Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, left, and mayoral candidate and City Council Member Nithya Raman debate at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association on Wednesday.
David Crane/Los Angeles Daily News
On Wednesday, the debate between Los Angeles’ mayoral candidates got ugly.
Incumbent Karen Bass, who amassed the most votes in the June primary, faced off against City Council Member Nithya Raman, whose campaign finished only a few percentage points behind. The event was their first match-up since June, and presented a perfect opportunity for each to make an affirmative pitch to voters.
The event, however, proved to be anything but.
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Instead, Bass and Raman embraced the slash-and-burn tactics that have typified the campaign so far: treating the election like a bitter personal feud rather than a conversation with voters.
Both candidates spent a substantial amount of time at Wednesday’s debate quarrelling over topics like homelessness, crime and whether the other has been responsive to their constituents.
At moments, it got uncomfortably intense.
During one exchange, Raman accused Bass of worsening the city’s financial woes by giving police officers raises while failing to prevent them from finding jobs in other cities. Bass countered that Raman opposed a proposal to hire 170 new officers in January.
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“I think that she’s irresponsible in what she talks about, because she talks out of both sides of her mouth,” Bass added.
When discussing unhoused people in Los Angeles, Raman again attacked Bass.
“Right now at City Hall, no one is in charge,” she said. “Mayor Bass only looks at Inside Safe. That’s the only program her office manages. We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in 8,000 beds not being managed. You deserve accountability.”
At one point, the candidates were so furiously disputing facts about the city that the debate moderator intervened.
“This is the issue: The audience doesn’t know who to believe, and they don’t have the confidence either of you have a definite plan,” the moderator said.
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Lately, Bass and Raman have spent so much time trying to discredit one another that the people they hope to govern seem to have become secondary characters in their own election.
One of the most recent flash points was Raman losing her leadership role on the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. In a video responding to the shakeup, Raman said, “I might be getting punished for running against Mayor Bass, but Angelenos are the ones who are paying the price for these political games.”
There has been no evidence that Bass’ office was involved in the reshuffling. Still, the removal of a mayoral opponent from a position of institutional power in the middle of a campaign is bad optics. But Raman’s response compounded the problem rather than solving it. Instead of using the attention to press her policy proposals on housing and homelessness at Wednesday’s debate, she spent her airtime relitigating the squabble. Both sides, in other words, ended up talking about each other rather than what they would do to improve life for voters.
“It does not speak to voters or their concerns,” Mike Bonin, a former Los Angeles City Council member who now serves as executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University Los Angeles, told me.
He added that it is fair to say a story about potential political payback is notable; these squabbles typically don’t ultimately matter to voters: “There are very few of them … driving their kids to school or while sitting at the kitchen table with their spouse trying to figure out how to pay the bills … caring about committees in City Hall.”
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The question of who deserves credit for modest drops in homelessness in Los Angeles in recent years has been a recurring point of contention. Raman has been touting a decline in unhoused people in her council district. But a spokesperson for Bass’ campaign told NBC Los Angeles that the mayor’s signature housing initiative, Inside Safe, was responsible for the reduction, arguing that “Nithya Raman is taking credit for the results of Inside Safe while campaigning against it.”
Voters deserve to know whose policies work. But they probably care less about who deserves to take a victory lap than about whether the city can keep making progress.
Even if voters are following these disputes closely, the back-and-forth over committee assignments and program credit will likely fade from memory by the time ballots are cast. What tends to stick with voters isn’t the blow-by-blow of a summer squabble. It’s the broader sense of what a candidate stands for and whether they seem capable of leading.
Former Los Angeles City Council Member Zev Yaroslavsky, who now directs the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, told me he doubts that recent controversies will move many votes, especially at such a politically fraught moment.
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“The stakes are very high for the city. It is in financial difficulty. We have a lot of social problems. We have the Olympic Games coming in two years,” Yaroslavsky said. “The two candidates need to focus on their vision going forward. Elections are about the future, and voters are thirsting to hear Bass and Raman articulate how they see the city’s future and how they’ll get us there.”
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Unless Bass and Raman start answering that larger question, the race will remain what it has been this summer: two campaigns talking past the people they’re asking to lead.
Justin Ray is a Los Angeles-based journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times and Columbia Journalism Review. He works for the independent, environmental news outlet Grist.