Nithya Raman, a 45-year-old Democratic socialist who tapped into widespread frustration with the quality of life in the nation’s second-largest city, will become the new mayor of Los Angeles, The Associated Press reported Thursday. His victory over Karen Bass, the 73-year-old incumbent, is a runaway success for a new generation of progressive leaders and the rise of younger Angelenos as a political force in the expanding metropolis. Raman, a Harvard-educated policy expert who served six years on the City Council, turned the page on a liberal bastion whose leaders had been consumed by high-stakes battles with the Trump administration. Instead, it focused on the anguish of young voters who found themselves increasingly excluded from the famously expensive city. Polls consistently showed her ahead by a wide margin with voters under 35. The vote also revealed a broad appetite for change among the city’s four million residents, an echo of the calls for a new perspective that Tuesday night drove a Democratic wave from Maine to California. In already deep blue Los Angeles, it also suggested a widespread openness to the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftist movement that helped elect New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. By Thursday, Raman was leading with 52 percent of the vote and DSA-backed candidates had won elections for city attorney and Congress. Members of the movement already hold three seats on the 15-member City Council. Ms. Bass called on Ms. Raman, her former ally, to concede Thursday morning as the ongoing vote count showed a growing lead for Ms. Raman. “I am committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition,” the mayor said in a statement. “Moving this city forward is what Los Angeles needs from all of us.” Ms Raman at her election party on Tuesday. Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times On Thursday night, Ms. Raman, who until recently was little known outside progressive political circles, spoke to reporters at a farmers market in the Fairfax district, surrounded by a crowd of news cameras, supporters and curious shoppers. She wore a blood orange leather jacket and appeared to pause in front of the microphones, as if she were enjoying her first moments before the public as elected mayor. “The key priorities that we have heard about throughout this city are homelessness, housing costs and public safety,” Ms. Raman said, adding: “These will have to be the priorities that I take on in the city.” He tried to reassure those who voted for his opponent or chose not to participate in the elections. “I think it’s a sign of the deep mistrust and cynicism that has taken hold here in the city of Los Angeles,” he said. “My goal is to earn your trust.” Raman, an immigrant from India with a screenwriter husband and two children, said her story of becoming mayor was emblematic of the opportunity the city represented for the rest of the world. “This city has opened its arms to people to come and build their dreams here,” he said. “And the idea that Angelenos voted for an immigrant to be their next mayor, at this moment in American history, moves me deeply.” Preliminary election results showed Raman had built up support on the city’s gentrifying east side and in neighborhoods filled with young people, newcomers and renters. Ms. Bass turned to homeowners on the city’s west side and in the San Fernando Valley and in historically black neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. In a largely Latino neighborhood, Boyle Heights, where a cold storage fire burned for days in June, filling the air with a stench of rotting meat and seafood, voters who had supported Ms. Bass during the primary election switched and supported Ms. Raman by wide margins in the general election vote. In interviews this week, voters said they welcomed Ms. Raman’s return to basics. Anthony Nabea, 36, said he liked its focus on city services and potholes. Marisol Medina, 52, disapproved of the money Bass had spent on police, whose union was among his biggest supporters. Zanisha Butler, 33, said she was simply ready to have a new face in the mayor’s office. “To be honest, I feel like Karen Bass has run her course,” Butler said. Others expressed concern about the loss of Bass, whom they considered a steady hand compared to the relatively untested Ms. Raman. Daquan Houston, 42, a South Los Angeles truck driver from Vermont Square, said the mayor deserved a chance to finish the job she had started. “If you get someone new,” he said, “then they’ll start from scratch.” Overall, though, Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles and a longtime civic leader, said Raman’s victory was “a reflection of an electorate that feels the city is on the wrong path.” An annual survey conducted earlier this year by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs found that residents across the county were less satisfied with their quality of life than at any time in more than a decade. Few members of the civic establishment publicly endorsed Ms. Raman. But those who did so cited pragmatic reasons. George Kieffer, former chairman of the University of California board of regents and co-principal author of the Los Angeles City Charter, said that at age 78 he had decided that only a major political reorganization would awaken the city’s bureaucracy from its slumber. “My party’s establishment is trapped in its own bubble,” he said. “Nithya sees it. When she jumped, I did.” Karen Bass represented Los Angeles for more than two decades in the state Legislature and Congress before her election as mayor in 2022. Credit… Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times A physician’s assistant and native Angeleno who organized in South Los Angeles against the crack epidemic in the 1980s, Ms. Bass rose politically as a progressive outside the city’s establishment circles. When she was elected mayor in 2022, as the city struggled to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, she defeated Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and civic leader who spent $100 million of his own money on the campaign. But his luck changed in January 2025. Traveling to Africa at the behest of the Biden administration, he was out of the country when devastating wildfires broke out. The disaster nearly leveled Los Angeles, the star-studded enclave of Pacific Palisades, and many survivors never forgave her for being absent during a time of crisis. His re-election campaign was an uphill battle from then on. Six months after the fire, a violent crackdown on immigrants in Los Angeles by the Trump administration sparked protests that the White House then used to deploy some 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 US Marines to Southern California. During the occupation, which lasted until the end of the year, the Republican president and his allies clashed with Mrs. Bass. Partisan tension strengthened his support, but not enough to fend off a serious challenge. After Austin Beutner, a Pacific Palisades civic leader, entered the race and then dropped out in the wake of a family tragedy, Ms. Raman took the field. Raman, an urban planning specialist who had been elected to the City Council in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement, channeled both Mamdani and San Francisco’s more centrist mayor, Daniel Lurie. Los Angeles was “shattered,” he charged, and Mayor Bass had failed to ensure a basic quality of life. Although Raman sometimes tripped over the camera and had to work to clear up his mistakes, his campaign also cleverly used social media videos designed to reach younger voters. Credit…Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times She shrewdly distributed videos on social media designed to reach younger voters. Following in Mr. Mamdani’s footsteps, he bravely appeared in microdrama parodies made by real Hollywood production teams and election-themed sketches with DSA-aligned actors and influencers. In one video, she talked about creating more shade in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, while pretending to be burned by hot surfaces: a car door, a picnic bench. He also distanced himself somewhat from the DSA, supporting changes to a local “mansion tax,” for example, that would have benefited one of the DSA’s usual targets: apartment owners. But he pledged to replace the police chief, whose aggressive crowd control tactics during immigration protests were denounced by the DSA. The group also accused the Police Department of protecting federal agents. Bass seized on Raman’s promise, calling it reckless with the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028, and accusing his rival of being “untested” and “not ready for prime time.” Ms. Bass’s 2022 opponent, Mr. Caruso, came to her aid and urged voters to reject Ms. Raman and the DSA. All City Council members expressed support for Ms. Bass, except Ms. Raman. None of that was enough. After a hedge fund manager and advocate for increased bike use in the car-crazy city endorsed Ms. Raman, becoming the largest donor in the race, Ms. Raman began airing ads at Dodger games and on national news shows. As his victory became clear, lobbyists, unions, downtown businesses, nonprofits, and other entrenched civic interests were already preparing for a realignment. The pressure will be on the elected mayor, according to UCLA’s Yaroslavsky. Mrs. Raman, he said, “must now face the challenge of erecting a new administration and beginning to deliver on her promise to fix the city she will lead in six short weeks.” Vik Jolly contributed reporting.
