Nithya Raman, Los Angeles' mayor-elect. Photo courtesy of the Office of Councilmember Nithya Raman.
Immigrant Trailblazers is a series profiling immigrants who have left a lasting mark on the United States.
On election night, Nithya Raman’s supporters gathered on the plaza outside the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park and waited for numbers that would not settle. The final polls had shown a dead heat, and the first returns of the night agreed. When the crowd finally went home, the next mayor of Los Angeles still had no name.
Raman had been here before. Five months earlier, on the night of the June primary, she had trailed a reality-television star, Spencer Pratt, by more than eight points for the second runoff spot. Then the mail ballots came in, count after count, and the gap narrowed. Seven days after the polls closed, she passed him.
On Thursday, two days after the November vote, it happened again, only bigger. With Raman ahead 52.1 percent to 47.9 and leading by nearly 35,000 votes, Mayor Karen Bass called to concede. The Kerala-born urban planner, who arrived in Louisiana as a six-year-old and did not become a U.S. citizen until she was 22, had unseated the sitting mayor of America’s second-largest city. She is set to be its first Indian American mayor.
How did she get here? Her career has a habit of starting behind and finishing first. It also has a habit of leaving behind people who once called her an ally.
A girl who didn’t see herself
Raman was born in July 1981 into a Tamil family in the southern Indian state of Kerala. When she was six, her family moved to Louisiana, and later to the Boston area. Her campaign has described a childhood in places where few people looked like her. Los Angeles, it says, was the first city that felt like home.
The pull back toward India never fully went away. At Harvard, where she graduated in 2003, she wrote her senior honors thesis on how voters choose political parties in Tamil Nadu, the state of her family’s roots. She then earned a master’s degree in urban planning at MIT. After that, she did something unusual for an immigrant success story: she went back. In Chennai, she founded Transparent Chennai, a research group that gathered data on sanitation and other basic services the city was failing to provide.
That work trained her eye on a specific kind of problem: the unglamorous systems, such as toilets, drains and sidewalks, that decide whether a city works for its poorest residents. It is the lens she would bring to Los Angeles.
The outsider who knocked on 83,000 doors
Raman moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and took a job in the office of the city administrative officer, a technocrat inside the machine. Within a few years she was working on homelessness from the outside. In 2017 she co-founded SELAH, a neighborhood coalition in Silver Lake doing outreach to unhoused neighbors. She also served as executive director of Time’s Up Entertainment, the advocacy group born of the #MeToo movement.
In 2019 she challenged City Councilmember David Ryu, an incumbent in the 4th District. Few gave her much chance. A volunteer army, many of them from the Democratic Socialists of America and the grassroots group Ground Game LA, knocked on more than 83,000 doors. The police union spent more than $200,000 to help Ryu. Raman finished second in the March primary and won the November 2020 runoff with nearly 53 percent. It was the first time in 17 years that a challenger had ousted a sitting Los Angeles councilmember, and the Los Angeles Times called it a “political earthquake.”
The establishment pushed back. Six months into her term, she was served with a recall notice; the effort collapsed when it failed to gather enough signatures. In 2022, a leaked recording captured three fellow councilmembers and a labor leader discussing how to use redistricting to carve up her district and weaken her politically. Raman responded by proposing that the city hand redistricting to an independent commission. A year later, Los Angeles police arrested her at a hotel workers’ protest after she refused to leave.
Then she started winning inside the chamber. In 2025 the council passed her motion capping annual rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments, which house nearly half the city’s residents, at 4 percent. It was the first time the city’s rent stabilization law had been strengthened in four decades.
The socialist who wants to build
If Raman’s story were only about a left-wing insurgent, it would be simpler to tell. It isn’t.
She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and she has also become one of the city’s loudest voices for building more housing, a cause often associated with developers. In 2024 she proposed allowing mid-sized apartment buildings near transit stations in some neighborhoods zoned only for single-family homes; the council rejected it, 10 to 5. In 2025 she voted against a council resolution opposing a state bill that overrides local zoning to allow denser housing near transit. And in early 2026 she moved to reform Measure ULA, the city’s “mansion tax.” She had supported the tax in 2022, but she now argued it had become a major obstacle to new construction. Some housing advocates on the left accused her of handing developers a break.
Her relationship with her own movement has been just as complicated. In 2024, after she accepted an endorsement from Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles, the local DSA chapter formally censured her but kept its endorsement. Two years later, that same pro-Israel group backed Bass. At a September 2026 forum, Raman said she agreed that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians, a characterization Bass rejected.
To her supporters, all this shows a pragmatist who follows the evidence. To her critics, it shows a politician whose positions are hard to pin down.
The ally who became the challenger
The most dramatic turn came on February 7, 2026. Just weeks after endorsing Bass for re-election, and only hours before the filing deadline, Raman announced that she would run against her. Bass had helped Raman win re-election in 2024. The Los Angeles Times reported that some in the mayor’s camp called the move a betrayal. Bass said she was surprised but declined to use the word. It also emerged that the mayor had quietly removed Raman from the regional air quality board a month earlier.
Raman ran on the basics: more housing, working city services and a revived film industry. She called Bass’s signature homelessness program, Inside Safe, fiscally unsustainable. The Bass campaign hit back, faulting her for recusing herself from votes on film-industry reforms. Raman said she stepped aside to avoid a conflict of interest, since her husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, is a television writer. A week before the election, the billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who lost to Bass in 2022, endorsed his former rival. He said his worry about Raman was less her ideology than her competence. The final UC Berkeley poll showed the race tied at 40 percent each, with many voters still undecided.
Bass’s concession on Thursday was gracious and pointed. She reminded the city that four years ago it had elected her as “the first Black woman mayor in the history of Los Angeles,” and she pledged a smooth transition.
Thirty thousand dark streetlights
Raman’s closing argument did not dwell on ideology. In her final days on the trail, she said the city was worse off than it had been four years earlier, and she ticked off the evidence: broken sidewalks, homelessness rising under the mayor’s flagship program, and 30,000 streetlights that no longer come on.
It was a planner’s complaint, the same kind of problem she once catalogued in the streets of Chennai. Now it is hers to fix, in a city preparing to host the 2028 Olympics. She joins New York’s Zohran Mamdani as one of two democratic socialists leading the country’s two largest cities, both with roots in India.
At one of her last rallies, she leaned into the crowd with a simple question: “Do you love Los Angeles?”
Four decades ago, a six-year-old girl from Kerala landed in Louisiana and looked for faces like her own. This week, the city she chose answered her question. The next test is simpler and harder: whether, on her watch, the lights come back on.
Sources
- ABC7 Los Angeles: Nithya Raman will be next mayor of Los Angeles; Karen Bass concedes
- CBS Los Angeles: Nithya Raman ousts incumbent Karen Bass
- NBC News: Democratic socialist Nithya Raman defeats Karen Bass
- Deadline: Nithya Raman Wins L.A.
- The Washington Post: Nithya Raman unseats Karen Bass
- Wikipedia: Nithya Raman
About the Author
