First New York, Now Los Angeles: DSA-LA Should Endorse Nithya Raman for Mayor

The following article was written by DSA-LA members.

At the end of June, an exasperated Hugo Soto-Martínez—DSA-endorsed councilmember of Los Angeles City District 13—took to the floor of City Hall to lament a series of democratic reforms that failed to make it onto the November ballot. Some of the measures, including council expansion from 15 to 25 members and non-citizen voting, had already been withdrawn from consideration. The coup de grâce, though, was the frustratingly close 8-6 decision against allowing voters to give the democratically elected council greater authority over the police department and its budget. 

“I have never been more embarrassed to be a member of the city council,” said Soto-Martínez. “One by one, this body has killed reforms that would give Angelenos a greater voice in their own government.”

Soto-Martínez’s speech marks a moment of reckoning for the socialist agenda in LA. Despite major gains in key areas of the city, which are reflected in the impressive plurality of DSA-endorsed candidates on the council and school board, certain barriers have emerged for socialist politics—particularly in large population centers like the San Fernando Valley, the Westside, and South LA, where either entrenched political loyalties still hold sway, or where there has otherwise been a reluctance to embrace the political message of DSA-LA and its periphery.

Neither the successes nor the challenges we confront in Los Angeles have, however, been the center of attention this year. After a thunderous series of electoral victories in New York in June, the national story is that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are on the rise as the premier challengers of the establishment political machine. 

The victorious socialist insurgency in New York comes off the back of trailblazing endorsements by DSA and by incumbent city mayor Zohran Mamdani. These endorsements—namely, those of NYC-DSA’s own Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, as well as Mamdani’s additional endorsement of Brad Lander (of the Working Families Party)—helped a wave of anti-establishment candidates achieve a shocking victory. The elation of the left was matched only by the conservative backlash, felt not just in the region but broadly enough that even President Donald Trump deemed the night of June 23rd a nationwide defeat for establishment forces. 

Taken together, these victories signal a national imperative: socialism must fight to win in the 2026 midterms to prepare for the critical 2028 moment. 2028 is already shaping up to be a historical and seismic confrontation. Before it begins, we need to put ourselves in the most advantageous position possible.

This outlook raises questions for the socialist movement in California after its less-than-stellar primary season—in particular, questions regarding the high-profile race for Mayor of Los Angeles, where DSA member and District 4 City Councilwoman Nithya Raman eked out a second-place primary finish to appear in the Fall runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.

Of course, DSA-LA’s concerns about Nithya have been well-documented, and contributed to the chapter’s reluctance to endorse her surprise candidacy earlier in the year. Possibly due to being the first DSA-LA candidate to win office, her relationship with DSA-LA has gone through ups and downs since 2018. While Nithya has helped win some of DSA-LA’s biggest legislative victories, like expanded tenant rights and rent stabilization, she has had a mixed track record of cooperation with DSA and has wavered on key political issues like anti-Zionism. However, due in part to rapid shifts in the national picture since then, it has become clear that a DSA intervention for endorsement of Nithya Raman in the LA City Mayor’s race is now critical. 

There are real reasons to hesitate on a Nithya endorsement, both previously and now. But our hesitations have to be tempered by new political realities: DSA-LA has a chance to participate meaningfully in the new nationwide electoral struggle that has already swept across New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, by posing a credible socialist challenge to Bass—a mayor whose negligent record has left her vulnerable even among previously reliable support bases, and whose defeat would mark a historic advance for the socialist movement in the country’s second-largest city.

Further, Nithya has pursued greater cooperation with the chapter in the lead-up to the endorsement forum, including hiring DSA-LA members to lead her campaign. What this signals is that with a DSA-LA endorsement, we may anticipate more constructive collaboration with the Nithya campaign going forward, in which the organization stresses the importance of boldly taking up the main pillars of the national electoral movement, and adapting their logic to the Los Angeles context. 

With such an approach, the chapter is in a better position to make the case that it is in Nithya’s political interests to unite the insurgent left in LA by adopting an unqualified opposition to the genocide in Gaza and a plan of action for Los Angeles to phase down its material ties to Israel. Publicly carrying the anti-genocide banner may lose Nithya the support of the establishment—but these are anti-establishment times; Nithya has to accept that she will always be the target of conservative forces as long as she runs to the left of what DSA-LA has termed “the status quo coalition.” 

With some of the most progressive California candidates in key races falling short this primary season, such as Tom Steyer for Governor and Saikat Chakrabarti for Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco seat in Congressional District 11, Nithya’s advance to the second round of the mayoral election comes as a relief in what was shaping up to be a lackluster election cycle in the Golden State. Her narrow second-place primary finish spares Los Angeles a disastrous faceoff between the Trumpian demagogue Spencer Pratt and the status quo incumbent, Karen Bass. Instead, Los Angeles now has an opportunity to advance a socialist message at the level of executive power.

Nithya, by her own admission, is no Zohran. Having been described as an insular, proceduralist candidate compared to the outspoken yet marginal Rae Huang on her left flank, Nithya failed to secure an explicit endorsement from DSA-LA (as well as from other key figures like Bernie Sanders) in the jungle primary. Without clear direction from the chapter, the City Council's DSA bloc of Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado, and Hugo Soto-Martínez issued an endorsement for incumbent Karen Bass. DSA-LA did recommend Nithya, however, illuminating a divide between the caution of socialist councilmembers and the boldness of the chapter’s rank-and-file members.

Subsequently, when Nithya appeared for an interview on Hasan Piker’s livestream before the primaries were held, she displayed an odd lack of preparedness to engage with her DSA-aligned base amidst what was an already rocky relationship. When discussing a series of hot-button activist issues such as homeless encampment sweeps, Palestine, and BDS-related legislation, the councilwoman seemed to offer unnecessarily litigious half-answers. At one point, Piker’s livestream chat had to be turned to “emote-only” mode to prevent further heckling from the audience (though ultimately, Piker did de facto endorse her candidacy).

Nithya ended up making the November runoff, but her current inability to craft a resounding left-populist message and build a mass campaign signals a weakness in her broader political strategy. Her campaign communications thus far indicate that Nithya is presenting herself as a “palatable progressive” option who will not drag status quo politicians into open fights. The qualities she embodies in her campaign are familiar among politicians seeking to oust an incumbent: she wants to make things more affordable, she believes the current administration could do a better job, and she insists that she is the only candidate with “a plan” to make a city that works for everyone. Unfortunately, this style of campaign mirrors some of Bass’ own messaging, and foregoes the lessons of the more ambitious politics of recent, sweeping socialist victories across the country that have been able to mobilize voters and activists alike. 

While comparisons to Mamdani’s populist strategy are always tempting, keying in on local politics brings to light another compelling model of successful campaigning: LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia. In 2022, the plucky 31-year-old ran on the Democratic ballot line after previously unsuccessful third-party attempts. In what we could now identify as a proto-Zohran left-populist campaign, Mejia crushed the labor-backed 5th District Councilmember Paul Koretz in both the primary and the general, with 20-point and 24-point leads, respectively. This spring, Mejia was reelected to office, breaking his own record with a whopping 26-point lead over challenger Zach Sokoloff (whose bid was bankrolled by his own mother to the tune of $7.5 million). 

Among voters who in 2022 preferred conservative billionaire developer Rick Caruso for Mayor over the more progressive Bass, there were a significant number of ballots cast as Mejia-Caruso votes, signifying the outsider appeal of both. Despite having fewer political networks and a smaller war chest than those he ran against, Mejia proved that a left-populist approach can work in Los Angeles. Much of the campaign efforts depended on volunteer labor and the goodwill of individual donors who were charmed by his outsider wit, pet corgi mascots, and brilliant Gen Z-oriented usage of social media. From billboards that agitated against the egregiously disproportionate amount of money wasted on the police, to highlighting the ongoing animal abuse and neglect by Koretz as then-Chair of the Animal Welfare Subcommittee, to meeting with everyday citizens biking in the popular CicLAvia, Mejia pioneered a path that would foreshadow the appealing elements of the Mamdani campaign.

Mejia himself recently endorsed Nithya: "The people are fed up. The old way of operating at City Hall in Los Angeles is failing," Mejia proclaimed at a joint event with the Raman campaign. "Nithya will bring the change we need at City Hall." The implication is that the LA City Controller undoubtedly recognizes the potential that Nithya’s campaign represents in the struggle to gain leverage against the status quo coalition. 

What Mejia’s statement suggests is that Nithya represents something much larger in this moment than her political shortcomings or the limitations of her campaign’s own self-representation. The place of her bid for power in the burgeoning democratic socialist movement will be determined by many factors beyond her control, and with the right strategic approach, DSA-LA may yet have something to say about Nithya’s political fate.

More importantly, it will have something to say about the fate of socialism in Los Angeles.

Nithya, Bass, and the National Insurgency

It may be argued that Nithya’s campaign does not deserve a fervent outpouring of energy by DSA; that this alliance is not worth the risk of our radical reputation. Of course, endorsing the Zohran Mamdanis of our moment is a more straightforward task; naturally charismatic and transcendent figures sell themselves, both to DSA and the broader public. It is precisely in the grey area, where the people are undecided on which candidate best represents this stage of the fight against autocracy, that DSA’s socialist horizon and impassioned activist network become potent weapons that can guide, clarify, and mobilize mass struggle. 

To be effective, however, our engagement with campaigns has to be informed by real political movements. Determining endorsement or abstention is therefore not just a question of crosschecking candidates against preset socialist principles, but of taking stock of how these politicians relate to the national political situation. If we examine the national upheaval that is unfolding now, which arises out of the complex crisis facing the country as a whole, we can observe certain consistent features. Specifically, the electoral insurgency identifies itself as a struggle for affordability, dignity, and democracy—and against Israel’s genocide, the corporate theft of elections, and billionaire control of the country. These issues constitute the primary points of rupture in the present conjunctural crisis. 

It is these issues that have produced a critical split within the Democratic Party and its base, and that have propelled democratic socialists into the political mainstream. Our strategic assessments as DSA members must therefore follow from this fundamental analysis. Our starting point thus shifts from asking “how socialist is Nithya, really?” to instead asking “what does Nithya represent in relation to the present insurgency, and how malleable is that relationship given the potential of a DSA intervention?”

Having identified the main struggles of the day, which determine the stakes of all present political contests, it is now worth going to the record to settle accounts on Nithya’s political profile, and that of her opponent, Mayor Bass, regarding the preceding considerations. 

The most frequent charge against Nithya from the left is that she is either a Zionist herself or an apologist for Zionism, whose support for Palestine has been at best wavering since October 7th, 2023. While it would be wrong to call Nithya a groundbreaking leader on the question of the Gaza genocide, it is equally misleading to dismiss her as a Zionist—especially given the sharply contrasting record of Mayor Bass on this issue. 

Nithya’s record prior to October 7th included her signing off on two statements concerning anti-Semitism, one of which was her endorsement of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) dubious, pro-Zionist definition of anti-Semitism. After the Nova attacks, she immediately issued statements condemning Hamas without giving context regarding Israel’s historical oppression of Palestinians. Then, in her 2024 race for reelection to city council, Nithya sought the endorsement of the local liberal Zionist group Democrats for Israel - Los Angeles (DFI-LA), an anti-Netanyahu but pro-Israel Democratic club that also supported other progressive candidates in 2024. At the time, Nithya’s opponent, Ethan Weaver, was a corporate-backed, Zionist Republican running against her as a Democrat. 

These gestures are indeed troubling and deeply frustrating. What they point to more than anything is the fumbling reaction of a person who did not already grasp the depth of the injustice of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and who therefore reacted rashly amidst a frantic media spectacle—as opposed to issues like housing justice, with which she has had significant experience, and acts with more foresight. Like the antecedent Bowman Affair, this was tremendously disorganizing to the chapter (and even resulted in an official chapter censure). 

This incident, however, led to DSA-LA reworking its relationship with its elected, and it was in part because of DSA-LA’s early engagement with Nithya on these issues, through its Socialists in Office (SiO) Committee, that Nithya’s subsequent statements improved. Further, as a result of this relationship and direct work with the Palestine Solidarity Working Group, Nithya proposed a resolution for a permanent ceasefire to the city council in November 2023—a bold move that was highly controversial with LA’s Zionist lobby. Nithya also called Israel’s bombardment of Gaza a genocide in her interview with Hasan Piker this May, for which the California Post accused her of bringing “anti-Israel hatred to the race for mayor.”

Karen Bass’ record on Israel-Palestine, however, is an entirely different story. According to reporting in LA Taco, Mayor Bass explicitly received funding from J-Street, an American liberal Zionist lobby, during her 2022 mayoral campaign. Furthermore, none of her public statements have condemned or even criticized Israel’s actions. She has instead repeated the Biden administration mantra that “we continue to stand unequivocally with Israel.” Since the first weeks after October 7th, Bass has been completely silent on the issue. 

Incidentally, DFI-LA supported Bass and Adam Miller in the mayoral primaries. Nithya’s name was not mentioned because she explicitly rejected their endorsement.

Nithya has required patient work and cooperation with DSA’s bodies to achieve a more effective and principled pro-Palestine position. That she continues to work with the DSA is a positive sign of her intentions. Bass, on the other hand, is unrepentant.  The incumbent mayor is an outright enemy of the growing movement to hold Israel to account for its genocide and for an arms embargo by the United States. In this context, the DSA’s theory of ‘co-governance’—of DSA chapters working with elected officials to engage in shared strategic planning and political consultation—is strongly validated by the case of Nithya Raman. 

Bass’ mayoralty has been defined by its opaque operations and expenditures, and its disregard for democratic processes. Perhaps most notably, Mayor Bass excluded Mejia, the elected City Controller, from conducting an audit on spending for her flagship Inside Safe program to counter homelessness. After the mayor’s rebuke of Mejia, a district judge ordered an expensive external audit that found the program was missing its targets, withholding data, and presenting misleading findings despite having a $2.4 billion budget. 

The mayor has executive and creative control over the major agencies and programs to address issues like homelessness, and it is clear Bass has not only not seized the opportunity to tackle these issues, but actively attempted to shield her programs from Council and City Controller oversight. She appears more interested in protecting her reputation from public scrutiny than in doing honest and transparent work to improve conditions in the city.

Additionally, Bass’ failure to deal swiftly with Palisades Fire recovery and to distribute available relief funds, and her dishonest and disastrous handling of the ongoing crisis at the Lineage Logistics fire—including intimate dealings with Lineage’s own corporate consultants and seemingly parroting the company’s messaging about air quality—have not helped matters. Bass’ credibility on the issue of democracy was eroded even further by recent reporting on her largest campaign contributors, which include commercial landlord firm Douglas Emmet as well as Airbnb—a company that has also tipped the scales against the Estuardo campaign and which shares consultants with Lineage. Fraud, waste, and abuse were polling as the number one issue in City Hall during the primaries. Bass has made herself vulnerable among voters who, increasingly, want greater democracy and honesty in government, and an end to corporate pandering by politicians.

Karen Bass’ campaign messaging thus far is oriented around her record. She is running on a few key accomplishments: reduction of homelessness by 17.5% (a figure already outdated by new numbers that show a recent uptick in homelessness), lowering crime through increased policing, taking a symbolic (yet thus far vapid) stand against Trump and ICE during the raids last year, the rent control measure passed by City Council that she technically signed into law (despite having little to do with its motivation on the back end, where Nithya herself was instrumental), and a new infrastructure plan for LA—which she is unveiling four years into her mayoralty, and which is clearly overdue, as parts of Hollywood are currently sinking into the subsurface after a 110-year old water main failure (following several similar incidents in previous years). 

However she wants to paint her record, it would be appropriate to describe the Bass camp’s politics as a politics of the sinkhole: large amounts of money for addressing homelessness are squandered and unaccounted for as people continue to live and die outdoors; renters and small businesses continue to pay exorbitant tribute to ghost entities that parasitize the LA economy; the cost of basic necessities like food, healthcare, and childcare are reaching crisis levels without meaningful intervention from the local government; and the only thing dynamic about the status quo’s politics is the pavement when it collapses onto the vacuum where government solutions should be. 

If the Bass coalition represents the sinkhole, Nithya’s coalition represents a politics of common sense and affordability. It is true that Nithya Raman’s platform leaves something to be desired—it lacks, for instance, substantive tax-the-rich schemes or a truly comprehensive vision for affordable housing construction—but there can be no doubt that she has thought through her plan and taken the issues of homelessness and housing costs seriously. Nithya’s homelessness plan promises to reduce the number of people living on the street by 50% before the 2028 Olympics. This is not only an incredible promise, but one that is realistic and based on a comparable success rate within her own council district during her tenure. Nithya’s team has analyzed existing funding sources and programs, conceived a new system for consistent casework, and established a permanent offramp from homelessness through two-year subsidized apartments that will not require additional revenue—making the ever-elusive goal of solving homelessness in LA feel realizable, possibly for the first time ever. The very existence of this plan marks the first real step forward in confronting what Nithya herself has called the “compounding moral crisis of our time,” and one that LA housing justice organizations, including DSA-LA, have been struggling to make meaningful progress on for years.

These policies, as well as her proposed Office for Tenant Protections, her crackdowns on private equity home-ownership, AI-enabled surveillance and data center construction, her green space initiatives, her strong stance against the Los Angeles Police Protective league and support for unarmed crisis response, and her proposals for new systems of democratic oversight and anti-bureaucratic measures, clearly position her as a candidate with a natural relationship to the movement for greater democracy and affordability, and against billionaire control of politics.  From the perspective of macro politics, this is the program that democratic socialists have been running on nationwide this election cycle. It is she—against Bass—that represents the progressive, socialist insurgency in LA in this historical moment.

An Intervention to Win the Whole City

We began our discussion by introducing the crossroads at which DSA-LA now finds itself: while we have won races in the areas of the city where explicit socialist messaging may resonate, we have failed to expand our coalition significantly into neighborhoods outside the transplant-dense “Commie Corridor” (and adjacent areas) of LA. The chapter’s own Faizah Malik was decisively defeated in the Westside’s Council District 11 in June, and Estuardo Mazariegos faces an uphill battle in South LA’s District 9, where he advanced to the runoff with 26.2% of the vote (behind his corporate-backed opponent Jose Ugarte’s 39.5%)—in a district that voted overwhelmingly for Bass, and where it is unclear whether Estuardo’s current messaging strategy can turn the tides in his council race in November. 

Both preceding and following the primary elections, a politico-geographic analysis of the city was published by DSA-LA’s Tal Levy and Ben Davis. Their observations highlight the difficulties that the chapter has faced in expanding its coalition beyond the areas where democratic socialism enjoys its most enthusiastic support. With the aid of their exhaustive study, both the advantages of Nithya’s current reach in the more conservative areas and the work that still needs to be done to increase it become clear. 

What the authors’ analysis shows is that bringing a socialist message beyond LA’s Commie Corridor—Silverlake, Echo Park, Highland Park, and Los Feliz—faces not just challenges of geography and resources, but also of politics. For example, among Latino “populist” voters, primarily those in areas like the North San Fernando Valley who are not necessarily Democrat-aligned, Bass was perceived as the reliable bulwark against the reactionary threat of Spencer Pratt, who was a bridge too far even for voters who had once placed their hopes on Trump. The same trend was visible among the more conventional liberal Latino voters in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and MacArthur Park. However, Nithya still held her own among these demographics, and even won the Westside liberal vote outright against Bass (overlapping the district where Faizah was beaten by 20 points). There are thus signs of real potential for Nithya across most areas of the city as we head into the runoff. Nithya has an opportunity, now that the right-wing Pratt no longer poses a threat, to convince voters—specifically those in Latino and even historically Black LA who turned out at far higher rates this year to fend off the menacing Pratt campaign—that she is our best weapon against the far right, and is capable of offering a new pole of attraction for all voters who are growing weary of the status quo coalition. 

Crafting this message, its program, and the overall vision necessary to move the conversation in Los Angeles toward a socialist agenda will be core, long-term areas of work for the left and for DSA-LA regardless of what happens in November. But the Nithya campaign already represents a clear step in this direction. It both forces us to grapple with the limits of our current reach in Los Angeles and offers a chance to extend it by speaking to large population centers with which our current relationship needs work, and with whom Nithya’s existing messaging for struggling homeowners and small businesses already puts the left into an advantageous position to expand its coalition in the necessary ways. Critical but supportive engagement with the Nithya campaign is therefore not just an exercise in holding a candidate accountable to our own platform; it involves rethinking our current strategy such that we may position ourselves as the legitimate representative voice of Los Angeles.

While it may be tempting to treat Nithya as an individual with unacceptable shortcomings, especially when compared to the more ambitious campaign (and now administration) of the New York City mayor, candidates are not simply autonomous agents expressing static and immovable personal preferences. Rather, they are dynamic reflections of the networks that support them and who continually shape, condense, and expand the limits of their political action. In this sense, we must understand elections as something far more than just allocating offices to dispersed and spontaneous political actors; they alter who possesses leverage, who can withdraw support, who can mobilize legitimacy, and the platform on which future struggles will be fought. 

The terrain of struggle that defines the LA mayoral landscape is already largely being shaped at the national level; DSA as an organization is now associated with the electoral movement from which Nithya herself cannot break away, even if she wanted to. Moreover, at the local level—regardless of whether or not Nithya is endorsed by the chapter—she will be “The DSA Candidate.” Conjunctural factors have already assured our mutual implication. The question now is whether we will choose to mobilize this relationship to assume greater political agency in Los Angeles, or cede that critical space to campaign staff and politicos—and to entities like Fox News and the California Post. 

As uncertain as our relationship with a Nithya mayoralty may appear to us now, what is certain is that two candidates will run for mayor of Los Angeles, and only one of them is capable of being pushed to victory by her association with our organization and the much broader movement to address the affordability crisis, to oppose Israel’s genocide, and for greater democracy in this country. We should seize the opportunity to broaden the reach of socialism, both in Los Angeles and beyond, by voting yes following DSA-LA’s August 20th and 22nd endorsement forums for Nithya Raman.

If you are a DSA-LA member and would like to sign the petition to endorse Nithya Raman for mayor, please do so at this link. Please note that you will still need to officially vote on the endorsement when electronic voting opens after the forum.