🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 10: New York's Zohran is Big in LA

The group that was once the closest ally to Los Angeles’s anti-Olympics coalition, NOlympics LA, appears to have abandoned the idea that the Games could be cancelled.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter was where NOlympics LA got its start. It was formed in 2017, in DSA-LA’s Housing & Homelessness Committee. 

But DSA-LA revealed this weekend, via a social media post, that they were moving ahead with its endorsement of the Fair Games campaign, which accepts that the Games will happen. That campaign makes demands on Olympics organizers and corporations to provide union jobs, fund housing, prohibit short-term rentals and ensure that immigrants are safe and treated with dignity. 

Local activists who are supportive of NOlympics LA reacted strongly against the news, pointing to the heightened risks of hosting the Olympics, including that it swings open the front gates of the Los Angeles region to federal law enforcement officials, even as the Trump Administration carries out raids on Los Angeles residents. It is being seen as a blow to anti-Olympics organizing efforts, with the People’s City Council calling the Fair Games endorsement by DSA-LA a “slap in the face to so many organizers.”

On Wednesday, NOlympics LA issued a statement and an essay criticizing the effort to try to reform the Olympic Games, saying that the effects of the games aren’t temporary, but rather “forever,” and leaves a long legacy that will also have implications for other places that might host the Games or other ‘mega-events.’

“Efforts to ‘make the best’ of the Olympics — like the Fair Games campaign’s call for an ‘Olympic Wage’ — will be used to demand more mega-events,” they wrote. “But economic benefits for a small group of union workers are not worth the violent policing of marginalized non-union workers, the decimation of city budgets, and the deepening of this city’s orientation towards tourist desires over residents’ needs.”

“Pretending that a ‘no harm’ version of the Olympics is possible is not only extremely naive,” they wrote, “it’s dangerous for what happens to us after 2028.”

DSA-LA appeared to have initially endorsed the Fair Games demands back in August, when the campaign was first announced. Shortly after the unveiling, some members of DSA-LA appeared to have worked to revoke the endorsement. They were unsuccessful. DSA-LA is no longer part of the NOlympics LA coalition, which operates “autonomously,” although some local chapters are still listed as coalition members. 

Many of Los Angeles’s progressive politicians were feeling galvanized last Tuesday as they watched New Yorkers elect Zohran Mamdani to be their next mayor. The results from a similarly high-profile big city across the country seemed to show that Democratic Party politicians could run unapologetically on socialist-inspired ideas prioritizing the interests of tenants and the poor – and still win. Some hoped that could also happen in Los Angeles.

But when he cast his own ballot last Tuesday, Mamdani didn’t actually vote for himself under the Democratic Party banner, which he was running under. He voted instead for Zohran Mamdani, the Working Families Party candidate.

The Working Families Party has been around in New York for years, and former mayor Bill de Blasio was active in it during its early days. Mamdani could raise that group’s profile a bit more, especially as many around the country have been watching his rise. But some who may hear about the Working Families Party outside of New York may be scratching their head a bit as to how this political group works.

The LA Reporter takes readers inside the Working Family Parties endorsement interviews, held four days after Tuesday’s election. Read the full story here.

Zohran Mamdani’s election has been especially meaningful for Muslims and people from the South Asian community, who are integral parts of their neighborhoods but do not yet see themselves in politics. That was noted by Faizah Malik, a candidate for the 11th City Council District on Los Angeles’s westside, challenging incumbent Traci Park.

In an interview with The LA Reporter, Malik, who is Muslim with a South Asian background, contrasted the richness of life as a Muslim in Los Angeles with how invisible they are in local politics. She said that in Los Angeles city government, there has rarely, if ever, been a Muslim elected official. She would be the first, if elected, Malik said.

“There are over 500,000 Muslims in Southern California,” she said. “They just opened up a new mosque in Santa Monica. And my grandfather founded a mosque in Inglewood in the ‘70s, and he was a big community leader in the Muslim community. And as a Muslim person in Southern California growing up, it was very much a weekend identity for me.”

Malik’s grandfather, Adam Bholat, founded a mosque in Inglewood that was later frequented by Lakers basketball players because it was down the street from The Forum, where the team used to play.

“There are so many Indian immigrants that live in Palms, Culver City, Inglewood, Hawthorne,” she said. “If you look at a lot of the best Indian Pakistani restaurants lists, a lot of them will be in Inglewood and Hawthorne, and that's because families like mine immigrated to this area, and we opened up a bunch of grocery stores and restaurants, and that's now part of the fabric of LA.”

It was not his widely lauded victory speech, but rather a speech Mamdani made about Islamophobia during his campaign, that moved Malik the most, she said. In that speech, Mamdani talked about how racism against Muslims was uniquely tolerated, including in political conversations, with Islamophobic jokes being casually made about him without being quickly called out as racist. Mamdani said he had believed that if he glossed over the fact that he was Muslim and focused on universality and the issues that mattered to people, this would be enough. But he was proven wrong. “No amount of redirection is ever enough,” he said.

This speech speaks to many Muslims such as herself, and was not something she got to see often, if ever, Malik said. “Nobody ever vocalized the sense of otherness growing up,” she said. “It was deeply meaningful.”

She said that there seems to be more Muslims now running for office, and that could be because of the political climate. “It’s not like we had one Zoom call where we decided we were all going to run,” she said. “I think all of us were deeply impacted by what is happening in Palestine, number one, and a lot of us are deeply impacted by our experience as Muslims growing up in America, in this moment with Trump in office and deciding that we we are not going to actually stand in the shadows anymore, and that we should step up, and we have the skills.”

“People say that representation is not everything. I agree,” Malik added. “We should not just accept representatives just because they are brown. That does not, has not led us to the policies we need.”

But with Mamdani elected, “finally, in New York, he has the politics and the representation that is meaningful,” Malik said. “And that's why I think, also … as someone who's born and raised here, as a daughter of immigrants, as a Muslim, as a housing advocate, that's why I decided to run. I was like, ‘Wait a second. I have plenty of experience to do that job.’ And, we have to try. Because if we don't try, then we won't win.”

There were sooo many stories breaking down the New York mayoral race. Here are a couple The LA Reporter selected that might interest readers of this newsletter.

They include this deep dive in Labor Notes by Luis Feliz Leon, who spoke to several union members, some of whom said they underestimated Mamdani at first, and others who pointed to how the campaign reminded them of the Democratic Party in the 1960s, when there were “precinct captains and Democratic committee people in every neighborhood, in every building,” according to retired AFSCME member Steve Beck. He said now people who want to volunteer aren’t able to knock on the Party offices’ doors and get quickly signed up. These days, Beck said, “it’s nothing but chasing money. If you donate a little bit to a campaign, you get these endless emails.”

Another one worth reading is a congratulatory message penned by comedian W. Kamau Bell to Zohran Mamdani. It is a message that’s chased with the cautionary tale of Bill de Blasio, who was also a progressive Democrat who became New York’s mayor. Bell details how, after NYPD officers killed Eric Garner, de Blasio shared his own experience of being the father of a Black son and having to teach him to be careful when encountering police officers. That drew the wrath of NYPD officers and their union, and things went downhill from there. Bell offered his “deepest sympathies” to Mamdani and warned that “too bad being the mayor of New York sucks,” a situation that likely applies to the mayor’s job in other cities. “I sincerely hope you are properly prepared to take on the challenges of this job,” Bell writes. “And if your employees turn their back on you, I hope you go all Queens on them.”

When Gina Fields threw on some sweats to go vote at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall in the Proposition 50 special election last Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, she thought she'd be done in 15 minutes. 

But she ended up waiting in line for more than an hour before she made it to the polling booth. "I like to meet my neighbors and chat with them about the politics of the world,” she said. “I didn’t expect to be there for an hour and a half.” 

She estimated that the line had about 200 people in it, and it stretched through the mall, when she was there at around 5 p.m. By the time she’d left, she estimated the line had grown, with people getting out of work, to 250 people waiting. 

They were all out to vote on a single measure, Proposition 50, which temporarily changes Congressional district lines to try to flip several seats to the Democrats, in response to gerrymandering efforts elsewhere that would increase the number of Republicans. (Proposition 50 has since passed, and CalMatters has a story on what could happen next. Here are the results in Los Angeles County, and statewide.)

Fields shared a video with The LA Reporter, and on her Instagram account, that gives a sense of how many people had shown up for the special election at just that one polling location. “This is a very long line for voting,” she says in the video. “It keeps going, and it’s still going … this is the line, doubling back on itself, oh my. It’s a minute and a half of me filming, and we’re still going, it never ends. It just keeps going, and going, and going, and going.” 

“I’m happy to see the turnout, but …. Now I don’t want to say it, this is ridiculous, and we need a better system,” Fields also says in the video. “And yeah, we can drop them [the ballots] off, and probably will next time, because I can’t wait another hour.”

Fields is on her neighborhood council, Empowerment Congress West Area, which she used to also chair. She recalls that at one time there had been five polling sites within a half-mile radius of where she lived. Then it became just three. At last Tuesday’s election, she said there was just one in her area. Her usual polling location is just a block away from her, but that wasn’t available this time.

Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the LA County Registrar-Recorder's Office, told The LA Reporter that there are fewer sites than in the last election cycle, but more than the minimum required. He said this was because of the short turnaround from when the election was called to when it was held.

“This election was called approximately 75 days before election day,” he wrote in an emailed response. “And due to the unscheduled and special nature, there are fewer vote centers countywide. It's important to note that the 251 vote centers we have exceed the minimum requirement of 197 locations. In scheduled consolidated elections like last year's cycle, we had 640 vote centers.”

The commission’s Government Structure Committee will meet in Woodland Hills at Pierce College today, Nov. 12, 2025 at 2 p.m. The panel should be deliberating on the variety of reform ideas that have come before them, which include expanding the number of City Council members so they represent smaller districts with fewer residents. Right now, each of the 15 council members have districts with more than a quarter million people, compared to other cities which range from 70,000 to over 100,000. 

Other ideas include creating a “tenant advocate” to represent the interests of tenants, changing the rules around commissions to allow non-citizens and people who aren’t registered voters to participate, making at least part of the elected City Attorney’s position an appointed one (in response to some City Council members raising concerns that the advice they get from an elected attorney could be politicized), switching LA’s voting process to a ranked (similar to what was used in New York’s mayoral primary) or star rating system, and some measures to strengthen the City Controller’s powers to hold other elected officials accountable. The staff report providing an overview of these and other ideas can be found here.

The Government Structure Committee is expected to discuss these proposals today, and they’ll have an opportunity to request additional information. They are expecting to meet again on Dec. 16 to continue deliberating on the proposals. The full commission on Jan. 7th would also be able to take up this committee’s recommendations, and then later that month on Jan. 22, the Government Structure Committee will meet again to make final deliberations before sending recommendations to the full commission on Feb. 7th. The Charter Reform Commission is expected to send recommendations to the LA City Council by February and early March.

The agenda is here, and additional reports are here. Public comment will be taken from people who attend in person, although written comment can also be submitted. The address for the meeting is 6201 Winnetka Ave, Woodland Hills, CA 91367. The campus map can be viewed here (Parking is $3). The meeting can be viewed remotely with this Zoom link.

Journalist Joey Scott reports on the fireworks at City Hall over the news that the LAPD was overspending once again, with some members of the Budget and Finance Committee responding in frustration. The city, facing a fiscal crisis, is trying to cut back on its spending and has limited hiring of officers. But instead of keeping hiring to 240 officers, the department is trying to hire 410 officers. And this all comes as we come off another episode of LAPD officers seen hitting or shooting at Angelenos during the Dodgers celebrations

Scott also took us along, in a TikTok video he posted last week, as he picked up the detritus from LAPD unleashing less-than-lethal weapons during the recent informal celebrations of the Dodgers winning the World Series. He says in the video that he is doing this because he loves his neighborhood and Los Angeles, and he hates “how the police act in these moments, hurting people, and then don’t have the manners to pick up after themselves.”

LA Taco journalist Lexis-Oliver Ray details some of the brutality Los Angeles residents experienced when LAPD responded to the celebrations, reporting that one man had to get surgery on his finger . His girlfriend told Ray that he was trying to leave the area but instead “they got him in the leg and shot the top of his finger off.”

Journalist, writer and local government watchdog Eric Preven has died. Preven, long a fixture at Los Angeles city and county meetings, worked to make local government more transparent. He was a plaintiff in an ACLU lawsuit that forced the city to disclose legal bills paid to outside law firms, and ensured public comment rights during special meetings through a Brown Act case he won against the city, according to this remembrance by Citywatch LA, where Preven was a regular contributor. 

He was considered a “gadfly” to local officials, who respected him despite the fact that he often took them to task. He is remembered in an LA Times story by Rebecca Ellis in which LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger says, “you may not agree with him, but it wasn’t just like [he was] shooting from the hip. He would do his research. He would let the facts speak for themselves.”

Last week, City Controller Kenneth Mejia posted a video on his re-election campaign account in which he shared that not only is he not seeking the Democratic Party’s endorsement, he’d left the Democratic Party in January 2024. Such an endorsement is often a routine step taken by many candidates for office in Los Angeles, including for nonpartisan offices in LA city government.

He made that decision, Mejia said, because he “could no longer be part of a party that pays for bombs to be dropped overseas, while people here in America and LA are struggling to put food on the table and a roof over their head.” The video included a screenshot of an Associated Press article with the headline, “US has given at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since war in Gaza began, report says.”

Mejia is being challenged by a couple of people, including Isadore Hall, who the LA Times described as a “veteran politician,” and the senior vice president of Hackman Capital Partners, Zach Sokoloff.  Hall’s website bills his campaign as aiming to “bring pragmatic, common sense leadership back to City Hall,” and it boasts and endorsement from City Council member Bob Blumenfield.

Mejia, who is now registered with the Green Party, according to his campaign representative Jane Nguyen, said in his Working Families Party endorsement interview on Saturday that it was the first endorsement he was seeking in this campaign. Mejia ran for Congress twice as a Green Party candidate, in 2016 and 2018, in the 34th District.

The Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce is hosting a debate for the Los Angeles City Council 1st District election on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025, at 6:30 pm at Sacred Heart High School Gymnasium, located at 2111 Griffin Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90031. Seven people are challenging incumbent council member Eunisses Hernandez to represent the East Side district. There will also be a “mobility debate” on Dec. 4, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., involving candidates from this district, that’s organized by Streets for All.

Rae Huang, a pastor and progressive community organizer who filed fundraising paperwork in late October, will be officially launching her mayoral campaign on Sunday, Nov. 16. Austin Beutner, another mayoral candidate, spoke to veteran journalist Mariel Garza recently in an hour-long interview for the Golden State, a news outlet started by Garza and Paul Thornton, both former LA Times editorial writers.

Dylan Kendall, a candidate in the Los Angeles City Council 13th District race, posted on social media about green composting bins popping up en masse in Los Angeles neighborhoods. She says that she tried to get LA Sanitation to pick up any extra bins, but she didn’t get a response. “I’m starting to think these bins will outlast us all. Who knows,” Kendall says. Meanwhile, Torched.LA’s Alissa Walker is seeking out photos of and stories about what she has dubbed the Great Green Bin Apocalypse of 2025, which has generated a lively conversation and plenty of footage of this “crisis” on Bluesky. This is happening as LA Sanitation is about to see its director step down. The LA Times’s David Zahniser reported that its General Manager Barbara Romero is leaving at the end of the year.

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