Three Cities, Three Socialist Mayors. Los Angeles Just Showed Conservatives What Happens When the Status Quo Fails.
Nithya Raman, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, ousted Mayor Karen Bass on Thursday. New York and Washington are already there. The answer is not to sneer at voters. It is to beat the socialists on the bills they ran on.
By Clara Hughes
Los Angeles has a new mayor-elect, and she is a democratic socialist. City Council member Nithya Raman defeated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, NBC News projected Thursday. The Associated Press described Raman as a "little-known Los Angeles City Council member backed by the Democratic Socialists of America." Bass called Raman on Thursday to concede, the Los Angeles Times reported, after the latest tally showed Raman with 52% of the vote to Bass's 48% with about 76% of the expected vote counted. NBC Los Angeles put the raw count at 429,450 to 394,796 as of Thursday morning. The Times called her the first challenger to defeat an incumbent L.A. mayor in more than two decades. And NBC News drew the larger picture: three major American cities will now be led by democratic socialists — Raman in Los Angeles, Zohran Mamdani in New York, and Janeese Lewis George, who won the mayor's race in Washington, D.C.,