Who is Nithya Raman, the democratic socialist who will be Los Angeles’s next mayor?
Özet haber: Urban planner and outsider who bested Karen Bass has close ties to Hollywood progressives – and a complicated relationship with the DSA Nithya Raman on Thursday unseated Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass after a neck-and-neck race for the leadership for the US’s second largest city. The young progressive’s victory means that the two largest cities in the US, as well the nation’s capital, Washington DC, have now all elected democratic socialist mayors. Continue reading...
Urban planner and outsider who bested Karen Bass has close ties to Hollywood progressives – and a complicated relationship with the DSA
Nithya Raman on Thursday unseated Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass after a neck-and-neck race for the leadership for the US’s second largest city.
The young progressive’s victory means that the two largest cities in the US, as well the nation’s capital, Washington DC, have now all elected democratic socialist mayors.
Though Raman’s political ascendance in Los Angeles has sparked many comparisons to New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani, her political profile in her home town is very different from Mamdani’s, as is her often tense relationship with the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Raman broke into politics in 2020 by unseating an establishment Democrat on LA’s powerful city council.
When Raman, an urban planner and political outsider, won a seat on LA’s city council in 2020, it was the first time that a sitting city council member had been ousted in 17 years. One LA political analyst called her win “a political earthquake”. Raman, whose campaign was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, was also the first DSA-endorsed candidate elected to office in Los Angeles. Raman credited her 2020 win to on-the-ground grassroots organizing, telling the Guardian at the time: “We knocked on 80,000 doors, which as far as we know, is a record. By the general election, we had 2,000 volunteers over all. We had 1,000 people just in our Slack.”
She has close ties to Hollywood progressives, including an endorsement from the Hollywood writers’ guild.
At the height of the #MeToo era, Raman served as the entertainment director for the Time’s Up, the organization founded by powerful women in Hollywood that created a legal defense fund for women in all professions to fight back against pervasive sexual assault and sexual harassment.
While older Hollywood celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Samuel L Jackson endorsed Bass, Raman secured endorsements from younger celebrities and comedians such as Mindy Kaling, Adam Scott, and Jaboukie Young-White. Raman’s husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, is a longtime TV writer.
She has also received attention from one very prominent celebrity Republican, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom she had “a widely publicized private meeting”.
Raman’s key issues are housing policy, homelessness and tenants’ rights.
Raman, an urban planner, has said she joined DSA-LA, which she did in 2019, not because of an “ideological drive”, but “because it was one of the only organizations that was meaningfully talking about housing affordability in the city”. Her mayoral platform calls for building more housing “at all income levels, everything from deed-restricted affordable housing to market-rate housing to social housing to homeless shelters”.
Her goal is to triple annual housing construction in the city, an approach that earned her an endorsement from advocacy group Yimby Action, which believes the best answer to housing affordability is simply building as much housing as possible.
