🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 17: DSA-LA won't be jumping into the LA mayor's race before June

Los Angeles may eventually get a mayoral candidate who’s backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, but it won’t be happening ahead of the June primary election.

On Saturday, an attempt to re-open the socialist organization’s endorsement process in the mayor’s race, ahead of the primary election, failed. It would have been an opportunity for either City Council member Nithya Raman or housing advocate Rae Huang, both members of DSA’s Los Angeles chapter, to garner the endorsement and canvassing power of their fellow members in DSA-LA, which has helped candidates unseat four Los Angeles City Council members in the last six years.

Meanwhile, DSA recently won some nationwide attention after voters last fall chose Zohran Mamdani, the candidate that New York’s chapter had endorsed in the mayor’s race, upsetting Democratic establishment expectations and prompting hopes of similar gains for the left here in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Los Angeles’s democratic socialist candidates Raman and Huang are among 13 seeking to oust Mayor Karen Bass, who is running for re-election. A motion to take up two petitions, one to endorse Raman and the other to endorse Huang, failed to get a 2/3 majority vote from a room of nearly 500 members who met Saturday for their general meeting held at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. Those who supported re-opening the endorsement process ultimately garnered 266 votes to the 222 against. 

Bass’s name elicited loud boos during Saturday’s meeting. The widespread disdain for the longtime Democrat, whose lengthy political career includes serving in the California legislature and in Congress, was reflected by speakers who said it was a motivating factor in their support for getting into the ring for Raman or Huang in the primary. 

During the debate, a member from DSA-LA’s Westside branch who spoke on behalf of the petition to endorse Raman, argued in favor of backing someone they could then send into office, in the process unseating Bass. He said the mayor and “the Democratic establishment in this city have failed to enact systemic changes that working people need.” 

Another member from the Eastside San Gabriel Valley branch, who is part of Huang’s campaign and supports that candidate’s endorsement, pointed to the mayor’s vast powers in the city — which include setting the budget, appointing and removing department heads, and issuing executive directives — as a reason for DSA-LA to back a candidate. She said that it would be “short-sighted to deny members the opportunity to weigh in during such an urgent moment for our city and country.”

While DSA-LA has been prominent in propelling progressives into office over the past three election cycles, this is the first one in which the organization is tackling a citywide race. For the 2026 election, members endorsed in the City Attorney’s race, in which deputy attorney general Marissa Roy is seeking to unseat incumbent Hydee Feldstein Soto, who is running for re-election.

Some who opposed endorsing argued there was not enough capacity among their members to add another race, with just a couple of months before the June primary. The chapter is already devoting their members’ time and energy into the six races where they have made endorsements. The slate of endorsements had been set before Raman entered the race, when many have said was a pivotal shift in the political dynamics mayor’s race, because it offered a viable path oust Bass.

But some who argued against endorsing said that the candidates being put forward may not be worth potentially drawing resources away from other campaigns, especially when it came to one of the candidates, Raman, who some said failed to stay true to their organization’s values since they first endorsed and carried her into office in 2020. 

Many expressed concern that the likelihood of Raman getting endorsed was high, because she is seen as a more traditionally viable candidate than Huang, whose platform is seen as more closely mirroring the positions of DSA-LA. Huang who has not run for political office before and only recently joined DSA-LA, a political organization that she has been closely aligned with in her community organizing work. She has as key members of her campaign, DSA-LA members who are involved in writing her policy platforms.

Both Raman and Huang were present during the meeting, with Huang staying until the end. Hugo Soto-Martinez, who has endorsed Karen Bass, attended an earlier part of the meeting.

In her reaction after the vote, Huang told The LA Reporter that she was “disappointed” by the outcome. She countered concerns raised about DSA-LA members’ capacity to support an additional candidate, pointing to the opportunities presented to DSA-LA when backing a candidate in a high-profile mayor’s race. 

And she addressed concerns about her own viability, saying that an earlier poll that showed her at 3 percent (a figure referenced several times by those who feared DSA-LA would opt for an endorsement of Huang’s opponent, Raman) had surveyed a very small number of people who vote regularly.

“I’ve been having conversations on the ground … more people are going to turn out to vote,” Huang said. “New voters, voters that have never come out before, are going to be voting in this election, and it is an opportunity.”

Meanwhile, newer polling results show that Huang leads among the youngest set of voters at 19%, with Bass and Raman each getting 18% of those voters, aged 18 to 29. Huang’s overall percentage moved up to 8% in the new poll released Sunday. This poll was sponsored by The LA Times and conducted by UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

Huang also said she has been seeking donations in small amounts, in an effort to qualify for additional funding through Los Angeles city’s campaign matching funds program, in order to raise her campaign’s visibility among voters. That program is meant to encourage candidates to raise money from less wealthy donors, by multiplying those smaller donations by six times. Raman is doing the same, as are many other candidate in LA city elections who are trying to get their name and platforms out to more voters in the next several weeks.

A mayoral candidate in the primary must receive 50% plus one vote in the race to win the seat outright, avoiding a runoff during the November general election between the top two vote-getters.

DSA-LA is not the only progressive group to sit out endorsements in the mayor’s race. Working Families Party did not endorse either Bass or Huang after interviewing them in January. Those endorsement interviews were done before Raman entered the race in the surprise turn of events in February.

First mayoral debate happening today: There’s an opportunity tonight to get a better sense of how Nithya Raman, Adam Miller and Rae Huang think about housing, transportation and other major issues affecting the city at the first mayoral candidate forum hosted by Streets for All and Housing Action Coalition. The debate begins at 5:30 p.m. and is taking place LA Center Studios’s Beaudry Theatre, 451 S. Beaudry Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90017. There is a free live-stream, and a ticket to attend in-person may pop up.

The heat was on last week, but a mutual aid group is working on cooling it down: Carla Orendorff, with mutual aid group Aetna Street Solidarity, says they are “planning to open a climate resiliency hub,” also known as a cooling center by this summer in Van Nuys. This had been in the works before a hit wave hit Los Angeles unusually early, last week. Researchers who had also released a study on the public health effects of on unhoused Angelenos told The LA Reporter that they are working with the mutual aid group to make the Van Nuys cooling center a reality, and recently put in a grant for it. You can also read more about the heat wave study in the previous issue of The LA Reporter.

Money matters at LA City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee: LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s revenue forecast was released earlier this month and will be taken up at the City Council’s Budget Committee today at 12:30 p.m. Things are looking a bit better, with the report saying that even with serious challenges like the wildfires and “aggressive federal immigration enforcement” revenues are projected to come in a bit below or at budget. Their office estimates that in this fiscal year revenue will be around $25 million short of the adopted budget, driven by revenue from the hotel tax (known as the transient occupancy taxes, or TOT), “special parking revenue transfers, grant receipts, and property tax.”

Also on the committee’s agenda today is a report looking at a proposal to move LA city over to a two-year budget planning cycle. Such a timeline is meant to give public officials a little more breathing room to decide how to allocate city funding — including spending a year accessing how well funded programs did. This proposal will also be taken up Tuesday, by the Charter Reform Commission. It would require making a charter amendment to change the budgeting cycle.

There are also several ongoing lawsuits on the agenda, including ones related to a collision between a “refuse collection truck and civilian vehicle” in Sunland, the LAPD bomb squad’s June 30, 2021 detonation of explosives on East 27th Street, and a lawsuit by the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights related to AB 630, a state bill sponsored by Mayor Karen Bass and authored by Mark Gonzalez, to make it easier for the city to remove RV encampments.

The Budget and Finance Committee’s agenda can be found here, and audio of the meeting is available here.

Dorothy Vena Johnson Black History Collection relocated to Baldwin Hills Branch Library: The Baldwin Hills Branch Library is the new home of more 2,000 books, newspaper and magazine clippings and other ephemera from the Los Angeles Public Library’s collection focused on Black history. The specific collection is named after African American poet Dorothy Vena Johnson, an African American librarian, and was started by the library’s first African American library, Miriam Matthews, in the 1930s. Johnson is also a co-founder of the League of Allied Arts, which supports Black women in the arts, including ballerina Misty Copeland.

The effort to move the collection from Vernon Branch Library, located in the Central-Alameda neighborhood, over to the Baldwin Hills Branch Library began about a year ago, and it was spearheaded by Library Commissioner Valerie Lynne Shaw.

“The demographics at Vernon Central has changed and I thought it would be a good idea to bring it to Baldwin Hills where the demographic is primarily African American,” Shaw said in an interview Saturday with The LA Reporter.

Sweeps blotter: LA Sanitation appears to have carried out a sweep during the heat wave, in Skid Row, according to Adam Smith, an organizer with LA Community Action Network, kept an eye on an Operation Healthy Streets crew last week as they worked. Smith says that in a “particularly brutal sweep today in 97 degree weather” the city’s sanitation workers and LAPD “threw out everything a 79-year-old Black man with a walker owned” and they “wouldn’t let him take anything despite telling them they have 15 minutes to move everything.”

Meanwhile, Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid updated The LA Reporter on a response that Council District 5 staffer provided to them about interim housing being offer to someone displaced by a particularly large CARE+ sweep on March 11 on the Westside. They had asked the office to offer housing to someone someone who lost his belongings during the sweep. They had initially been told that no offer was made. They said the council staffer did send back an email to them on the same day, explaining that they had offered interim shelter out of the area. It turns out the staffer responded that the “bed was available is located in south central LA. PEH was not open to move to that area. Unfortunately, we did not have placement available in the immediate area.” The staffer said they’d reach out to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to “engage” the person displaced by the sweep.

Quickly moving on from Chavez: KNX’s Craig Fiegener reported that a bust of Cesar Chavez was removed from the Los Angeles mayor’s office. Next Monday, March 30, what has been known as Cesar Chavez Day will be referred to as Farm Workers Day, after Mayor Karen Bass signed a proclamation to rename that holiday — set for the last Monday of March — in the city of Los Angeles. And calls are renewing to rename Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, a major thoroughfare that runs through Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles an Monterey Park, formerly known as Brooklyn Avenue.

These were just one of many major steps taken, in quick order, to scrub the labor leader’s name from buildings, streets, holidays and other places of honor, following investigative reporting by the New York Times on sexual abuse allegations against Chavez.

In San Fernando, muralist Juan Pablo Reyes painted over an illustration of Chavez that he completed in 2014 as part of a mural that also includes Nelson Mandela and Ghandi. In the Instagram video showing him putting a roller over Chavez’s face, Reyes notes that this mural was one of his first commissioned works, and it was done at Maclay Middle School, which he had attended just a few years before. “What’s right is right, what’s wrong is wrong,” he said. “And no matter who it is, they have to be held accountable for it.” Reyes added that people should “stay tuned” for a new painting.

In Monterey Park, city officials are looking into working with other municipalities to look at how to address Avenida Cesar Chavez, the portion of the much longer street called Cesar E. Chavez that had been changed from Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar Chavez Avenue. Officials there put out a statement and press release saying that because the street extends beyond their city boundaries, they “will consider coordination with neighboring agencies, including the city of Los Angeles and East Los Angeles, to ensure a collaborative regional approach.”

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