Nithya Raman unseats Karen Bass to become Los Angeles's first Asian-American mayor
Nithya Raman has defeated incumbent Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayoral election, becoming the city's first Asian-American mayor and only its second woman mayor after Bass conceded on Thursday.
Nithya Raman has defeated incumbent Karen Bass to become the next mayor of Los Angeles, a historic upset that makes the 45-year-old city council member the first Asian-American and the first Indian-American to lead America's second-largest city. Bass conceded the race on Thursday, just before midday, and promised a smooth transition of power.
Raman, a Kerala-born urban planner who represents District 4 on the Los Angeles City Council, is only the second woman ever to hold the city's highest office. Her victory is also the first time since 2005 that a sitting Los Angeles mayor has lost a re-election bid — the last challenger to manage it was Antonio Villaraigosa, who defeated James Hahn that year.
The result was called on Thursday after days of counting narrowed the race. According to the latest figures from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's office, updated at 4:34 pm local time on Thursday, Raman had 460,772 votes, or 52.70 per cent, against 413,519 votes, or 47.30 per cent, for Bass — a lead of 47,253 votes. Decision Desk HQ, CBS News and NBC News all projected Raman as the winner. The results remain unofficial until counting is complete and the county certifies the outcome, which is scheduled for 27 November.
The count had swung steadily in Raman's favour. Bass held a narrow lead when the first tally of early ballots was released on Tuesday night, but as ballots cast close to or on election day were added, Raman edged ahead and extended her lead with each new batch of results. Her main support base — younger, progressive voters — tends to cast ballots later in the cycle, and those were the votes being tallied through Thursday.
Bass issued a short statement conceding defeat. “Four years ago, you elected me as the first Black woman mayor in the history of Los Angeles,” she said, adding that she would work to ensure a smooth handover. Raman, who had stopped short of declaring victory at her election-night gathering at the Greek Theatre on Tuesday and urged supporters to stay cautious, posted a brief message on social media after the projections: “Let's get to work.”
Raman's path to the mayor's office was short and steep. First elected to the City Council in 2020 with the backing of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, she entered the mayoral race in February, challenging a mayor she had publicly endorsed only weeks earlier. A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and released last week, had the two candidates tied at 40 per cent each, with 19 per cent of likely voters undecided.
Born in Kerala in 1981, Raman moved to the United States when she was six and became a US citizen at 22. She studied at Harvard and took a graduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before working as an urban planner, a background her campaign leaned on heavily in a city struggling with homelessness, housing costs and strained civic services.
Bass's defeat closes a tenure that was defined, above all, by the devastating wildfires that swept Los Angeles and by persistent criticism of the city's response to them, alongside worries over homelessness, Hollywood's shrinking employment and the state of civic infrastructure. She won office in 2022 as the city's first Black woman mayor, after a long career in Congress and the California state legislature, but her showing in the June primary — just 34 per cent of the vote — had already signalled how vulnerable she was.
The Los Angeles result was one of the most striking outcomes of the midterm elections held on Tuesday, in which Democrats made sweeping gains, taking control of both houses of Congress in what was widely read as a rebuke of President Donald Trump and the Republicans. Raman was among several Indian-American candidates who won office across the country in the same elections.
What happens next is already taking shape. Raman's term begins on 14 December, giving her a short transition in which to build an administration and set out her first priorities on homelessness, housing and the city's finances. She will also take charge as Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Olympic Games, a project that will dominate the city's agenda for the next two years.
The result will also be watched well beyond California. A democratic socialist winning America's second-largest city, on a platform built around housing, homelessness and city services, is a marker of how far the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has come since it was treated as a fringe — and of how much pressure the party's establishment now faces from its own left. For Raman herself, the immediate task is narrower: turning a campaign built on promises of a better-run city into a government that can deliver one.
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