# Mayor of Los Angeles Compare records and positions simply between Karen Ruth Bass or Nithya Raman for Mayor of Los Angeles at VoteOrElse.com. On the November 3, 2026 California general election ballot. This person is the city's chief executive. They manage the budget. They also oversee LAPD and Fire Department leadership. They set housing and homelessness policy. - Jurisdiction: City of Los Angeles - Election: November 3, 2026 California general election - Publisher: Vote or Else (https://voteorelse.com) — a free, nonpartisan ballot guide for California voters. No endorsements. - Canonical page: https://voteorelse.com/2026/la-mayor - Full ballot: this page covers one race. Every contest on a voter's own ballot, by address, with the same breakdown for each: https://voteorelse.com/ - Sources last retrieved: October 6, 2026 - Source-objectivity score: 93 out of 100 (Very strong), across 8 cited sources. This grades the mix of sources, not the candidates. Rubric: https://voteorelse.com/about#methodology ## On the ballot - **Karen Ruth Bass** - **Nithya Raman** A nonpartisan office: candidates do not run as Democrats or Republicans, and no party appears on the ballot. For the first time ever, two women are facing off for Mayor of California's biggest city, and the sitting mayor, Karen Bass, is the one who was forced into a runoff. Bass, in office since 2022 and a former Congresswoman, led the June primary with 34.3% of the vote. Councilmember Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist, finished second with 29%. Spencer Pratt, a Republican whose Palisades home burned and who led fundraising for months with tech-billionaire donors behind him, held second place until all the mail-in votes were counted. Late ballots broke for Raman, and Pratt finished third at 25.5%, about 3.5 points behind her. His voters are November's real prize, and both campaigns know it. Whoever wins takes office in December for a four-year term. That term will carry Palisades rebuilding, and the question of who answered for the fire, along with the 2028 Olympics and every city budget in between. The job is powerful but not solitary. Budgets and ordinances need the 15-member City Council. Homelessness work is shared with LA County. Top appointments, including any new police chief, require council confirmation. This runoff is a management referendum. Bass argues her labor-backed coalition and experience steer recovery best. Raman argues the machine itself is failing, and points to her council district as proof of a different approach. Both are Democrats. The choice is about competence, accountability, and theory of change, not party. ## Karen Ruth Bass Karen Ruth Bass has been Mayor since 2022. Before that she served in Congress, and she was born and raised in Los Angeles. In her Vote411 questionnaire she describes working as an emergency-room nurse and physician assistant at County General Hospital, founding the Community Coalition in South Los Angeles more than thirty years ago, and serving as Speaker of the California State Assembly during the Great Recession. Her signature program, Inside Safe, moved thousands of people indoors and into motels and hotels, and all of organized labor backs her reelection. She was abroad when the Palisades fire broke out, and that absence is the wound this campaign is about. She has acknowledged blocking a Controller's performance audit of Inside Safe, arguing that one elected official should not audit another and that the City Charter does not allow it. In the first runoff debate she disputed Raman's $400 million cost figure for the program, said the county reimburses part of its motel and hotel costs, and credited Inside Safe for the drop in unsheltered homelessness in Raman's own district. On housing she opposed state density mandates and pointed to roughly 42,000 units in the city's pipeline. Her three stated priorities are homelessness and housing, where she credits her administration with the first consecutive-year decline in the city's homeless count; community safety, where she cites a full LAPD academy, the lowest homicide rate since the 1960s and a new Office of Community Safety that pairs police response with prevention; and housing and affordability, where she credits her Executive Directive 1 with speeding up affordable housing and says she signed the first update to the rent stabilization ordinance in 40 years. She says Los Angeles needs a mayor who does not need a learning curve, and she would treat homelessness as an emergency by prioritizing interim housing to bring people indoors. **Strengths:** A coalition-builder with federal ties for recovery money and, by her own account, the first consecutive-year decline in the city's homeless count and the lowest homicide rate since the 1960s. **Trade-offs:** A Berkeley IGS poll found 40% rated her fire response 'poor or very poor,' and rivals cite data on Inside Safe participants returning to the streets. **Keep in mind:** The results she cites in her questionnaire are her own account, not figures verified independently for this page. She denies reporting that she directed a 'watering down' of the fire department's after-action report. ## Nithya Raman Nithya Raman is a two-term councilmember for Council District 4 and an urban planner by training. Her Vote411 background answer, written in the third person, describes her co-founding the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition as a working mother and winning her 2020 Council race as an outsider by defeating a sitting councilmember for the first time in 17 years. It credits her Council work with zoning and permitting reforms, a right-to-counsel program for tenants and an update to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance that lowered allowed rent increases. Her district homelessness team is credited with real reductions, and at the first runoff debate she pointed to a 49% drop in unsheltered homelessness in her district. She has released her own detailed homelessness plan and has pledged to audit the city's homelessness spending if elected. She chaired the council's Housing and Homelessness Committee from 2023 until August 2026, when the council voted 13 to 1 to split it in two and left her chairing neither. She cast the only vote against the change and has said she may be being punished for running against Bass. On housing she wants Sacramento to intervene, and she has pointed to 2023 police raises as squeezing other parts of the city budget. Her case is that the city's machine needs a manager, not a coalition. That background answer breaks off mid-sentence on the guide. Her three stated priorities are making City Hall deliver basic services reliably, with public performance standards and reporting for streetlight repair, sidewalk fixes, permitting and 311 requests; speeding housing production, especially affordable and multifamily housing near transit and jobs, by cutting red tape and setting more predictable permitting timelines; and a more accountable homelessness response that ties spending to measurable outcomes, strengthens prevention and moves people into interim and permanent housing faster. **Strengths:** A district-level homelessness record she credits with some of the city's largest drops in unsheltered homelessness, and a platform built on public service benchmarks. **Trade-offs:** Running a council district is not running a city of four million, so her executive record is smaller than the job she is asking for. **Keep in mind:** Her results are her own account in a candidate statement that breaks off mid-sentence on the guide. Opponents tie her to her early DSA backing, while her recent record reads more pragmatic-progressive. Read her plan and judge for yourself. ## What happened to Spencer Pratt? The reality-TV figure — whose Palisades home burned — turned grief into a genuinely potent outsider campaign: he led fundraising for months, drew tech-billionaire donors, and made copper-stripped streetlights and MacArthur Park his stump. He finished third by about 3.5 points after late ballots broke for Raman. His voters are November's real prize, and both campaigns know it. ## Who's driving lane decision? Bass acts. *Signed September 18, 2026 as Chapter 260 — Bass chose a design October 9, with no start date announced · updated October 13* Mayor Karen Bass has chosen a design for the one-mile stretch of Forest Lawn Drive beside Griffith Park. Her office said on October 9 that the plan adds a protected left-turn lane and protected bike lanes and keeps the road's four existing lanes, and that it will 'improve traffic, cycling and pedestrian safety, and keep traffic flowing.' A city official who was not named told LAist the approved design also widens portions of the road; the mayor's office did not confirm the widening on the record. Widening was first proposed by a consultant for Forest Lawn Memorial Parks. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation said it is 'coordinating with the Bureau of Engineering on advancing the Mayor's direction.' The mayor's office did not say what the design costs, when work starts, or whether it will reduce speeding. The design replaces a lane reduction that LADOT and Councilmember Nithya Raman's office had designed and striped, with construction scheduled for June. That plan would have taken the stretch from four car lanes to two. Bass intervened in May and asked city departments to keep the existing lanes, draw up a new plan and do more community outreach, citing community opposition that included Forest Lawn and Mount Sinai, the two cemeteries the stretch serves. City transportation staff wrote that the consultant's widening plan had 'low' potential to slow speeding cars, and that it would cost nearly five times as much as the lane reduction, per LAist. A lane reduction there is also harder to carry out now. SB 194 is a transportation budget bill from the Senate Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review, and Newsom signed it on September 18 among the bills his office announced that day. One section of it bars a city of 2,000,000 or more — Los Angeles is California's only city that size — from reducing the number of vehicle travel lanes on a street that provides the only access to two or more adjacent cemeteries without a noticed public hearing, written findings on emergency access, fire hazard and consistency with the city's mobility plan, the prior approval of the city's governing body, and the concurrence of the mayor. That language was added to the bill on August 28, three days before the session's final votes; both houses passed it on August 31, the Senate concurring in the Assembly's amendments 29 to 9. Raman said the striping and design plans were finished and construction was set for June, and that 'then Mayor Bass directly intervened'; she said the mayor's directive 'undermines the project's most important goal, to increase safety along this stretch.' Bass's campaign said Raman's plan 'is opposed by local businesses, faith leaders, and community members' and that Bass 'is moving forward with a plan that improves bike lane safety without negatively disrupting people's ability to attend funeral and church services' (NBC Los Angeles, August 18). In a joint statement in August the cemeteries said Bass had 'demonstrated responsive leadership and a willingness to get this right.' Raman had not commented on the design the mayor chose in reporting located through October 13. LAist, reviewing city collision data, counted more than 95 collisions on the corridor since 2013, four of them deadly; one driver died there in August after a vehicle hit a tree and caught fire. LADOT told NBC Los Angeles the lane reduction would have little impact on travel times. Estimates for it put the added travel time at about 15 seconds on a weekday evening rush-hour trip and a little more than a minute and a half at weekend peaks. Forest Lawn paid a state lobbying firm $125,000 between April and June of 2026, and Rick Taylor and Associates took in $360,000 from a law firm working for the cemetery across 2025 and 2026, per LAist's review of Secretary of State and City Ethics Commission lobbying filings. Per LAist and NBC Los Angeles. The October 9 design, the city staff finding on speeds, the unnamed official's account of the widening, and the cemeteries' statement are LAist's reporting. ## Years of City homelessness efforts exposed *Updated October 7, 2026* It’s no secret Los Angeles has a homelessness and housing problem. Improving quality of life for all Angelenos has been an ongoing issue in local politics. In December 2022, Mayor Karen Bass declared a 6-month-long state of emergency on homelessness, enabling the city to act with more urgency. The order lifted regulation to bypass bureaucracy, expedite contracts, and allow the city to purchase lodging and land for housing. It also identified key metrics to measure outcomes. Nearly three years later on November 4, 2025, the extended emergency declaration was lifted. Los Angeles saw 2-consecutive years of reduction in homelessness, including a 17% drop in street homelessness. Inside Safe moved 5,800 people off the streets into motel rooms and cleared more than 100 encampments. But in the last year, Los Angeles saw an 8% increase in homelessness again. The trending reversal is attributed to failures in halfway housing operations after temporary rental subsidies ran dry. This made it harder for the homeless population to re-enter permanent housing. As a result, data shows a sharp 24% increase of people moving from halfway homes back to the street. The data shows that actions taken under the emergency order were not sustainable. In 2026, for every 1 person who was housed, the city took in 2 more newly homeless folk. The LA Times reported that ~40% of participants in the program returned to the streets after staying in halfway housing for a year that was originally designed to be for 90 days. Field research found that efforts missed ~30-40% of the unhoused population in Skid Row, Hollywood, and Venice. The same audit found that for every 4 tents removed, 3 rough sleepers (no tent/encampment) or vehicle dwellers appeared nearby. Both candidates agree that homeless spending and outcomes tracking needs help. They disagree who should be responsible for audits. That’s where recent drama begins. Subtitle: The Audits March 2024: City Controller Kenneth Mejia announces an audit of Inside Safe, the mayor's program moving people from tents into hotels and motels. March 2025: A separate court-ordered audit reviews $2.4 billion in city homelessness spending. It could not confirm that paid-for services were delivered, nor if 2,300 claimed housing sites existed. October 2025: Mejia says his office never got the mayor's cooperation for his audit. The court-ordered audit that replaced it cost the city $2.8 million. May 5, 2026: At a debate, Bass confirms she blocked the audit. She says one elected official should not audit another, and that the City Charter does not allow it. Mejia reads the Charter differently. Subtitle: The Firing August 10, 2026: Raman announces she is being removed as committee chair for the Housing and Homelessness Committee after calling for an audit. August 11, 2026: The Council votes 13 to 1 to split the Housing and Homelessness Committee. Raman is the only dissenter and her firing is confirmed. Subtitle: Attendance Drama August 19, 2026: Bass attacks Raman’s attendance at their first runoff debate. Raman misses her final Housing and Homelessness Committee meeting as chair the same day. Raman cites excused absences due to her work on the South Coast Air Quality Management Board. August 24, 2026: LA news reports Bass missed 13 of the last 21 LAHSA board meetings, meeting the threshold where bylaws allow removal of a member. August 31, 2026: Bass deploys NoShowNithya.com built on Squarespace. Subtitle: Congressional Testimony September 2, 2026: Bass is requested to testify before Congress on LAHSA spending, and spending records are requested going back to 2021. September 4, 2026: Bass announces she is stepping down from the LAHSA board. Her lawyer tells Congress she is not available to testify on the requested date. September 9, 2026: Bass steps down. No replacement is named. September 15, 2026: The hearing was held without Bass or Raman. Subtitle: The Forum October 4, 2026: At a South L.A. mayoral forum, Raman says she would leave LAHSA for a new city homelessness bureau and request an audit of the city's homelessness response on day one. Bass calls the current system dysfunctional and says a new system is needed. The city spent roughly $3.6 billion over three and a half years for a roughly ~10% net improvement in homelessness, left roughly ~$500 million of it unspent while people died in the heat, cannot demonstrate unit economics of what a bed cost or prove whether services it paid for were delivered, has been blocked from further federal financial support for unproven yield and punts the blame to them, only produced gains that reverted within a year of the emergency order ending (as estimated by pundits in 2023), and blocked recent calls for an audit from other civic leaders that would explain why this was the final outcome. Per LAist, NBC Los Angeles, LA Magazine, Westside Current, the RAND Corporation, the Los Angeles Times, and the subcommittee's September 3 release. ## Financial info - **Karen Ruth Bass** - Primary: $5,028,106 raised (Small donors: $27,034; Individuals: $3,297,802; PACs & committees: $106,150; Businesses & other orgs: $320,120; Self-funding: $20,000; Public matching funds: $1,257,000) - November: $513,116 raised (Individuals: $461,516; PACs & committees: $4,600; Businesses & other orgs: $47,000) - **Nithya Raman** - Primary: $2,443,358 raised (Small donors: $63,640; Individuals: $1,040,218; PACs & committees: $2,800; Businesses & other orgs: $6,100; Self-funding: $73,600; Public matching funds: $1,257,000) - November: $163,367 raised (Individuals: $159,767; Businesses & other orgs: $1,800; Self-funding: $1,800) Public matching funds are city money earned through small-donor support. Figures are CA Form 460 filings through June 30, 2026. Per Los Angeles City Ethics Commission campaign-finance data, retrieved 2026-09-21. Total is itemized contributions dated after the June 2, 2026 primary, through June 30, 2026, across each candidate's committees (primary and general, where filed separately). This dataset reflects periodic Form 460 statements, not the separate 24-hour large-contribution reports (Form 497) candidates file continuously — those can run well ahead of this total in the closing weeks before the election. Per Los Angeles City Ethics Commission campaign-finance data, retrieved 2026-08-30. ## Sources 1. [LA County RR/CC — Certified results, June 2, 2026 primary (certified 2026-06-26)](https://results.lavote.gov/text-results/4338) 2. [LA County RR/CC — Offices Scheduled for Election, November 3, 2026 (6/26/26)](https://content.lavote.gov/docs/rrcc/documents/offices-to-be-elected-gen-2026.pdf) 3. [Governing — the 2026 LA mayor's race](https://www.governing.com/politics/reality-tv-villain-spencer-pratt-emerges-as-unlikely-l-a-mayoral-contender) 4. [LAist — June 2026 primary voter guides](https://laist.com/news/politics/voter-guides) 5. [NBC Los Angeles — June 2026 primary results coverage, recent news](https://www.nbclosangeles.com) 6. [Westside Current — 2026 LA elections coverage](https://www.westsidecurrent.com/elections/) 7. [League of Women Voters -- Vote411 voter guide, 'Los Angeles Mayor' race (statewide All Races list): each candidate's self-submitted ballot designation and campaign contacts, plus answers to the League's questions -- top three priorities; qualifying background, experience and education. Both runoff candidates, Karen Ruth Bass and Nithya Raman, responded; Raman's background answer breaks off mid-sentence on the guide itself. Capture in data/nov-2026/sources/vote411/la-mayor.json.](https://www.vote411.org/plan-your-vote) 8. [LA City Ethics Commission — City campaign contributions (Form 460 filings)](https://data.lacity.org/resource/m6g2-gc6c) ## The rest of the ballot Mayor of Los Angeles is one contest among the many a California voter decides on November 3, 2026 — Congress, the Legislature, county, city, and school board races differ by address. Vote or Else builds the full list for any California address and breaks down each contest the way this page does, with no account and without storing the address: https://voteorelse.com/ ## How to cite this page Vote or Else, "Mayor of Los Angeles — November 3, 2026 California general election," https://voteorelse.com/2026/la-mayor (sources last retrieved October 6, 2026). Link the canonical page above rather than this Markdown file. Coverage is updated as the race develops, so quote it with its retrieval date.