In June, I voted for Spencer Pratt for mayor for one cause. I wished City Hall to hear one message: this metropolis is a mess, and the folks operating it should be ashamed.
Spencer didn’t make it. But I know enough about politics to perceive two issues. Things can always get worse.
So before any Pratt voter casts a protest poll for Nithya Raman on November 3 — and most of us still haven’t determined — look at who’s behind her.
Spencer Pratt meets with African American and Latino voters as he ran for mayor. London Entertainment for CA Post
Start with the carpenters’ union.
The Western States Regional Council of Carpenters backed Karen Bass in 2022. Then Bass made one of the finest calls of her time period. Her resolution to fast-track reasonably priced housing has moved more than 29,000 items through metropolis approval. Crucially, she refused to load these initiatives with a union-wage mandate after her advisers warned it could elevate prices by as much as 20%.
The union wished that mandate. A carpenters’ union vice chairman complained that Bass’s plan “left workers out of the equation.” In August, the union dropped Bass and endorsed Raman.
The carpenters’ marketing consultant is Rick Jacobs, Eric Garcetti’s former senior adviser and one of the most highly effective operators in this metropolis. When the union couldn’t get what it wished from Bass, it discovered a candidate who would comply.
The same day the union endorsed Raman, Bass was in Koreatown slicing the ribbon on 19 residences for veterans, constructed under her directive, with out the union mandate.
Bass speaks during a debate with Raman in the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 Mayoral Debate. Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
That’s the selection in this race: Housing under Bass; union management, and less housing, under Raman.
Then there’s Raman’s political dwelling. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose LA chapter endorsed her in September.
Read DSA-LA’s voter information to perceive what that means. It praises Raman for becoming a member of “the rest of DSA-LA in opposing the massive raises for LAPD officers in 2023.” It attacks Bass for her “steadfast support to raise salaries for the Los Angeles Police Department.” And on taxes, it says: “yes, we’re going to talk about repealing Prop 13,” the last safety for owners in California.
DSA-LA says its purpose is to “build a governing majority” at City Hall, and it is operating a slate, including Marissa Roy for City Attorney, to get there. A Mayor Raman wouldn’t be a lone progressive. She would lead a motion. Spencer himself warned Democrats never to belief the DSA. On that, he was proper.
Then there’s homelessness, the challenge that despatched so many of us to Spencer in the first place. When the metropolis lastly cleared the encampment that had taken over Echo Park Lake in March 2021, Raman tweeted that “a forced and sudden eviction is not the way to move forward now.”
Her own constituents observed. Local media reported that “some residents in her district said they were frustrated that Raman had not taken similar action to eliminate an encampment along Berendo Street.” One neighbor said she had “time to show up for a photo op in Echo Park” but not to “meet with the neighbors who have been asking for months to meet her face to face.”
Pratt, left, Mayor Bass, heart, and Raman attend the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 California Gubernatorial and Los Angeles Mayoral Debates at the Skirball Cultural Center on May 6, 2026. Jon Rou/LMU
It wasn’t a one-off. Raman voted against the metropolis’s anti-camping legislation in 2021. She voted against holding encampments 500 toes from faculties and daycare facilities in 2022. When the council named 54 websites for enforcement, she proposed none in her district. This April, as The California Post reported, she voted against a no-camping zone in Venice.
We’ve seen this film before. George Gascón came down from San Francisco with a radical experiment in legal justice “reform” and ran it in LA. It took a landslide defeat to finish it.
Raman arrived in city in 2013 with her own theories about how a metropolis should work, and she has been testing them on her district ever since. The folks who run these experiments get to transfer on. Those of us who grew up here reside with the outcomes.
Karen Bass was not my first selection. Pratt voters have every proper to be offended with her. Spencer lost his dwelling in the Palisades Fire while she was in Ghana, and I’m not asking anyone to overlook that.
But this election turns on one query: will Los Angeles be run by pragmatists or by an ideological motion? On that query, Bass has made the grown-up call when it counted.
Bass has loads of issues. But she is not a radical, and she isn’t backed by the pursuits behind Raman.
A protest vote feels good for about a day. Then you reside with it for 4 years.
If you voted for Spencer because you wished LA to cease getting worse, don’t hand the metropolis to the folks who would make it worse quicker. On Election Day, vote for Karen Bass.
Shervin Natan is a voting Angeleno and member of Thrive LA, a nonpartisan motion of Angelenos.
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