Angelenos demand – Election-night momentum in Los Angeles pointed to a city ready for disruption—yet the early returns also suggested Angelenos may be wary of whoever they view as the status quo, even when that challenger comes with a “movement” message.
A huge, waning moon glimmered over Los Angeles on election night, and the early returns carried a harsher message underneath it: the city’s political establishment looked like it was retreating.
Mayor Karen Bass held a cushy lead in her bid for a second term. and the Associated Press declared she had made it into the November runoff election. But the underwhelming amount of support she had received thus far signaled a deeper discomfort in a super-blue city. Many voters, rather than returning a Democratic stalwart to office, appeared to be looking elsewhere.
They gravitated instead toward self-proclaimed upstarts from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman. If the current results held, Bass would face Pratt in the runoff.
Raman’s campaign. launched at the last moment—just weeks after endorsing her longtime ally Bass—was built on a gamble that anger toward the incumbent could be captured from inside City Hall. The bet was half right. Voters did want change. But to many, Raman wasn’t the break from the status quo. Instead, she was seen as part of it.
At Raman’s election-night party at Boomtown Brewery on the outskirts of Little Tokyo. the room itself seemed to echo the limits of her appeal. The gathering felt like happy hour at a Silver Lake bar: far whiter than the city overall, with few Latinos. Raman’s address to a packed house landed as a grab bag of platitudes, mixed with a broadside against MAGA.
To many Angelenos, the complaint sounded politically weightless in L.A.’s ecosystem. The speech read less like a pivot to a new governing vision and more like an uninspiring cri de coeur—too cautious for those. including Pratt’s supporters. who want radical change. and too familiar for those who already back Bass. By the end of the night, Raman was in third place.
Still, she insisted the campaign had opened something transformative. “Together, we built something extraordinary,” she said to cheers. “And it gives me so much inspiration to be a part of it. a movement powered not by cynicism or political insiders. but by ordinary people who still believe Los Angeles is worth fighting for.”.
Then Raman went to the dance floor, pumping her fist while a DJ blasted Daft Punk’s “Lose Yourself to Dance.”
Across town in West Los Angeles, Pratt had a quieter kind of celebration. He reveled in his second-place position after a spring of fulminations against Bass (“Karen Basura”). nonprofits. homeless people (“zombies”) and anything that reeked of Democratic pieties. Pratt also swore he was campaigning for all ideologies in a nonpartisan race.
Dismissed for long stretches as a has-been joke, Pratt appeared to correctly read the temperature of the city: Angelenos are angry, and they don’t want to be polite about it anymore. His supporters treated his rise not as a fluke, but as proof they should double down against liberal L.A.
Yet if Pratt moves on to the general election and wants to win for real, he would have to learn from the political revolution his rivals helped build—even though they sit at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Six years ago this spring. L.A.’s political establishment wrote off DSA-LA as “wokoso” upstarts in their long-shot quest to get a political novice named Nithya Raman elected to the city council. Even after Raman and three other DSA members joined the council. skeptics dismissed them and their progressive policies as anomalies that didn’t reflect how Angelenos wanted the city to work.
But Tuesday night’s results undercut that dismissal. Four of the six DSA-endorsed candidates in L.A. city elections were in first place by large margins, and another was comfortably in second—evidence of DSA’s multicultural, citywide reach.
In a telling sign of its new king-making status, the local chapter declined to endorse Raman or any other mayoral candidate. Without that powerful backing, their trailblazer—and Rae Huang, also a DSA member—withered on their L.A. revolutionary vine.
Some other races reflected a different kind of momentum, too. Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez and L.A. Unified school board member Rocío Rivas looked to be coasting to outright victories. Marissa Roy was on track for a runoff that would exclude incumbent city attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. who was a distant third in early returns. In District 9. where Curren Price is terming out. Estuardo Mazariegos stood comfortably in second place and looked set to head to a runoff against a fellow Latino candidate. That race is expected to decide South Los Angeles’s first non-Black council member in 63 years.
The most surprising outcome involved Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez. who became a punching bag—along with Bass—for people who believed L.A. had transformed into a hellhole. So-called dark money groups. which don’t have to reveal where their funding comes from. poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into negative mailers. Opponents vying for her seat cast federal raids against drug dealers and gangs in the MacArthur Park area as an indictment of her leadership. berating her during debates and on social media.
Even Hernandez’s supporters were fretting about election night. But when the reporter arrived at her raucous soirée in Highland Park, early returns showed her ahead of the field and perhaps avoiding a runoff.
“It’s reassuring to see [DSA’s success],” Hernandez said as jubilant supporters lined up beside her to get tattoos—real ink, not temporary—of hummingbirds, her campaign’s logo. “That means people see us. That means people want more.”
Hernandez pointed to her fellow DSA member, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “What happened with DSA over there didn’t happen overnight,” she said. “In L.A., we’re getting there.”
None of this means L.A. has suddenly become a land of Trumpers and closet commies. Two incumbent council members who are centrist Democrats were also headed toward easy victories. and Councilmember Monica Rodriguez walked into a third term because no one ran against her. Centrists Timothy Gaspar and Barri Worth Girvan had a huge lead over their rivals for the San Fernando Valley council seat that Bob Blumenfield is leaving due to term limits.
But anyone trying to predict the next phase in Los Angeles has to sit with a simple fact: antiestablishment sentiment was in the air.
The people who rode that wave may be tempted to treat it as a permanent transformation at City Hall. Yet politics, like la luna, waxes and wanes whether people like it or not.
As Juliet warned Romeo, “O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon / That monthly changes in her circle orb / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”
Angelenos have declared they want dramatic change. The question now is how they’ll feel in November.
Los Angeles election night Karen Bass Nithya Raman Spencer Pratt runoff City Council DSA-LA political establishment antiestablishment MacArthur Park