Outsider Nithya Raman pairs housing platform with tense DSA ties in Los Angeles

Raman’s three fellow democratic socialists on the council backed Bass for mayor

Nithya Raman arrives at the Los Angeles mayor’s office as a political outsider with close ties to progressive Hollywood and an often tense relationship with the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, according to The Guardian. Raman, an urban planner whose campaign centered on housing policy, homelessness and tenants’ rights, unseated Mayor Karen Bass on Thursday after a neck-and-neck race for leadership of the nation’s second-largest city. The victory means the two largest US cities, along with Washington DC, have now all elected democratic socialist mayors. Raman’s ascendance has drawn many comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but her political profile in her home town is very different from Mamdani’s.

Raman broke into politics in 2020, when she unseated an establishment Democrat on Los Angeles’s powerful city council — the first time a sitting council member had been ousted in 17 years. One Los Angeles political analyst called her win “a political earthquake.” Her campaign was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders, and Raman became the first DSA-endorsed candidate elected to office in Los Angeles. She credited the victory to on-the-ground organizing. “We knocked on 80,000 doors, which as far as we know, is a record. By the general election, we had 2,000 volunteers over all. We had 1,000 people just in our Slack,” she told The Guardian at the time.

Her ties run through progressive Hollywood. At the height of the #MeToo era, Raman served as entertainment director for Time’s Up, the organization founded by powerful women in Hollywood that created a legal defense fund for women in all professions to fight back against pervasive sexual assault and sexual harassment. She secured an endorsement from the Hollywood writers’ guild and support from younger celebrities and comedians including Mindy Kaling, Adam Scott and Jaboukie Young-White, while older Hollywood celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Samuel L Jackson endorsed Bass. Raman’s husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, is a longtime television writer. She has also drawn attention from one very prominent celebrity Republican, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom she had what The Guardian described as “a widely publicized private meeting.”

Housing sits at the center of Raman’s platform. She has said she joined DSA-LA in 2019 not because of an “ideological drive” but “because it was one of the only organizations that was meaningfully talking about housing affordability in the city.” Her mayoral platform calls for building more housing “at all income levels, everything from deed-restricted affordable housing to market-rate housing to social housing to homeless shelters.” Her goal is to triple annual housing construction in the city, an approach that earned her an endorsement from Yimby Action, an advocacy group that believes the best answer to housing affordability is simply building as much housing as possible.

Before she ran for office, Raman co-founded a still-active volunteer organization serving unhoused people in north-east Los Angeles. In 2017 she was one of five co-founders of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, a group that organizes local volunteers in north-east LA to do outreach and advocacy with their unhoused neighbors. The group, which now claims 800 volunteers, describes its mission as recognizing “unhoused individuals as fellow members of our community worthy of the same dignity, respect and representation afforded to any housed person.”

Raman won the mayor’s office despite a conspicuous lack of support from her city council colleagues — even the fellow democratic socialists on the council. During a mayoral debate, Bass brought up Raman’s lack of support from other council members and city leaders, telling her: “Your colleagues have a very difficult time working with you.” The three other democratic socialists elected to the Los Angeles City Council after Raman all endorsed Bass for mayor. “So the establishment doesn’t like Raman: so what?” Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote, arguing that Raman’s outsider status was precisely what voters frustrated with the city’s Democratic political establishment wanted. Raman was among the politicians revealed to have been targeted by establishment Democrats in the 2022 Los Angeles City Hall audio tape leak scandal, and she won reelection to the council in 2024 by a large margin.

At Raman’s election night party at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, “the political class of Los Angeles was absent,” Kurt Peterson, one of the leaders of hospitality union Unite Here Local 11, which endorsed Raman, told Politico. “Even though every city councilperson said they were standing with Karen Bass, not very many of the people they represent followed them to the polls,” he added. The Guardian’s report included photographs of Raman casting her vote in Silver Lake on Tuesday with her husband and two children.

DSA-LA’s mayoral endorsement came late and nearly fell apart. The chapter did not endorse Raman during the primary, when she entered the race at the last minute after previously endorsing Bass. After she beat out reality star Spencer Pratt for second place and advanced into the runoff against Bass, DSA-LA “enthusiastically” endorsed her while noting that “Councilmember Raman’s relationship with DSA-LA, and the broader Angeleno grassroots left, has had some ups and downs.” Among those downs, the group wrote in its voter guide, was “an inconsistent position on Palestine, which eventually resulted in conflict with the chapter over a 2024 endorsement from a pro-Israel Dem club” — though it added that it believed Raman had since “worked with us to improve on this issue.”

The endorsement survived a challenge at the national level: a DSA national political committee voted 14-13 in early November against rescinding the local chapter’s endorsement over Raman’s stance on Israel, the Los Angeles Times reported. Despite the endorsement drama, DSA-LA was quick to celebrate Raman’s victory, posting a photo captioned “YUP, that’s our mayor!!!” even before the Associated Press called the election in her favor.

Raman presents her willingness to vote against her allies on key policy issues as the heart of her political identity. She broke with the DSA in arguing that Los Angeles’s mansion tax, which brought in less revenue than supporters had hoped, needed reform — a position she called an “extremely unpopular sentiment.” One Hollywood comedian who supports Raman contrasted her with Mamdani by saying, “She’s not ideological. She’s a wonk,” Vanity Fair reported. In recent interviews, Raman has emphasized her political distance from the DSA. Vanity Fair wrote in an October profile that Raman favors the Scandinavian model of social democracy, signaling a belief in a regulated free-market economy rather than the more explicitly anti-capitalist vision embraced by many in the DSA.

Asked about comparisons to New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Raman said she was “grateful” but drew her own line. “Mamdani is one of the most popular politicians in America right now, and I’m very grateful to be compared to someone who is that skilled as a communicator and a leader. But I am different. I am myself,” she said.