EXPLAINED | How Nithya Raman Beat Karen Bass to Become LA’s First Indian-American Mayor-Elect

Nithya Raman had already endorsed Karen Bass for another term as mayor of Los Angeles. Then, with hours left to get on the ballot, she decided to run against her. On November 5, two days after the election, Bass called her to concede. The Associated Press called the race for the Kerala-born city councillor, who will become the first Indian-American and first South Asian elected to lead America’s second-largest city.

In Los Angeles County’s 4.34 pm update that day, Raman had 460,772 votes, or 52.70 per cent, to Bass’s 413,519, or 47.30 per cent. The count was still provisional. “Los Angeles, I am deeply honored to be your next mayor,” Raman wrote on her campaign website.

Raman had asked voters to judge City Hall by what they could see on their own streets. Could they find a home they could afford? Would the city fix a broken streetlight? And when it helped someone move out of a tent, where did that person go? Those questions also explain why an urban planner with a career that took her through Delhi and Chennai ended up running for mayor.

How did Raman beat the mayor she once backed?

She forced a runoff and made it a contest over how well Los Angeles was being run. Bass led the June primary with about 34 per cent. Raman came second with about 29 per cent, ahead of Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star. With nobody over 50 per cent, the top two advanced. Both were Democrats in a city election in which candidates run without party labels. Bass, a former congresswoman and the city’s first woman mayor, had the backing of California Governor Gavin Newsom and former US vice-president Kamala Harris. Raman had the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America and a pitch to voters who thought City Hall was moving too slowly.

Bass had a record to defend. She had moved thousands of people into temporary accommodation through her Inside Safe programme and argued that she had made progress on public safety and homelessness. Her response to the January 2025 Palisades fire also came under intense criticism. Raman used an empty lectern in a campaign ad to ask, “Where is our mayor?” She paired that attack with promises as ordinary as repairing potholes and getting streetlights working. She became the first challenger to beat a sitting LA mayor since 2005.

The race was close enough that a late October poll had both women at 40 per cent among likely voters. The same poll put reducing homeless encampments at the top of voters’ priorities. That made one of the most visible problems in Los Angeles a test of two records. Bass could point to people her programme had brought indoors. Raman asked why so many people were still sleeping outside.

Who was Raman before she ran for office?

She was a planner who kept looking at the gap between what a city said it provided and what people could actually use. Raman moved from India to the United States at six, studied at Harvard and earned a master’s degree in urban planning from MIT. She worked with people facing eviction in Delhi and founded Transparent Chennai, a civic research project. One of its assignments was to map the city’s public toilets. The researchers looked at where the toilets were, who used them and whether they were close to neighbourhoods where residents were likely to need them.

Raman later wrote that getting basic information on toilets and bus services was hard, sometimes because the agencies themselves appeared to lack it. That finding gives her India years a bearing on her LA campaign. One of her proposals now is a public website where anyone can see when a housing application was filed, which permits it received and how long the city took to respond. In Chennai, her team went looking for the missing information. In Los Angeles, she wants City Hall to publish it as the work gets done.

In Los Angeles she helped start SELAH before winning a City Council seat in 2020, defeating incumbent David Ryu. She was the first Asian-American woman and first South Asian elected to the council and won a second term in 2024. One example of what she did there fits on a receipt. She and fellow councillor Curren Price pushed for a review of what the city charged street vendors to operate legally. The council voted to cut the annual city permit fee from $541 to $27.51.

Why does she want to change what gets built near train stations?

Because in some neighbourhoods, the rules allow a detached house where several households could live close to a station. Raman’s campaign wants to let builders put two, three or four homes on more of those plots, open up more land for apartments along busy transport routes and make it easier to turn vacant offices into homes. Her plan aims to triple annual housing construction.

That takes two kinds of change. The city first has to change its zoning rules, which say what can go on a plot. Then a builder has to get a permit, line up financing and actually build. Shorter waits can cut costs. For people on the lowest incomes, the price of the finished home still matters, which is why her plan also calls for simpler public financing for homes with affordability requirements. Bass used an executive order to speed up projects that were entirely affordable. Raman is proposing a wider change in where the city allows homes and how it approves them.

Where do people go when the city clears an encampment?

Under Bass’s Inside Safe programme, one answer was a motel room. That could get someone off the street quickly. Finding a permanent home afterwards was the harder part. Raman wants to keep some private rooms, send more medical teams to people living outdoors and put more money into temporary rental assistance so people can move into homes of their own.

The latest count shows why the destination matters. After two years of declines, the regional homelessness agency estimated that 29,115 people were living without shelter in the city in 2026, up 7.9 per cent. The broader city count, which also includes people in shelters, rose to an estimated 45,194. The agency said the change in that broader count was too small to establish a statistically reliable increase. It identified a funding squeeze on rental assistance as a reason fewer people were able to move out of temporary accommodation. When those beds stay occupied longer, fewer are available for the people still outside.

Can Raman halve the number of people in tents by the Olympics?

That is her pledge. She has promised to cut the number of people sleeping in tents and encampments by at least half by the 2028 Games. It is a narrower target than halving all unsheltered homelessness, which also includes people living in cars or sleeping outdoors away from encampments. Her term is scheduled to start on December 14. She can direct city departments and propose a budget. She will need the City Council to pass spending and rule changes, and cooperation from the county, which funds much of the care her plan relies on.

Her first budget will show how much money she can put behind rental assistance and outreach. The city can then track how many people move from tents into temporary rooms, how many get a permanent home and how many end up back outside. The Olympics give Raman a date. The harder test is whether people who turn in a motel key have a front door of their own to go to.