Bass Faces a Progressive Challenger Who Once Backed Her — and Polls Put Her Behind

Karen Bass is facing a second term fight for Los Angeles mayor, and her opponent is someone she backed for office just two years ago. City council member Nithya Raman entered the race hours before the filing deadline and defeated TV personality Spencer Pratt in the primary. With roughly a month to go before the election, several polls show Bass trailing Raman, though some surveys show only narrow margins while others show wider ones.

Los Angeles is a deeply blue city, and the race pits two progressives against each other representing opposing wings of the Democratic Party. Raman holds the endorsement of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which she is a longtime member. Her campaign relies on the DSA’s large volunteer network knocking on doors to reach a multiracial coalition of working-class Angelenos and renters.

Bass has campaigned at six churches on a sunny Sunday in late September, plus a volunteer appreciation event and four more gatherings scheduled for the evening. At a picnic table in Ernest E Debs regional park, she told supporters: “I’ll be going until about nine.” Later she said, “I have no idea what being bored is.”

Both campaigns are tied in fundraising at about $2.5m each.

How Bass Got Here

Bass’s popularity began to rebound in early 2026 after the Trump administration’s crackdown on anti-ICE protests and mass immigration raids. She spoke forcefully against those operations, praised immigrants’ role in Los Angeles, and confronted border patrol agents deployed to an immigrant neighborhood. By February 2026, several competitors including billionaire Rick Caruso dropped out of the race, easing Bass’s path to victory.

Raman served on the Los Angeles city council since 2020 and beat an incumbent Democrat backed by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton that year. Bass supported Raman’s 2024 re-election bid, and Raman backed Bass’s 2026 re-election, calling her the most progressive mayor the city had ever seen.

Hours before the filing deadline, Raman surprised allies and opponents by opting to run against Bass. She told a reporter she felt the “call from Los Angeles … for change across the entire city.”

The Primary Fight

Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star and registered Republican, ran against Bass after losing his home in the Palisades fire. His ads went viral and his debate performance appeared to boost his campaign, while Raman struggled to find her footing and had little airtime. Donald Trump endorsed Pratt, a move political commentators said would hurt him in the deeply Democratic city.

Bass emerged as the primary frontrunner, and Raman narrowly eked out a win against Pratt by about 3.5%.

The Race So Far

Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted the campaign remained quiet through summer. He said: “We had a whole summer where there was, at least to the average person, no campaign out there. Only this last week did advertising start to appear on television.”

Ballots are already on their way to voters as the final days of the election approach.

A Difficult Position

Bass’s approval ratings sit at levels comparable to Donald Trump’s amid widespread voter dissatisfaction with the city’s direction. That is a hard position for any incumbent.

Raman’s position is different. She is running as a challenger with the DSA behind her, and her campaign’s door-knocking operation is built around a coalition of working-class Angelenos and renters. The question is whether that coalition shows up in November.

Where the paper stands

The paper backs neither Karen Bass nor Nithya Raman and says elections should judge candidates issue by issue against individual freedom, small business, and no concentrations of power, not as a horse race between two machines gathering power. This is a race between two progressive Democrats in a deeply blue city, and the paper does not take sides on that basis.

The paper’s north star — maximizing individual freedom, supporting small business, and avoiding concentrations of power — offers no clear preference here. Neither candidate’s platform or record has been tested against those standards in this article.

What the paper wants readers to watch for is how the campaigns actually perform against those principles in the coming weeks.

Key Facts at a Glance

1. Raman narrowly beat Pratt by about 3.5% in the primary.
2. Both campaigns are tied at about $2.5m each in fundraising.
3. Ballots are already being sent to voters.
4. Several polls show Bass trailing Raman, with some showing narrow margins and others wider ones.

The race remains tight.

Source material: “The surprising, cut-throat race for Los Angeles mayor,” The Guardian.

DSA · election · Los Angeles · mayor race · politics