Their Own Worst Enemies: L.A.'s Predictably Unpredictable Race for Mayor

Seth Jacobson, JCI Two days before Los Angeles picks a mayor, the race is exactly what everyone predicted and nothing anyone expected. Everyone predicted it would be close. No one expected the deciding factor to be self-inflicted. Karen Bass and Nithya Raman have each spent long stretches of this campaign doing their opponent's work for them, and Tuesday will reward whichever candidate stopped first. In a city where two-thirds of voters say things are on the wrong track, the incumbent's job was to prove she could lead and the challenger's job was to prove she was ready. Both, at different moments, forgot.

For most of this year, the Bass camp could not project leadership. The Boyle Heights fire, the scandals inside the city's homeless services bureaucracy and favorability numbers that never recovered left the mayor reacting instead of defining. She fell behind on the message and stayed there. When she finally went on the attack, it was only after she had been forced to spend weeks defending her record. The argument she should have opened with, that Raman is an untested councilmember with no executive experience, arrived late. But it has worked: four weeks of hammering on experience now show up in the new polling.

The problem is the math. To win, Bass needs 70 percent or more of the Black vote, a roughly even split of Latino voters, and the disaffected Democrats and independents who, as one local labor leader put it, will have to hold their noses and vote for Bass. For Ramon to win, she needs to do 60% or more in the Latino community, split the San Fernando Valley, hold her own on the west side of Los Angeles and make inroads with the Black and Asian communities.

Unfortunately, these are both coalitions built on resignation, not enthusiasm, and resignation does not knock on doors.

Raman, by contrast, ran a near-flawless campaign for four months after the primary. She built and sold a narrative of Bass as a leader who had gone missing and lost touch with the voters who matter most to a Democratic coalition: young people, Latinos and environmentalists. She paired it with a credible story about homelessness, the issue she knows best. Then late September arrived. She had no clear answer on police enforcement or on whether she would fire the police chief. She contradicted her own council record on homelessness votes and got tangled in problems in her own district. Worse, she let the Bass team claim the Palisades fire victims and key local figures, Rick Caruso among them, whose endorsements told moderates and independents to think twice about handing her the job.

So now Raman is answering questions about leadership when she should be asking them. The "lost leader" frame was hers to drive for six weeks. She has spent them in a defensive crouch.

Behind the candidates sit the unions, and they are at war with one another. UNITE HERE has thrown its organizing muscle behind Raman. Virtually every building trade and public-employee union stands with Bass. That split turns the final 48 hours into a pure turnout contest: whichever side closes the enthusiasm gap and drags its base to the polls pulls ahead.

It also explains the strange tone of the closing stretch. Each campaign has to make voters aware of the other's flaws without looking like it is running a purely negative campaign, a tightrope neither has walked gracefully. And all of it plays out above a set of voter priorities that have barely moved all year. Angelenos tell every pollster the same thing: homelessness, security and safety, and the basics, like potholes that get filled and electric bills that come down. The candidate who ties her closing argument to those, rather than to her rival's weaknesses, has the edge.

Which brings this predictable, unpredictable race back where it started: the ground game. Polls will not settle Tuesday. Precinct captains, phone banks and union halls will. The question for Los Angeles is not which candidate made fewer mistakes; both made plenty. It is whether voters are willing to take a risk on a new direction, or whether they will stay with the Democratic establishment they already know and only half trust. Whoever turns out her people answers that question. Whoever doesn't will have been, one last time, her own worst enemy.

Background: Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times primary poll · Raman's runoff launch