Outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass says her defeat to democratic socialist Nithya Raman wasn’t about her record in office, but rather a broader national mood among voters demanding change.
“This happens every five or six years, that voters get in a space where they just want everything new,” Bass said Thursday at a ribbon-cutting event for a $72 million taxpayer-funded homeless housing project at a converted motel. “And I think that what happened here was part of that.”
The 73-year-old, a former state Assembly speaker and six-term congresswoman, made similar remarks to NBC4 when asked directly what went wrong with her campaign.
“I put the election in the context of the national scene. To me, there was a wave and these waves happen. I’ve been around long enough to experience them, not where they necessarily affected me. But change waves happen where people are just frustrated. They just want change, they got it.”
Raman defeated Bass by a wide margin, taking nearly 55% of the vote to Bass’s roughly 45%, according to the latest results. The loss makes Bass the first sitting Los Angeles mayor to be unseated by a challenger since Jim Hahn lost to Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005.
“Obviously I was disappointed in the results,” Bass said. “But the results are the results.”
Asked on Tuesday, during her first public appearance since the defeat, whether she would ever run for elected office again, Bass gave a one-word answer: “Doubtful.”
Raman’s win places Los Angeles alongside New York and Washington, DC, among major American cities now led by self-identified democratic socialists, joining New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and DC Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George.
