Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman spoke to supporters Tuesday night, with the mayoral race still up in the air hours after polls closed. “Thank you to each of you for believing in the promise of this beautiful, strange, magical place we can call home,” he said. “There are still a lot of ballots left to count… I’m hopeful. I’m very hopeful.” She called her campaign “the craziest months” of her life, before asking attendees to get out on the dance floor with her to celebrate the victories achieved by Democrats who took control of the House and Senate. “Today, across America…voters demanded change. They are angry at the broken status quo and the politicians who failed them time and time again,” Raman said. “But change feels good, doesn’t it?” He continued to call for more changes at home in Los Angeles, saying that at City Hall, “we get so used to saying no, we forget how to say yes.” He touched on affordability in the city, the speed with which action is taken, and the “cynicism” that caused people to begin to believe that Los Angeles’ problems were not only bad, but permanent. “The result: Los Angeles stopped being a place where we could build things, where we could open things, where we could film things, where we could create things. We stopped asking when the sidewalk would be fixed and started planning our trip around it,” he said. “Hopelessness can be fatal to a city, but this campaign refused to accept that…You saw hopelessness and chose hope.”
