New York is hardly the only American big city that could elect a socialist mayor. Most such cities have electorates that are filled with immigrants and racial minorities, underpaid service-sector workers, underpaid young college graduates, public-sector union members, and people whose incomes lag behind housing costs. Such cities have arts, ideas, and public-service subcultures. Such electorates have social democratic politics and encompass neighborhoods already represented by socialist elected officials.
But don’t take my word for it. Consider the socialists, or quasi-socialists, following the example of Zohran Mamdani by running for mayor this year in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. (the two cities, coincidentally, where I’ve spent nearly all of my life, though my presence really can’t be said to have shaped these cities’ politics).
In Washington, the front-runner to succeed Mayor Muriel Bowser, who isn’t seeking re-election, is Janeese Lewis George, a 37-year-old attorney and member of the city council, having twice won election from the city’s Fourth Ward. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Lewis George’s campaigns have benefited from the substantial precinct walking and phone-banking of the city’s (and the metro area’s) DSA local.
And in Los Angeles, the—I’d call her “socialist adjacent”—city council member from that city’s Fourth District, Nithya Raman, stunned L.A.’s activists and politicos by entering, at the last possible minute, the field of mayoral candidates now seeking the job of incumbent Karen Bass, who’s running for re-election. While Bass has won few stellar reviews for her tenure in office, she’s been a stalwart progressive throughout her long career in the legislature and Congress, and has invariably relied on L.A. progressives as her base. Most local progressives had already endorsed Bass, albeit in some cases tepidly, for re-election, including, just two weeks ago, Raman herself.
Shock, surprise, and mystery, then, attended Raman’s announcement of her candidacy, but the timing actually made perfect sense. Bass’s popularity has declined significantly in the wake of her response, and the city’s response, to the devastating Palisades Fire, and the ongoing problem of homelessness, despite the significant reduction in the number of homeless that can be credited to her policies. For that reason, the conventional wisdom was that she’d face a serious challenge from a candidate to her right. But in the past week, the one such challenger who’d already entered the race, Austin Beutner, withdrew due to a family tragedy; the billionaire developer Rick Caruso reaffirmed he wouldn’t run; and, just hours before the filing deadline, County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath announced she wasn’t running either. Had any of them filed (or in Beutner’s case, un-filed), a Raman candidacy would have split the progressive vote, raising the chances that the next mayor would have moved city government rightward. But when it became clear that Bass would not face a serious challenge from her right, Raman doubtless realized that her candidacy couldn’t be accused of opening the door for a candidate to Bass’s right to sweep into the mayor’s office.
Raman, like D.C.’s Lewis George, was first elected to the city council in 2020, and like Lewis George, she was endorsed by DSA and significantly benefited from their work on her behalf. Both those 2020 campaigns were the first in which those locals endorsed a victorious council candidate, though in the following years, L.A. DSA has elected three of its members to other L.A. council seats. To the best of my knowledge, Raman herself has not been a dues-paying DSA member, though her stances strengthening tenants’ rights and opposing increases to the police department’s budgets initially solidified her left-wing support.
Her record, though, has included some deviations from left-wing stances. She backed the city’s voter-enacted “mansion tax,” which has placed a 4 percent tax on the sale of properties worth more than $5 million, the proceeds going to fund new affordable housing and tenant assistance. But she now supports limiting the kind of property it applies to, arguing that applying it to apartment buildings might deter the construction of new apartments, though surveys show that’s not the case. In that sense, the acronym to which she’s hung her banner is more YIMBY than DSA.
On Tap This story first appeared in the On Tap newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
Most of Raman’s positions don’t differ very much from Bass’s. Despite that, her candidacy has what one L.A. pol has called “Mamdani vibes.” Like him, she’s a youngish (she’s 44; Bass is 72) Indian-born American who came to this country as a small child; like him, her initial campaign relied significantly on DSA support. Unlike Mamdani, however, she’s not running against an Eric Adams or Andrew Cuomo, but a fellow progressive.
Also, it’s not all that likely that she can assemble the kind of massive volunteer army that Mamdani was able to field. For starters, the L.A. local of DSA—should it decide to support her, which is by no means a given, considering that a dues-paying (albeit nearly universally unknown) DSA member, Rae Huang, is also running—has roughly 3,500 members, which, as a percentage of the city’s electorate, means it’s a good deal smaller than New York DSA was when Mamdani’s campaign began. Moreover, heroic though DSA’s efforts for Mamdani clearly were, even if we assume that every member volunteered in his campaign, his total legion of 104,000 volunteers was about nine times bigger than the local’s membership. Raman would have to become a social media prodigy virtually overnight to assemble anything comparable to Mamdani’s legions, and despite her obvious fluency in a range of media (and her ties to “the industry,” as Hollywood is called in L.A.), she’s not demonstrated the kind of social media chops that Mamdani obviously had.
But do I think the New York electorate is really to the left of L.A.’s or D.C.’s? I don’t. The limiting factor in D.C. is that the absence of genuine home rule and the presence of genuine national politics has long reduced residents’ involvement in local politics. With Trump trying to run the city, however, locals are being compelled to make an anti-Trump statement in D.C. politics, too, which I suspect will greatly help Lewis George’s prospects.
As to Los Angeles, the veteran L.A. journalist and scholar Jim Newton recently noted that Republicans now comprise roughly 15 percent of the city’s registered voters, which makes L.A. “as a percentage of the electorate, significantly more Democratic—and less Republican—than New York City.”
Given those metrics, Raman’s chances depend on her galvanizing progressive support. If I were running her campaign, I’d have her show up at the Wiltern Theatre one week from tomorrow and join Bernie Sanders in supporting the state ballot measure to establish a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the state’s billionaires. The reason that measure has drawn such vehement establishment opposition is that the establishment’s funders fear that such a tax will prove to be wildly popular. Raman needs to claim the progressive mantle loudly and forcefully if she’s to succeed, and this would be the clearest way to do that.
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