Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was riding relatively high two months ago, weathering pitched challenges from Spencer Pratt on the right and Nithya Raman on the left to emerge as the top vote-getter in the city’s June 2 mayoral primary.
“Tomorrow begins the second half of this journey,” an ebullient Bass told supporters at the Line Hotel in Koreatown on election night.
There’s been a lot less to cheer about lately.
Bass’ summer has been beset by a string of negative news. Staff members on both her campaign and administration teams have left. She was away from the city — just as she was at the start of the devastating 2025 firestorms — when a blaze ignited at the Lineage cold-storage food warehouse in Boyle Heights, inundating the heavily Latino surrounding neighborhoods with noxious fumes.
And that was all before the release of a new report showing that homelessness in the city rose for the first time in three years, undercutting a pillar of Bass’ fall runoff campaign against Raman.
“In terms of policy, politics and operations, I don’t know if there has been a single piece of good news that has come out of her camp since the primary,” said Dan Schnur, a professor of political communications at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.
“Bass’ only possible path to reelection at this point is raising so much money that Raman simply can’t be heard,” Schnur said.
With three months to go in the campaign, Schnur and other analysts say Bass has time to turn things around. Nonetheless, they say, the summer of bad news will force Bass to reset her campaign narrative — including shoring up her support with Eastside Latinos in the wake of the Lineage fire.
Bass carried 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods in the June 2 election, including Boyle Heights, compared to seven for Raman and just one for Pratt. Yet when she attended a community meeting in early July in the wake of the Lineage fire, she was met with boos from the largely Latino crowd.
“The Lineage fire has deeply eroded the Latino support she was getting from the eastern side of the city, which she needed to build towards November. That’s going to be a real challenge for her now,” said Sara Sadhwani, a professor of politics at Pomona College.
Bass was in Chicago at the dedication of the Barack Obama Presidential Center when the fire broke out and returned to Los Angeles the next evening as the fire continued to burn, casting a black plume of smoke over the neighborhood and leaving a stench for weeks as food rotted in the burnt building.
The episode was a stark reminder that Bass was abroad on a diplomatic trip in Ghana at the start of the deadly Palisades fire in Los Angeles in January 2025. High winds and elevated fire risk were forecast as she departed for Africa.
“It reinforces the narrative of the Palisades, her being out of town,” said Fernando Guerra, a professor of political science and Chicana/o Latina/o studies at Loyola Marymount University.
At a news conference Friday, Bass ordered city agencies to delay the processing of rebuilding permits for the Lineage burned-out cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights until regulators have found ways to subject the project to strict environmental review.
“They shouldn’t even think about rebuilding until they’ve cleaned up the mess they’ve created,” Bass told reporters.
The harsh line Bass is taking against Lineage, however, comes after disclosures that one of her former top advisors, Yusef Robb, had taken on a role doing crisis communications for highly scrutinized company.
Robb spent the first half of the year working for Bass as an unpaid spokesperson, delivering statements for the mayor on some of the most controversial issues she faced, including allegations that she watered down an after-action report on the Palisades fire.
After the mayoral primary, Robb transitioned to a role as an unpaid, unofficial advisor to the mayor, her office said. He took on a role with Lineage on June 19.
The roles overlapped, but Robb and the mayor’s office insisted there was a firewall between Robb and the mayor regarding the Lineage fire. Robb has since said he would no longer advise the mayor.
Bass also took heat for comments she made that the air surrounding the burned-out warehouse wasn’t dangerous to breathe, despite some residents reporting feeling sick from the smoke.
Bass spokesperson Ilanna Morales said the mayor was simply stating what public health officials had determined, which was that conditions didn’t warrant a mandatory evacuation.
“Any assertion that the Mayor does not think smoke is dangerous is distorting her remarks and taking them out of context,” said Morales.
Morales also noted that the mayor’s response to the fire included opening mobile health clinics throughout Boyle Heights, providing respiratory health screenings and oxygen level checks.
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who has endorsed the mayor, said that Bass has done a good job related to the Lineage fire, but that critics are piling on to a politician in a susceptible position.
“We live in a day and age where you see someone vulnerable, and everyone attacks and pounces,” Rodriguez said. “Everyone is angry, and they want to blame someone.”
The mayor’s team is also pushing back on assertions that it’s been a summer of unrelenting bad news, touting among other things the recent World Cup soccer matches at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium as a major success that boosted L.A. businesses, hotels and Metro ridership.
Bass supporters pointed to her second appointment as chair of L.A. Metro along with her announcement that she wants to make buses and trains free, as well as her administration’s role in helping broker new ownership for the downtown “Graffiti Towers” that would begin immediate abatement of the tagging on the buildings.
“The last few weeks have been challenging; no mayor is perfect,” said Nella McOsker, who runs the downtown business group Central City Assn. and has endorsed the mayor. “I think that Bass has a relentless desire to respond, engage and correct in the midst of these crises.”
Rise in homelessness
One of those crises is the city’s chronic problem with the homeless population. Throughout her reelection campaign, Bass has repeatedly touted two straight years of decreases in homelessness from 2024 to 2025 as one of her main arguments for why she should be given another four years by Angelenos.
But 2026 ended that positive run. The city’s unsheltered homeless population went up 7.9% this year, according to a report by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Bass cited cuts at the state and federal level as partially responsible for the increase, saying that Trump administration actions have led to higher gas, groceries and rent prices, which has driven some Angelenos to the edge of homelessness.
Bass continued to site a “historic decline” in homelessness since she took office — an 11% drop overall since 2023.
But the uptick citywide this year contrasted sharply with Raman’s district, where homelessness actually decreased by 49%.
The discrepancy gave Raman an outlet to attack the mayor while touting her own record on homelessness in her district.
“This is a moral outrage and it is a failure. The approach to homelessness that Mayor Bass has led and defended brought us here,” Raman said at a press conference the day the numbers were released.
The mayor has argued that her own program, Inside Safe, was at least partially responsible for the drop in Raman’s district and also argued that Raman’s role as chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee on the Council makes her responsible for citywide homelessness numbers as well.
“The homeless count is as much an indictment of Nithya Raman as it is of Karen Bass. If you’re going to blame one you have to blame them both,” said Rodriguez, who sits on the Housing and Homelessness Committee in Council.
A new campaign team
Bass is gearing up for the fall campaign with a new campaign team, led by Julie Chávez Rodríguez.
Chávez Rodríguez, a granddaughter of disgraced labor leader Cesar Chavez, was campaign manager for President Biden’s aborted 2024 re-election campaign, and then took the same role for Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out.
“She’s getting Graffiti Towers cleaned up, announced a fare-free Metro, hosted a successful World Cup, and more,” said Chávez Rodríguez. “Those are big wins that Angelenos see and feel, it’s not campaign rhetoric. The Mayor’s getting things done across the City and that’s how you win.”
Chávez Rodríguez came on after the mayor’s previous top campaign strategist, Douglas Herman, left the campaign a week after the Boyle Heights fire began, citing “strategic differences” for his departure.
Along with Herman, media consultant Larry Grisolano and research director Mike Rice also left.
Bass’ director of communications at City Hall, Kolby Lee, also resigned this summer, the latest in a string of Bass’ communications staff to leave her office over the past nine months.
Bass did significantly outraise Raman in the first campaign finance cycle of the general election, which her campaign said showed the mayor’s momentum and support in the city. Bass raised more than $510,000 in June, while Raman took in just over $170,000.
Political consultant Mike Trujillo, who is supporting Bass, said the kinds of turbulence Bass has faced this year is par for the course for a big-city mayor.
“Stuff happens; things are always moving,” Trujillo said. “Bad things are always happening, and good things are always happening.”