At the DSA party, people cheered victories elsewhere in the country by socialists and establishment Democrats alike, but they booed when Bass appeared on television, and laughed when a Fox News commentator suggested the economy was doing well. At one point, organizers put on Hasan Piker’s livestream, and at another they played an AI-generated video showing Raman dancing while wearing a traditional Russian fur hat with ear flaps and a red star. When local TV station KTLA suggested Raman would likely win and Mayor Bass’s face appeared on screen, someone shouted, “Woah get fucked Karen.” It kind of encapsulated the strongest force animating the DSA members I talked to in this mayoral race: their dislike for Mayor Bass. They even called her the c-word on stage: “conservative.”
The DSA and Raman have had something of an on-again, off-again relationship. The organization helped propel her to an upset City Council victory in 2020, only to censure her over disagreements about Israel, housing policy, and the city’s mansion tax. The local DSA chapter endorsed her candidacy late in the campaign but the national organization almost stripped it from her at the 11th hour. The national DSA voted last week to preserve its Los Angeles chapter’s endorsement of Raman by a single vote, after a dispute over her refusal to embrace the movement to boycott Israel.
“I think people here have varying levels of begrudgingness about supporting Raman but I think everyone here voted for her,” said one DSA-LA member at the party who worked on the chapter’s video team and declined to give her name.
Still, the DSA members at the party seemed to think this mayoral race offered another encouraging sign for their organization, even if Raman isn’t quite New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She was attacked consistently by her opponents—mainly Spencer Pratt—as a “dangerous” extremist but with the help of the DSA—they said members knocked on more than 110,000 doors this election cycle—she might be the first LA mayoral candidate to defeat an incumbent in over 20 years.
