By Stephen Witt
Behind Los Angeles’ laid-back national image lies a real, fast-paced hustle culture. Having become an Angeleno a little more than a year ago, I can vouch for it firsthand.
The fellow urbanites I’ve met here are, for the most part, smart, funny, confident, rightfully proud of their city, and always on the go. They work hard, play hard, and have real vision for what they want out of life. They’re not afraid to pursue their dreams, leading from the front rather than from behind.
Which makes the recent Berkeley IGS/LA Times mayoral election poll of likely LA voters a bit confusing. It shows City Councilmember Nithya Raman leading incumbent Mayor Karen Bass 39% to 28%, with 33% still undecided.
It’s also worth raising an eyebrow that the LA Times co-sponsored this poll. The paper of record has not exactly hidden its lean in this race. It continues to feature Gustavo Arellano’s Sept. 4 column, headlined “Nithya Raman is the comeback kid of L.A. politics,” on its politics homepage as though it were fresh news, weeks after it ran.
And it’s a stretch to call it a “comeback” in the first place. Raman beat conservative reality-TV figure Spencer Pratt for second place in the June primary. In a one-party, overwhelmingly Democratic city, that’s not exactly an uphill climb.
What strikes me most about this poll is how little visible campaigning Raman appears to be doing. She has no public daily schedule, has rolled out few detailed policy proposals, and is rarely seen outside of media hits.
Compare that to Bass, a political warhorse who uses the mayoral pulpit for all it’s worth. She regularly issues policy announcements and puts herself in front of constituents.
Yet the poll shows Raman running away with it. A few theories, none of them fully satisfying on their own:
Maybe it reflects a genuinely strong DSA-backed ground game translating enthusiasm into poll numbers that don’t show up in Raman’s public schedule. Maybe Bass’s old-school retail politics has simply lost ground to social media as the place voters actually pay attention. Bass also carries the baggage of a rough first term, homelessness chief among it, that a challenger doesn’t have to answer for yet.
But my own theory is simpler: Angelenos understand, at some level, that the mayor’s office isn’t nearly as powerful as the title suggests. This city runs on individual council members guarding their own districts, plus a thicket of independent departments and quasi-governmental authorities that answer to no single executive. If voters sense the office has limited teeth, who’s the strongest mayor becomes less urgent than it would be almost anywhere else.
Either way, it’ll be worth watching how this shakes out. Early voting starts in about two weeks. Election day is Nov. 3.
