Bass-Raman mayoral race has avoided the identity politics that dominate LA’s history

The race for mayor of Los Angeles has largely focused on the decision voters face between a liberal incumbent with four years of mixed success and a democratic socialist who might advance a more progressive agenda.

If that’s the choice in this election between Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman, it is also worth noting what it has not been: In the ethnic and national stew that is Los Angeles, this year’s race has avoided the theater of identity politics that has often shaped its mayoral contests.

With one exception, this campaign has not been marked by racial divisions or differences over issues relating to immigration, assimilation or cultural hegemony. That represents a break from much of this city’s recent political history.

Tom Bradley, the city’s first Black mayor, held office for five terms. Before moving to politics, Bradley had served as a police officer at the LAPD, navigating one of the most racially entrenched institutions of its time. He never forgot those experiences, and his mayoralty marked and solidified the place of African Americans in Los Angeles leadership, as well as fusing an alliance between Jewish and Black voters.

The mayors who have followed often have risen to office against a backdrop of racial divide. Richard Riordan won the support of white voters and many Latinos but never found much support in Black communities. His successor, Jim Hahn, rejiggered the Riordan majority and won by drawing support from Black and moderate-to-conservative white voters — only to lose both when he dumped Police Chief Bernard Parks and opposed San Fernando Valley secession. 

Antonio Villaraigosa was the first Latino to lead Los Angeles in the modern era, and his election was a triumph for the Latino-labor coalition that united behind him. Eric Garcetti looked like a white guy, but his mother was Mexican; he spoke fluent Spanish and he was popular with many of those who had supported Villaraigosa. And Bass, the mayor now fighting to keep her job, defeated a white, self-financed businessman in the Riordan mold by consolidating support from Black voters and building energy around electing the city’s first woman.

That marks a half-century of shifting identity politics, which is natural, perhaps, in a city whose demographics have been fast-evolving over that same period — from a mostly white and Republican anti-labor alternative to San Francisco, to a plurality-Latino metropolis where organized labor is a powerful political force.

And yet, there’s been barely a whiff of those tensions or that history in this campaign. Both Bass and Raman enjoy support across ethnic lines, with notably large chunks of the electorate undecided going into the campaign’s final days.

The city’s Black voters, of whom there has not been much serious polling, appear to remain firmly in Bass’ camp. Even in that shrinking segment of the L.A. electorate, however, there are signs of younger Black voters coalescing around Raman.

Indeed, the only real nod to identity politics in this runoff campaign was telling. During a debate, Raman made a clumsy reference to former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates and the “gold standard” of the police department’s refusal to cooperate with immigration authorities.

Her comment, a reference to the department’s Special Order 40, was clipped. It was also historically suspect since LAPD has long turned over suspects found to be in the country illegally to federal authorities. What Gates did decades ago was prohibit officers from stopping people based solely on suspicion of their immigration status. But Raman’s remark roiled up old antipathies toward the police department and the racial dimensions of that history.

In some ways, that was just campaign noise. I did not hear it as suggesting that Gates represented any kind of “gold standard” for policing, and I say that as someone who had issues with Gates, who once challenged me to a fistfight for reporting that he had retired “in disgrace.” It sounded to me like Raman was trying to say that even in the Gates era, the LAPD understood the value of distancing itself from immigration enforcement.

Nevertheless, it’s not great politics to insert “Daryl Gates” and “gold standard” into the same sentence, and the words touched a nerve in a certain slice of the electorate. In short, it angered many Black voters who too-often were on the receiving end of racist policing.

After the debate, an impromptu community gathering rallied around Bass and demanded that Raman walk back her remark. It featured, for me, friendly and familiar faces. Carl Douglas, the great lawyer who defended O.J. Simpson at Johnnie Cochran’s side, spoke in his trademark stentorian eloquence. Danny Bakewell, the now-graying activist, was gritty and forceful. The crowd chanted “four more years.” All of it felt reminiscent of the 1990s.

To her credit, Raman did pull back the comment, however it was initially intended. 

But the episode felt out of character with this mayoral election. It stands out in this cycle precisely because the campaign has not been built on such flare-ups, the kind that refresh memories of the deep, destructive racial divisions that once plunged Los Angeles into riots, that threatened the city’s sense of itself as a place of welcome and refuge.

That’s not to say that the campaign has avoided division. All campaigns divide. The goal, after all, is to get more voters than the other side, to produce a winner and therefore a loser.

In this race, though, the lines of division are not primarily racial and certainly not of gender — not with two women of color contending for the office. Rather, the most palpable divide and predictor has been age, or someone’s time living in Los Angeles.

For those who were here when Gates was the chief, when LAPD was regarded as an “occupying army,” when more than 1,000 people a year were being murdered in Los Angeles, the urgency of Raman’s campaign may feel manufactured. It is hard to identify with the idea that the city is in crisis when it seems so much better than it once did.

But for newer arrivals, those who have come to the city in recent years in search of its age-old promise, it may feel bleaker. The cost of rent and gas and groceries, the dismaying presence of homeless encampments and the dark threat of immigration raids all seem to block the fulfillment of that dream. Those newer arrivals — Raman herself moved here in 2013 — are more open to the notion that something here is terribly off, that only a fresh take on leadership can bring the city to its fullest potential.

Is division by age or length of residence any better than division by race or gender? Probably. All of us were young at some point, and most of us get old, so generational divides have a built-in mechanism for healing in a way that gender and racial divides do not.

In the short run, they may decide this race for mayor. And the campaign’s defining divide is also what may keep it competitive. For while Raman is leading in every reputable poll, her support relies on those younger, newer voters, while Bass’ is built on those who have been here longer and have a greater stake in the city’s history.

Traditionally, those voters are more dependable, so Raman’s lead, while significant, is not dispositive. A poll of likely voters released this week had the candidates evenly split.

This election remains competitive, right to the finish.