Outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Tuesday she likely won’t run for office again, breaking her silence a week after losing her reelection bid to Nithya Raman in a result few saw coming.
Asked by NBC4 whether she would seek elected office in the future, Bass gave a one-word reply: “Doubtful.”
It was her first public appearance since the defeat, and she made the comments while visiting the site of an industrial fire in Vernon. Bass, who leaves City Hall in December, suggested she’s ready to shift her focus away from public life after decades in politics.
“I have spent my entire life devoted to service, never thinking about what do I want to do personally,” she said. “That moment is here.”
Raman, a former ally of Bass’s on the City Council, held a double-digit lead in Tuesday’s latest count and is set to become Los Angeles’s 44th mayor. The loss is notable because Bass had never lost an election before, across a political career spanning Los Angeles, Sacramento and Washington, DC.
Bass attributed the outcome to broader voter anger rather than anything specific to her record.
“I put the election in the context of the national scene,” she told NBC4. “To me, there was a wave and these waves happen. I’ve been around long enough to experience them, not where they necessarily affected me. But change waves happen where people are just frustrated. They just want change, they got it.”
She is the first sitting Los Angeles mayor to lose to a challenger since Jim Hahn was defeated by Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005.
Raman ran to Bass’s left and was seen as the more progressive candidate in the race. She was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America-LA, while Bass had backing from all but one of Raman’s City Council colleagues. Even developer Rick Caruso, whom Bass beat in 2022, said he intended to vote for her this time.
Raman’s win puts Los Angeles alongside New York and Washington, DC, among major cities now led by mayors with democratic socialist support, following the elections of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Janeese Lewis George in DC.
