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There are two<\/span> democratic socialists running for mayor in Los Angeles, but many West Coast leftists are already feeling the crush of defeat.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rae Huang<\/a> and Nithya Raman<\/a> have each, at varying times, been hailed as Southern California\u2019s analogue to Zohran Mamdani. Yet when the rallies and canvassing sessions have wrapped up, leftists admit that neither has the coalition nor the talent that fueled<\/a> the New York City mayor\u2019s rise<\/a>. Huang voices the platform they like; Raman has demonstrated some political chops. Mamdani won because he had both.<\/p>\n With less than a week to go before election day in a crowded nonpartisan primary, Huang, Raman, and 11 other candidates <\/strong>are all vying for second place to the presumed front-runner, incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. Unless someone gets over 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff in November.<\/p>\n There\u2019s little chance either slot will go to Huang, a Presbyterian minister and activist who jumped into the race last November with plans to run from Bass\u2019s left<\/a> by campaigning on free buses, affordable housing, and police accountability. She has struggled to break 10 percent in the polls.<\/p>\n Raman, a city councilmember representing a sprawling district that spans the Los Feliz, Hollywood, and San Fernando Valley neighborhoods, <\/strong>surprised her allies and opponents alike when she joined the race just hours before the February filing deadline, but she has since amassed enough support that she could conceivably compete with Bass \u2014 or with Spencer Pratt, a right-wing reality TV star whose candidacy has fractured the city\u2019s already divided left.<\/p>\n In the eyes of some leftists, a vote for Raman is the pragmatic choice to stop Pratt from making it to November, and a vote for Huang is a throwaway in the name of ideological purity.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Pratt has built a campaign attacking Bass\u2019s handling of the Pacific Palisades fire, calling unhoused people drug-addicted \u201czombies,\u201d and arguing that LA\u2019s housing crisis should be solved with police force. In the eyes of some leftists, a vote for Raman is the pragmatic choice to stop Pratt from making it to November, and a vote for Huang is a throwaway in the name of ideological purity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhile I understand the desire to vote for the most value-aligned candidate,\u201d said Leslie Chang, a Raman supporter and co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America\u2013Los Angeles, \u201cif it comes at the cost of everyday people being able to live a better life, that\u2019s not something I have sympathy for.\u201d<\/p>\n Huang\u2019s supporters, meanwhile, argue that Raman\u2019s platform offers little daylight from Bass, whose status quo gave rise to Pratt in the first place.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThose who consider themselves progressive, or even on the left, have kind of gone into retreat and not let themselves imagine a better political future,\u201d said Michael Burns, a writer and performer who mailed in his vote for Huang. \u201cAnd for me, supporting candidates with a bold vision, with a left vision, is part of contributing to that imaginary.\u201d<\/p>\n Though both Huang and Raman are Democratic Socialists of America members, the local chapter has not endorsed either candidate, and\u00a0Raman\u2019s three DSA colleagues on the City Council have endorsed Bass. Huang and Raman\u2019s campaigns did not respond to The Intercept\u2019s requests for comment.<\/p>\n Despite being a<\/span> DSA member, Nithya Raman has at times aligned herself with more conservative forces and struggled<\/a> to build coalitions on the left. After running in 2020 on calls to defund the police, she voted to expand the Los Angeles Police Department budget in 2021, 2022, and 2023<\/a>. But she also voted against police raises in 2023, and this year, she opposed a plan by Bass to hire 170 more officers. In 2024, Raman accepted an endorsement from the Democrats for Israel\u2013Los Angeles, a Zionist organization that opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, which earned her a censure from DSA\u2013LA.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what version of Nithya I\u2019m ever getting on anything,\u201d said William Gude, a Hollywood resident. Known as @FilmthePoliceLA on social media<\/a>, Gude is a fierce police accountability advocate who said he would have voted for Raman had she maintained her policy positions from her rise to City Council in 2020. Now, he says he finds it difficult to get responses from Raman\u2019s office regarding police misconduct.<\/p>\n Raman\u2019s supporters argue that at least their candidate has a political record to scrutinize. Huang has never held elected office, and her lack of campaign experience has shown itself on the trail. Earlier this week, the LA Reporter exposed<\/a> that the Huang campaign had misrepresented its fundraising totals by claiming publicly that Huang had raised enough to qualify for public matching funds, when in reality she\u2019d fallen far short. (The campaign has chalked the mistake up to clerical errors and lack of capacity.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason why I\u2019m not voting for Rae Huang is kind of like a pragmatic approach and a belief that change comes incrementally,\u201d said Sean Wakasa, who co-chairs DSA\u2013LA along with Chang. \u201cYou have to make a power analysis about what\u2019s achievable and what\u2019s likely to happen, and that\u2019s what keeps my vote for Nithya going strong.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The most recent poll in the race<\/a>, released from the Los Angeles Times and University of California, Berkeley on Thursday, has only increased the stakes. It shows Raman in striking distance of Bass, with 25 percent support to the incumbent\u2019s 26, and ahead of Pratt, at 22.<\/p>\n In the eyes of the most ardent Raman backers, Huang\u2019s voters, who made up 9 percent of respondents, are both delusional and important. Raman supporters call for Huang to drop out and for her voters who have yet to cast their ballots to jump ship. But not all leftist Raman skeptics favor Huang: Roughly 10 percent of voters remain undecided. Gude said he\u2019s considering sitting this election out.<\/p>\n Raman also has a tendency to struggle during debates and public conversations; in an appearance on influential political commentator<\/a> Hasan Piker\u2019s stream<\/a> earlier this month, she stumbled over questions about the sale of property in illegal West Bank settlements<\/a> and the LAPD\u2019s training collaboration with the Israeli military. Combined with the Huang campaign\u2019s messy rollout, it\u2019s possible neither candidate is quite spotlight-ready to command an audience the size of LA.<\/p>\n Leftist, liberal, and moderate Angelenos alike fear there\u2019s someone else who is.<\/p>\n You might have<\/span> seen Spencer Pratt on television 20 years ago, screaming \u201cWhat are you crying about, Stephanie?\u201d and calling his little sister, the target of his ire, a \u201ccrazy bitch<\/a>.\u201d He made millions on the reality TV show \u201cThe Hills\u201d \u2014 then blew most of it<\/a> on crystals, expensive wine, and other luxury habits. His campaign, too, is predicated on the idea of great personal loss: His platform centers the destruction of his home in the Palisades fire, for which he blames Bass (and not climate change, which, on one of many podcast appearances with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, he implied was a hoax<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n Pratt, who did not respond to The Intercept\u2019s request for comment, has sought to paint himself as a regular guy<\/a> fed up with the corruption of \u201celites\u201d like Bass and Raman, and desperate to get the \u201cbums<\/a>\u201d off the street. In one ad, he stands in front of an Airstream trailer, where he claimed to be living after his house burned down. (He was actually staying<\/a> at the Hotel Bel-Air for over $1,000 a night.)<\/p>\n His situation has not translated into a drop of empathy for the people who actually cannot afford homes. \u201cThis idea that they\u2019re forced on the street right now is a lie that our city is perpetuating,\u201d said Pratt during a local ABC interview<\/a>, referencing the city\u2019s unhoused population. He has claimed they are on \u201csuper meth<\/a>,\u201d and argued that they don\u2019t want to go into shelters, in part, because they want to continue to \u201cabuse\u201d animals\u00a0on the street<\/a>. Pratt has said<\/a> that if elected, he plans to have police \u201carresting people and the people that aren\u2019t getting arrested, we\u2019re getting to mandatory medical treatment.\u201d He argued that whoever was left would go to Seattle once his administration stopped providing resources and housing services \u2014 or, as he called it, \u201cunplug them.\u201d<\/p>\n Those \u201ctalking points\u201d are \u201cdisconnected from the data and the reality of the situation,\u201d said Benjamin Henwood, director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Homelessness has nearly doubled in Los Angeles over the last decade, though it\u2019s dipped<\/a> slightly <\/a>in the last couple of years. \u201cWe know from research and data<\/a> that [homelessness] really is driven by housing affordability.\u201d<\/p>\n The idea that Los Angeles has enough beds, and people just don\u2019t want to use them, is belied by the available data. As of 2023, an audit<\/a> from the LA city controller\u2019s office found that roughly 46,260 unhoused people live in Los Angeles, but there were only 16,000 interim shelter beds available. And while the city has added some new beds since then, Henwood said they\u2019re not nearly enough for everyone.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s one of the most expensive ways to try to address homelessness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Substance abuse and mental health problems are also not the main drivers, though they are often the most noticeable to the general public. And it\u2019s not clear if Pratt\u2019s arrest-first strategy would even be legal, Henwood said. But, \u201cpractically speaking, that\u2019s one of the most expensive ways to try to address homelessness,\u201d said Henwood. \u201cIt uses a huge amount of resources, and at the end of the day, people can only be incarcerated for short periods of time, and then they\u2019ll have to be released. So I don\u2019t actually know how that translates into any kind of longer term goal, but it does spend a lot of public tax dollars.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Matthew Lewis, director of communications at California YIMBY, an organization that pushes for more development of high-density housing to solve the housing crisis, argues that Pratt, who he vehemently disagrees with, and the wave of anti-homeless legislation across the country is a reaction to policy failures in Democratic cities<\/a> to adequately address the housing crisis<\/a>. \u201cYou see the same thing play out all over the place,\u201d he said, \u201cand what that suggests is that this is not a Spencer Pratt phenomenon, this is an American city phenomenon. Spencer Pratt is a consequence of pretending we could brush it under the rug.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a Spencer Pratt phenomenon, this is an American city phenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But Bass has been the subject of LA-specific grievances. She faced intense scrutiny for her handling of the twin Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires<\/a>, which destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people. <\/a>Despite promising not to travel abroad<\/a> during her tenure as mayor, Bass was in Ghana attending an embassy party<\/a> when the fires broke out and returned the following day, leading to widespread condemnation and accusations of mismanagement and apathy. (Her defenders point out that strong Santa Ana winds whipped up last year\u2019s fires, and a mayor cannot control the weather.)<\/p>\n Despite the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Pratt\u2019s plan, Henwood said his message is landing with voters in LA for a reason. \u201cPeople are frustrated,\u201d said Henwood. In 2024, Angelenos voted to increase the sales tax rate<\/a> to fund homelessness programs and, Henwood argued, Democrats set expectations too high on what the tax would really be able to achieve. \u201cPeople in LA did that because they\u2019re like, this is bad, we\u2019ve got to do something about it, and they did that, and yet the problem still wasn\u2019t fixed, and so they\u2019re frustrated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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