as a top issue in the race, so it seemed worth covering.
Raman does have certain advantages that Mamdani did not. She came much earlier than he did to YIMBYism—the movement that advocates for removing barriers to building more housing. This fact has activated the salivary glands of L.A. policy wonks. Scott Epstein, the policy and research director of Abundant Housing LA, told me that Raman, who has a master’s degree in urban planning, is “a dream candidate for us.”
But Raman’s more left-wing views threaten to scare away the same coalition that might be interested in building. She has been a vociferous advocate of tenants’ rights, to the point of trying to extend the pandemic-era eviction moratorium into February 2023. In her 2020 run, she called to “defund the police” and specified that the police department should be made “much smaller.” She has since recanted, but on the somewhat narrow grounds that the city doesn’t yet have “an unarmed responder” for 911 calls. “Unless we can, materially, take call load off of LAPD, we do have to be able to have a system that is responsive to people’s needs,” she told me.
Her biggest liabilities might arise from her attitude toward homelessness, the issue dominating the election. Los Angeles has a much worse street-homelessness problem than most cities do, creating a widespread feeling of public disorder even as the violent-crime rate falls. Thousands of homeless people die on the streets of L.A. every year, and it is a political liability to suggest that nothing can be done about this until some future date when housing is cheap. In 2022, during a city-council vote on a law to restrict tents within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers, Raman voted against the measure and then, a year later, memorably rolled her eyes at people who were upset with her about it. She continues to dismiss tent sweeps as a “politically-motivated game of sidewalk shuffle.”
Despite her commitment to progressive policies, Raman has failed to consolidate the support of the Los Angeles left. The three other DSA members of the city council have all endorsed Bass. So has almost every union that has made an endorsement, including the über-influential L.A. County Federation of Labor, which has close to a million members. The Los Angeles DSA chapter gave Raman a tepid recommendation that it specified “is not an endorsement.” In a party straw poll, 42 percent of local members preferred another candidate: the pastor and community organizer Rae Huang, who told me that her ideology is shaped by “Marxism and the gospel.”
Catching fire as a socialist is harder in L.A. than in New York. The local DSA chapter, which draws from all of Los Angeles County, has only about 5,000 members, compared with roughly 14,000 in New York City (which is slightly less populous). “L.A. isn’t like New York or Chicago, where people live and breathe politics,” South said. “Mayors here come and go without leaving much of an impression.”
Few big-city mayors make less of an impression than Karen Bass has. Los Angeles mayor is an inherently weaker position than its counterpart in New York City or Chicago. City-council members can veto development in their districts, social services are handled at the county level, and schools are handled by a separately elected school board. But Bass seems to have gone out of her way to exercise as little power as possible.
In 2023, six months into the job, she said her goal was to eliminate unsheltered homelessness by the end of her first term. More recently, she has taken to boasting about a 17 percent drop in two years. Her signature program, Inside Safe, offers free, temporary housing—mostly motel rooms—to the homeless for three to six months, before moving them into permanent housing.
It barely works. The program has cost about $400 million and served just under 6,000 people— 14 percent of the homeless population—in the three and a half years since it began. Only a quarter of those people are now in permanent housing. Another quarter are still in the motels, where the average stay has turned out to be a year. The other half have exited the program, overwhelmingly to return to life on the streets. The program has cost $254,653 for every homeless person who is now permanently housed. (In an email, a Bass campaign spokesperson pointed out that the county pays some of the cost.) At the current pace of housing 1,500 people every three years, Inside Safe is on track to solve L.A.’s homelessness problem in the year 2108.
Bass has also done very little to address Los Angeles’s housing crisis. Bass’s main housing policy is an executive order she signed during her first week in office to streamline affordable-housing development. The policy immediately appeared to be a modest success. Seven months later, under pressure from homeowners, Bass excluded single-family-home neighborhoods from the order, which make up most of the residential land in L.A. A year after that, she issued a revision that added several more development-killing loopholes to the order. (One of those changes excluded all historical-preservation zones, which appeared to be in response to complaints over a 70-unit building proposed on a “historically preserved” vacant lot.)
In 2022, about 23,400 housing units were permitted in Los Angeles. Bass took office in December that year. In 2023, the number fell to about 18,600, and then to 17,200 in 2024. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is home to roughly 100,000 fewer people than it was in 2019.
Politically, this strategy of watering down her own initiatives to avoid alienating interest groups might have worked, if not for the fires. Bass was at a cocktail party as part of a delegation to Ghana when Los Angeles went up in flames last January, breaking a campaign promise to never leave the country during her mayoralty. Her approval ratings have been abysmal ever since, currently sitting at about 35 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval. “In the entire era of modern L.A. politics—where we have polling, et cetera—no incumbent mayor running for reelection is as low in the polls and as high in disapproval as Karen Bass,” Fernando Guerra, a political scientist at Loyola Marymount University, told me. In a poll he conducted in October, he said, more than two-thirds of respondents said that they wouldn’t vote for her. (In response to interview requests, Bass’s campaign told me that the mayor would speak with me, but never actually made her available.)
Bass has secured every important endorsement, including from Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and the California Democratic Party, but her unpopularity with voters puts her in a weak position. Polls have her leading the pack, but with only about 25 percent support. If she were to face Raman head-to-head, she could lose. But she might not have to. Thanks to Spencer Pratt.
Spencer Pratt does not have the background of a conventional political candidate. He originally became famous for being an entertaining jerk on the reality show The Hills in his 20s. After his career being a heel on camera ended, he took the proceeds and blew them all on fancy suits, ammunition, and healing crystals. According to a 2013 interview with OK! magazine, he rationalized this spending by telling himself that the world was going to end in 2012 anyway, at the conclusion of the 13th Mayan baktun. He was set to carry on as many ex-celebrities do, slowly running out of money and then occasionally appearing on TV to get paid for activating the audience’s nostalgia for the time when they were famous.
Everything changed after his house burned down in the Palisades Fire. His parents’ house burned down, too. Twelve of their neighbors died. Pratt became enraged at the city’s leadership, accusing Bass of negligence. On the one-year anniversary of the fires, he channeled that anger into a long-shot bid for mayor. Since then, he has run a surprisingly formidable campaign.
Of the three major candidates in the race, Pratt has been the most digitally adept. He posts short, well-produced videos that get across his simple and darkly attractive message: L.A. is a hellscape, and its political class, including Bass and Raman, is to blame. Just as Mamdani answers every question with some version of “affordability,” Pratt turns every conversation back to his assertion that L.A. is a “zombie”-infested wasteland that he could easily fix. His housing affordability plan is to clear Skid Row and build multifamily developments there.
Pratt’s digital savvy and populist politics have created a nationwide media storm around his campaign. Fans have made AI-generated ads that depict Pratt as a hero who finally cleans up the city. The videos can be hilarious despite their messages. One such video parodies the Lego Movie song “Everything Is Awesome” with the hook “Everything Is Awful.” Pratt himself reposts his favorites—he seems to like the ones in which he is Batman. (Pratt’s representatives declined to make him available for this article.)
Although he is a registered Republican, Pratt has made genuine efforts to depict himself as the real liberal of the race. He compares himself to Barack Obama; insists that his friends, family, and supporters are Democrats; and told CBS that “Mayor Bass loves ICE.” He has fashioned himself as a lifelong animal lover, showing off his softer side in videos of him feeding hummingbirds with his children, and allying with animal advocates in their outrage over the treatment of dogs on Skid Row. When asked by CNN why he was a Republican at all, he offered a single reason: He believes in the right of a well-trained gun owner to carry a concealed firearm. Still, Pratt has little chance of becoming mayor. The homicide rate in the city is at a 66-year low, a problem for his apocalyptic message. (Pratt claims that “crime isn’t down,” just going unreported). His biggest obstacle is that he is a registered Republican, and that Donald Trump said on camera that he’s heard Pratt is “a big MAGA person.” (Pratt wisely appeared not to accept the semi-endorsement, but still.) L.A. voted 70–27 for Harris over Trump in 2024, and 2026 is shaping up to be an especially bad year for Republicans.
In a reality-TV-worthy twist, however, he might help Bass keep her job. The latest poll shows all three candidates within the margin of error, but most prior polls showed Bass and Pratt finishing first and second. Polls of that head-to-head matchup show Bass winning by 14 to 32 percentage points. Raman might well beat either in a head-to-head race, according to polls, but only if she can make it out of the primary. (Technically, if a candidate wins 51 percent of the primary vote, no general election will happen. But that is extraordinarily unlikely.)
This is all quite bleak for my hometown of L.A. The city is an eye-wateringly beautiful place, with perfect weather and the country’s best food scene. Its mayoral race, however, has become a staging ground for three of the most unfortunate tendencies in contemporary American politics: Nithya Raman’s Millennial socialism, freed from the troublesome belief that eviction and policing are worthwhile; Karen Bass’s milquetoast establishment-ism that avoids making the choices necessary to solve hard problems; and Pratt’s carnage-populism that tells Americans they live in something other than the greatest place that’s ever existed. Whichever of the three candidates wins, Los Angeles will most likely lose.
*Sources: Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Roy Rochlin / Getty; Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News / Getty.