Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is heading into Tuesday’s primary with the toughest reelection fight of her political career, and she knows it. Her campaign does not expect her to win a majority vote, but Bass said she fully intends to capture the Nov. 3 runoff and secure a second and final term.
“I have been fighting for change from Day One,” Bass said as she tried to draw a line from her first day in office in 2022, when she declared a local emergency on homelessness, to the race now unfolding. She said she will argue that she has made progress on clearing homeless encampments, fast-tracking affordable housing and reducing homicides, which are now at their lowest since 1966.
But the race has been transformed by the 2025 Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Many voters now associate Bass with the disaster, and many view the response under her leadership as a failure. Michael Trujillo said he believed the fire changed the city’s view of its mayor. “I think the city turned on her after the fires,” he said. “We saw an office and an administration that was not well equipped for a crisis.”
That anger has been reinforced by a broader sense that the city is not working. Bass’s critics say Los Angeles problems go well beyond the Palisades fire, pointing to broken sidewalks, pockmarked streets and aging infrastructure that take years to fix because of the city’s long repair backlog. Oren Hadar said, “I just get the sense that the city is kind of falling apart.” He added, “We can’t repave streets. We can’t fix streetlights. It’s just this basic stuff that isn’t getting done.”
Bass is facing City Councilmember Nithya Raman and an insurgent challenge from reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, who lost his home in the Palisades fire and has framed homeless residents as a danger to stroller-pushing mothers. Bass’s campaign has tried to keep the focus on her record, but a majority of voters view her unfavorably, and her path resembles a broader pattern in large cities where mayors have lost reelection in Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco.
The historical warning is hard to miss in Los Angeles. Former Mayor James Hahn was the last incumbent forced into a runoff and lost his 2005 reelection bid to Antonio Villaraigosa. Sam Yorty was pushed into a runoff in 1973 and defeated by Tom Bradley, whom Bass has cited as one of her heroes. Bass now faces the same kind of test those mayors did: whether voters are willing to give an incumbent a second look after a first term defined by crisis.
Former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Rick Cole said Bass helped create some of the political trouble she now faces. He said her early decisions included negotiating significant raises for police officers, firefighters and the civilian workforce, leaving the city with too few dollars to sustain basic services. “From A to Z, from animal services to the zoo, the city is shabbier and more dysfunctional than it was three years,” Cole said. He also said Bass has been a micromanager.
Bass did not reject the political cost of trying to force through unpopular changes. “That’s very disruptive and can get people pissed off. But I’m going to do what needs to be done to address these problems,” she said. The result is a race shaped by a fire, a citywide frustration with basic services and a sitting mayor trying to convince voters that the mess in front of them is precisely why she should stay.
