You’ll need to try and forgive me if I’m not quite as exuberant about the blue tsunami as perhaps those in areas where candidates with track records and/or broad visions drove that sea change. Nithya Raman will soon be the mayor of Los Angeles, and other than the fact she is not Karen Bass I’m at a loss to try and explain why.
Raman finally emerged victorious over Bass early Friday in a manner similar to how she first qualified as a Democrat-on-democrat challenger in June: outsized support from early voters whose choices were not part of the overnight results, disproportionately connected to artsier, younger and gentrifying neighborhoods. At that time her main rival was the former reality star Spencer Pratt who had even less experience than she did and enough cred with the D.C. power base to have its leadership clamoring for investigations. I painstakingly explained then how the math actually worked out in the hopes of shutting them up. Fortunately, this particularly odious person is now a moot point so I don’t need to reiterate that exercise.
But other than a focus on a singular issue that mostly involves folks ineligible to vote I can’t find too many reasons beyond being a lesser of two evils that she wound up with those numbers in her favor. Even the usually sympathetic POLITICO struggled, as evidence by the profile dropped last weekend by Will McCarthy:
It has been nearly a century since Los Angeles has elected a mayor with such scant experience in the city’s civic life…Unlike New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to whom she is frequently compared, Raman did not build her base by fusing her identity with an existing movement or by capturing mass attention through mastery of online communication. Instead, she pursued the type of civic engagement that plays out in claustrophobic public-library meeting rooms rather than celebrity-packed rallies or viral memes. Raman built her standing on an issue rather than a banner or a brand, zeroing in on one of Los Angeles’ longest-running, most intractable problems — street homelessness.
But Raman has struggled to meld her activist origin story and her political education on City Council to make the case that she is prepared to run a city of nearly four million people. Her relationship with the Democratic Socialists eroded as she broke with them on issues like Israel…Her stint atop the housing and homelessness committee has been panned by colleagues…”It was the most unproductive time I’ve had on council,” said councilmember Imelda Padilla of her time on the committee. “There’s no way to rephrase that.”
Even some of the grassroots, homelessness-focused organizations that one would expect to serve as the core of Raman’s constituency are unsure about her candidacy. Some point to Raman’s record of DIY activism — and the way she came to fuse her concern for the poor with a pro-construction mentality that could benefit private developers — as reasons not to trust her.
And then there’s this “testimonial” from one of her technical constituents who resides in the portion that was added on midway through her term that represents a more family-centric and somewhat older base of actual homeowners:
The upcoming “Grey’s Anatomy” Texas spinoff will shoot in Albuquerque, New Mexico instead of California despite repeated attempts from the producers to keep the production in Hollywood. Shondaland executive producer and creative partner Betsy Beers testified at an Assembly Committee hearing in North Hollywood last week, upset by the limitations and unpredictability of the state’s film and television tax credit system. The upcoming spinoff was rejected twice for a California tax credit, delaying the start of production for the ABC and 20th Television medical drama.
In the wake of her election the ASSOCIATED PRESS reiterated the rhetoric that has so incensed her constituent. It’s not even worth excerpting. But the campaign is now over. She’s got time and, most of all, reason, to give cases like Beers’ more than mere afterthought. Start caring about those who don’t want to wind up on her priority list. Start NOW, Nithya. Soup’s already getting cold.