The Pressure on LA’s First Socialist Mayor

On paper, the second-largest city in the country has its first democratic socialist mayor. 

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman declared victory on Thursday over the embattled incumbent Karen Bass, joining a list of socialist mayors who have risen to power in recent years, including Zohran Mamdani in New York; Seattle’s Katie Wilson; and most recently Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., who won in a landslide this week.

Raman, however, did not campaign unabashedly as a socialist. Though she ran as an endorsed member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter, the national DSA threatened to override the local chapter and rescind the endorsement over concerns around her stances on Israel and Palestine. 

Unlike her counterpart in New York, to whom she draws most comparisons, Raman did not make sweeping socialist promises, such as free public transit, universal childcare, or taxing the rich. Instead, she focused on what’s wrong with the city. Riding a wave of resentment for Bass’s alleged mismanagements of the Palisades fire and the Lineage Logistics warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, Raman talked about filling potholes, fixing street lights, and making roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists.

In addition to DSA-LA support, she earned the endorsements of popular anti-corruption City Controller Kenneth Mejia and Unite Here 11, a major local hospitality workers union, whose large membership canvassed for her in the general. But she lacked endorsements from most key labor groups and social justice nonprofits, and the organizing base they provide. Her fellow DSA members on the Los Angeles City Council all pulled for Bass, forcing Raman to battle back the perception that she struggles to build coalitions.

While Mamdani, 10 months into his term, now finds himself under pressure from New York’s left for refusing to fire NYPD’s police commissioner, his massive base of organizer support offers a buffer to criticism. Raman won over the city’s voters, but it’s not clear how much time that will buy her to tackle the city’s most vexing problems once she takes office.

“Folks in New York are willing to cut Mamdani more slack on the movement side, because he was one of them on a bunch of issues,” said David Levitus, executive director of LA Forward, a progressive nonprofit that endorsed Raman in the general election. ”I think Nithya” — who did not come from the ranks of DSA organizing like Mamdani — “has more skepticism from parts of the left because of that.”

Raman will face scrutiny from LA’s progressive left on a host of issues: bloated police department spending amounting to roughly a quarter of the city’s nearly $15 billion budget; fear of collaboration between ICE and law enforcement agencies; the 2028 Olympics prompting an expansion of surveillance; rising homelessness; and failing infrastructure.

Weeks before the November election, Raman seemed less concerned with movement-based allegiances or ideological labels, saying she is “a capitalist and I’m also a democratic socialist.” Before the primary in June, she said she was “one of the most independent voices in City Hall” when asked about her membership with DSA. The statements and her votes in city council have prompted intense debate among DSA-LA’s members over whether Raman holds up to democratic socialist ideals.

While most Angelenos do not care about such fine distinctions, Raman’s measured embrace of socialist mantle has created among some activists the perception of a more responsive audience in city hall compared to previous administrations. Yet to others on LA’s progressive left, Raman’s ideological elusiveness reads as political unreliability.

“I don’t think Nithya Raman is accountable to anyone in the movement,” said Kris Rehl, an activist who volunteered for Raman during her 2020 city council run and now runs the mutual aid group LA Street Care. “If you do not subscribe to any ideology, you can’t be held accountable to it.” 

Rehl, who advocates for abolishing anti-camping bans that criminalize homeless encampments near schools and daycares, expressed dismay over Raman’s previous votes on expanding the police department despite running on defunding the police in 2020.

Others like Tal Levy, a member of DSA-LA’s electoral politics committee, remain more optimistic about what Raman can deliver as mayor. While DSA-LA is pushing for reallocating funds from the police budget into social services, Levy sees the value of Raman’s pledge to support LA Forward’s initiative of citywide expansion of unarmed crisis response teams, which divert certain 911 calls to teams of social workers and clinicians, rather than police.

“Even if Nithya were a fire-breathing abolitionist, it would still be a long fight to make those changes,” said Levy, who has been organizing with DSA-LA for nearly a decade. “But I believe there is plenty of room for us to make material wins in the short term.”

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While there is debate over how much power DSA-LA has within LA’s political landscape, the group provided Raman additional attention and credibility among leftist voters, which was only bolstered by the successes of other DSA-endorsed candidates in New York and in congressional races across the nation.

The DSA’s National Political Committee, however, spurred one of the biggest public rifts during Raman’s campaign. The committee held a vote to un-endorse Raman over her perceived lack of support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which hadn’t been included by the DSA-LA on its endorsement questionnaire. After a week of debate and dueling resolutions, and an email from Raman, in which she wrote, “the best way for working Angelenos to stand in solidarity with Gaza is through non-violent protest, legislative action, and diplomatic pressure, including BDS,” the national committee decided against rescinding its endorsement of Raman by a narrow margin.

Frances Gill, one of three DSA-LA members on the DSA national political committee, voted against rescinding the group’s endorsement. She opposed the idea of alienating the organization’s second largest chapter as “bad organizing and bad leadership,” especially in a high-profile race when the stakes for the regional and national chapters were so closely intertwined.

“The public ties us to one another,” Gill said of the DSA and Raman, “and there’s not a lot of other key players who have also played such a critical role in her being able to win. So I think that gives us an outsized seat at the table.”

She was a part of the faction among national leadership that instead called for a long-term pressure campaign on Raman on the issue of Israel and Palestine. The group is planning to push Raman on what she can do as mayor to halt the transportation of military hardware that makes its way through the Los Angeles International Airport to Israel. Organizers also plan to call for an end to real estate events in LA facilitating the sale of housing illegally built in the occupied West Bank. They will also examine whether the city itself is invested in companies that are profiting off Israel’s genocide in Gaza and apartheid rule of Palestinians.

“I think there is room to push,” Gill said.

Another major public spat between progressives and Raman took place in January before she announced her candidacy for mayor. 

Catching housing advocates by surprise, Raman introduced a motion to reform the city’s “mansion tax” to make exemptions for developers. Raman claimed that the tax, known as Measure ULA, was inadvertently preventing construction of new multi-family housing. Organizers opposed the idea, since the tax generates funds for services to support existing affordable housing and keep people housed, and that carveouts for developers would only fuel displacement of low-income renters, possibly pushing more people to the streets.

LA Forward was among those blindsided by the motion, which she eventually withdrew. Before endorsing Raman, Levitus and the group met with the candidate alongside organizers in an activist’s home. 

“She talked about, ‘The times when I’ve succeeded, it’s because I built a coalition, the times when I failed, it’s because I didn’t, and I didn’t bring people along,’” Levitus recalled from the July meeting. “She really owned her mistake. I don’t know how much her mind has changed intellectually about the policy, but think clearly she recognizes that she needed to do something different — and that might lead to her pushing for a policy that is different from what she had pushed for before.”

Among Raman’s early tests progressives will be watching for is how she fulfills her pledge to fire LAPD police chief Jim McDonnell. Raman was among the councilmembers who approved his appointment in 2024, despite concerns around his track record of collaborating with ICE as LA County sheriff. She has since said she would fire McDonnell over his response to the ICE raids and his refusal to enforce a state law that banned federal agents from wearing masks.

Yet the pledge to replace McDonnell may present a political quagmire for Raman, given that the mayor in LA cannot unilaterally force out a police chief. The city’s police commission, consisting of five civilians appointed by the mayor, must make that decision. Raman first will need to assemble her own commission, but that process also requires approval from a city council that remains largely supportive of the police department. 

William Gude, a vocal police accountability advocate who supported Raman in the election, said he planned to push the mayor to circumvent the process by asking McDonnell to resign. “I’m putting pressure on her from day one,” he said. “There’s some promises that she made, and those promises need to be kept.”

In her first press conference as mayor-elect, Raman sidestepped a question about whether she still planned to fire McDonnell, amid public threats from the police union warning of “Armageddon.” “Public safety is the most important service the city is delivering to its people,” said Raman, noting the chief was one of her first phone calls after winning.

Activist pressure could be a burden for Raman — or a tool she could use to force legislation through a city council she knows well, according to Gude. “Does she want to have activists coming after her, also while battling 15 council members?” said Gude, who goes by @FilmthePoliceLA on social media. “Or would she rather have the activist base going after the council members that are coming after her, to create a buffer, to do a lot of her heavy lifting? It’s a choice she has to make.”

Hamid Khan, who heads the Stop Spying LAPD Coalition, is among those who is closely watching who Raman appoints to her police commission. But he sees Raman’s pledge of firing McDonnell as “a band-aid” for the more glaring structural issues of the department. While crediting Raman’s opposition to automated license plate readers from Flock Safety and Axon, Khan also pointed to Raman’s historic support for expanding the police department.

While in city council, Raman voted to expand LAPD’s budget three times: in 2021, 2022, and 2023. But she also voted against police raises in 2023, and this year, she opposed a plan by Bass to hire 170 more officers. She has said on the campaign trail she does not wish to expand the police budget, but also said she would not cut into it either.

In the span of her time in city council, the LAPD has expanded its surveillance reach, Khan said. The department is slowly unrolling its Real-Time Crime Centers, which meld automated license plate reader technology, social media monitoring software, and CCTV cameras into a constant surveillance tool. He warned such a technology, while marketed to curb retail theft, will disproportionately harm Black and brown Angelenos.

“We have to situate the people’s expectations in Los Angeles that they’re not based upon the comment, ‘I’m gonna fire Jim McDonald,’” said Khan, who advocates for abolishing the budding police outposts. “What does that do? The fundamentals still remain the same.”

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There is a notion among some on the left that Raman is very much a part of the political machine that bred some of LA’s ongoing problems. She has served on city council for five years and was an ally to Bass, having endorsed Bass just weeks before jumping in the race herself. Yet Raman, a Harvard-educated urban planner and former entertainment director of Time’s Up, is in many respects an outsider to the political establishment.

Former City Councilmember Mike Bonin called Raman’s victory a “reordering of the governing class in Los Angeles.” For the past several decades, LA politics has been run by establishment Democrats, such as Bass or her predecessor, Eric Garcetti, son of a former LA County district attorney; the chambers of commerce; lobbyists; longtime city hall staffers; all riding the influence of homeowners.

For Lex Steppling, an organizer with Los Angeles Community Action Network and a critic of Raman’s time in city council, the “political recalibration” with her victory in city hall was a welcome sight.

Steppling grew up in a generation of LA political activists who got their start organizing with Community Coalition, which Bass founded in 1990 and for a long time was the only progressive organization in the city offering paid political work. He watched as his peers grew to leading campaigns on issues such as policing and mass incarceration, then began running for elected office. They brought with them their organizing chops, but also their relationships with the organizations that gave them their start. Steppling described this as a “relational ecosystem,” in which movements would be co-opted into electoral politics — in which scoring political points became more important than addressing the issues.

He blamed the lack of gains on policing and mass incarceration since the 2020 George Floyd uprising on such a relational ecosystem. A victory for Raman could mark a reset to such an establishment, and he hopes activists will capitalize on the opening.

“The right kind of openings to do the right kind of work will reemerge,” said Steppling, who helped lead a successful anti-incarceration measure in 2020. “It’s gonna once again start to be about the demands.”

Raman’s election evoked for Bonin memories of the last time an LA incumbent mayor was ousted. In 2005, then-state Assembly member Antonio Villaraigosa beat James Hahn, becoming the city’s first Latino mayor. Villaraigosa, previously director of Southern California ACLU, was seen as a progressive candidate at the time. That’s not how he governed. An early sign of his establishment politics was hiring a longtime political insider as his chief of staff.

Raman will also signal her governing priorities with the hires for her transition team and cabinet.

Some organizers were encouraged to see progressive figures added to her campaign, such as Faizah Malik, a civil rights attorney and former city council candidate also endorsed by DSA-LA, and Jamie York, an advocate for greater transparency in city politics whose high-profile rejection by the city council as an ethics commission appointee drew public scrutiny. It remains unclear what if any role they would play in city hall. 

The LA Times reported that Rick Cole, former deputy mayor, is expected to supervise Raman’s transition team alongside Andrea Conant, Raman’s chief of staff in city council.

“How big is the table,” Bonin said, “and how much of the activist community is at the table?”

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