After several difficult years, Los Angeles is voting for mayor. Who is best suited to meet the moment?

The current mayor of Los Angeles and a longtime progressive lawmaker who has been tested by a series of crises.

A D.S.A.-backed City Council member focused on government process.

Times Opinion brought together a panel of local leaders and experts to help make sense of the race.

Who Should Run Los Angeles?

By New York Times Opinion

In the past decade, Los Angeles has faced a series of crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, prolonged Hollywood strikes, the significant expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Trump and a series of wildfires and industrial fires that disrupted the city in unexpected and challenging ways.

Since 2023 Mayor Karen Bass, a longtime progressive activist and legislator, has emphasized reducing homelessness and crime, but she has faced criticism for her performance in office, particularly regarding her response to the fires. Earlier this year, in a surprise move, Nithya Raman, a City Council member who was eventually backed by a local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, jumped into the race to challenge Ms. Bass, saying that the city needs new leadership.

Los Angeles is also facing several complex issues. Residents struggle with housing costs and the persistence of homelessness. The film industry faces economic challenges in the age of streaming and foreign production, and a city of aging infrastructure is squaring off against a surge of climate-related risks. It’s not easy to govern the city, either; power and governing authority is split among city, county and independent authorities in one of the most diverse communities in the world.

How have the fires and their aftermath reshaped city politics? How would a relative newcomer like Ms. Raman deal with some of these problems? Could Ms. Bass find a renewed mandate in a second term? Times Opinion assembled a panel of experts and local leaders with a range of viewpoints for a new installment of The Choice, aimed at guiding Los Angeles voters through the core issues in this election.

The Choice was prepared by Times Opinion editors, drawing on a round-table conversation with the panelists held on Sept. 30 and a survey.

We asked panelists to rate the leading candidates on how they would approach governing. Each chart reflects an average of their individual ratings.

We asked the panels to assess how strong a mayor each candidate could be for the next four years.

We asked the panelists if they considered each candidate to be sufficiently experienced in Los Angeles government affairs or as executives.

We asked the panelists to assess whether the candidates would be more front and center, like Daniel Lurie or Zohran Mamdani, or operate at a remove.

Ideology is more complex than just moderate or progressive, but we asked the panelists how they thought the candidates would lead.

Let’s just start here: What is the mood of Los Angeles right now? There have been several crises in the past five years. How have they shaped politics and how voters think about the city and government?

This is the most frustrated L.A. residents and L.A. voters have been in the 40 years that I have been observing and studying Los Angeles. At Loyola Marymount, we conduct one of the largest annual surveys in urban America on Los Angeles, more than 2,000 residents every single year. When we ask about trust in government, efficiency in government, does government care about you, can government solve problems — all have declined dramatically. Voters have no belief in the ability of local government to improve their lives.

In any mayor’s race, we ask the question: Is the city working for us? Are residents able to get basic services? And does the city believe in its mayor? And I think all of those questions are up for debate right now because a lot of community members, people that we talk to every day, are feeling that services are not being delivered.

Everybody is either frustrated, unhappy or angry. And as a consequence of that, they’re uninspired by leadership. A mayor’s race often can be a moment of civic inspiration and of civic imagination, right? In 2013, Eric Garcetti had a vision for Los Angeles that he was selling to voters: a forward-leaning city. In 2005, Antonio Villaraigosa had a very clear vision of Los Angeles. “Come dream with me” was sort of the slogan of his inauguration speech. And in this campaign, I’m not seeing anybody articulating a vision for Los Angeles and trying to sort of lead people to a common civic mission.

Los Angeles has undergone two major catastrophes in the last two years — first, the ones with the Palisades and the Eaton fires. And even though the Eaton fire was in Pasadena, it’s still part of our larger community. The second major crisis we’ve had most recently is the Lineage fire in Boyle Heights, where a cold storage warehouse burned and the decomposing food took a long time to clean up. That’s of great concern to the community right now because it kind of traffics a longstanding history of people being promised so much by these candidates.

When you’re talking about all these hot button topics like housing, public transportation or safety, the emergency crises around climate change and environmental inequity in Los Angeles, it’s not just what you promised, but what are the outcomes? What do you deliver on? People are fed up that we are always rallying around this progressive candidate that’s supposed to come in and save us from MAGA. And then they don’t deliver.

Let’s talk a little bit about the candidates themselves. What would be a strength for each as mayor? What would be a weakness or an unknown? Let’s start with Nithya Raman.

Right now, if she were to get elected today, her mandate is she’s not Bass. But that’s not the same thing as an agenda, and that’s something she should focus on building in the final weeks of the campaign. She can be very, very good at articulating a vision for Los Angeles when she wants to; she has a sense of the future, of what a multiethnic, complex city is supposed to be. And if she can articulate that, that will be a real strength. She is also very good at identifying and fixing the things that prevent government from working right.

Where she’s going to have a challenge is she is not a politician by nature. And one of the things that she has struggled with, and she has conceded this, is that she has not been a natural at sort of the relationship building that’s important.

I think if Raman wins, it’s notable that she’s not endorsed by her colleagues on the City Council. If you’re going to advance anything big as a mayor, you have to have a coalition on the City Council. And if you’re a council member that wants to advance anything big, you have to work with the mayor. So how does she reset relationships should she win, not just with the council, but also with labor and with the business community, in order to make some big moves and shift this mood?

I feel like she’s still learning how to be a politician. She has learned how to deliver her message better. I definitely do think that she will bring an outsider’s perspective. We haven’t really seen that in the city leadership. Most of the mayors that we’ve had have all had those traditional coalitions and things behind them, though she has very interesting people that are behind her, including the pro-transit community and environmentalists. We’re watching, I think, the plane being built in real time.

She understands policy and systems at a very minute level. And I think that was the strength of hers going into this race. I would say the biggest question, I think, from my perspective as a civil-rights leader in South L.A., is: Can we trust you on issues around race and equity in our community? I’ve seen her doing more work with the immigrant and primarily Latino community. But what about the other, more solidly Black communities that have been a part of this coalition bloc?

At City Hall in a Raman administration, you would likely see environmentalists having more sway and developers having more sway, which would be interesting because they don’t always get along on how we actually build things in the city.

How about Karen Bass? What would be a strength for her in a second term? What would be a weakness or an unknown?

Bass has a truly cross-sector coalition. She has the business community behind her. She has older white liberals behind her.........

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