Palisades Fire survivors are backing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for re-election, despite blaming her for the disaster that destroyed their homes. Four residents who lost their homes in the deadly blaze told the California Post they remain furious over her administration’s failures surrounding the fire, which ignited on January 7, 2025, while Bass was in Ghana, but that their anger is not enough to make them turn toward her challenger, City Councilmember Nithya Raman. Their decisions echo those of billionaire developer Rick Caruso, Bass’s former political rival, and Palisades Councilwoman Traci Park, who both plan to vote for the mayor despite reservations about her leadership.
The paradox at the heart of this race is that the fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed more than 4,000 homes in one accounting, and more than 16,000 structures across the Palisades and Eaton fires in another, is both Bass’s greatest liability and, for some of its victims, not a sufficient reason to change mayors. A majority of likely voters, 56 percent, rated her response to the fire as poor or very poor in a University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, while only 17 percent called it fair and 14 percent good or excellent. And yet, among the survivors interviewed in the final days, the alternative, in their judgment, is worse.
Why Palisades Fire survivors Karen Bass voters stay, despite fury
Jessica Rogers, president and executive director of the Palisades Long-Term Recovery Group, speaking as a resident, raised alarms about Raman and her allies in the Democratic Socialists of America, adding that policies she associates with former DSA-backed Westside Councilman Mike Bonin damaged public safety. She credited Bass with coordinating with federal environmental officials after the fire, meeting with Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration, and responding to security concerns in the recovery area. For Rogers, the choice is not between a mayor she trusts and a challenger she distrusts in the abstract; it is between a mayor whose failures she has lived through and a challenger whose politics she fears would make recovery harder.
Sue Kohl, Nina Madok and Kaye Steinsapir, the other three residents interviewed, made similar calculations in different words. Madok, a Republican whose home burned down, said her support for Bass is hardly enthusiastic, a phrase that captures the mood of this group better than any endorsement could. These are not voters who have forgiven Bass. They are voters who have decided, reluctantly, that familiarity, in the words of the California Post’s headline, is preferable to the unknown: the devil you know, rather than a challenger they associate with a movement they distrust.
Caruso’s decision is the most striking version of the same calculation. Caruso, who lost to Bass in 2022 and became one of her biggest critics following the fire, announced that he would vote for his former opponent after working with her on rebuilding the fire-ravaged Palisades. He said that for the love of Los Angeles, he must put the past behind him because the election must be about the future, and that he will be casting his ballot for the mayor. When a developer who spent a fortune trying to defeat Bass, and who criticised her relentlessly after the fire, says he will vote for her, it tells readers something important about how Raman is perceived by parts of the city’s establishment: not as a fresh start, but as a risk.
Los Angeles mayor race Bass Raman November 3: the polls and the debate
The polling picture is genuinely confusing, and readers deserve to see why. A Berkeley IGS poll conducted September 15-20, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, found Raman leading Bass 39 percent to 28 percent among likely voters, with 33 percent undecided, a result that reflected a large undecided bloc, much of it made up of voters who had backed reality television personality Spencer Pratt in the June 2 primary, where Pratt, running on sensationalism over crime, homelessness and the fire, won 25.8 percent. In that primary, Bass placed first with 34.3 percent and Raman second with 28.5 percent, sending both to the November runoff.
Later polls commissioned by the two camps split along predictable lines: a pro-Bass committee’s August survey showed the mayor ahead by six points, while two pro-Raman polls in September showed the challenger ahead by five and six points. A California Post and McLaughlin poll cited in the final days found Raman leading Bass 46.7 percent to 38.8 percent, with 13.5 percent undecided, and only 25.5 percent approving of Bass’s job performance against 71.7 percent disapproving. A newer UC Berkeley and Los Angeles Times poll showed the candidates tied at 40 percent, with 19 percent undecided, but found 65 percent of likely voters viewing Bass unfavourably. Prediction markets have been equally volatile: Kalshi at one point put Raman at 51 percent to Bass’s 48 percent, then at 53 percent to 46.9 percent, while another market snapshot on November 1 put Bass at 57 percent to Raman’s 42 percent. Markets are not polls, and polls are not results, but the range of these numbers tells a consistent story: this is a close, volatile race in which a large bloc of voters, including many Pratt voters, had not firmly chosen even in the final week.
The televised debate between the two Democrats, both members of the same party, sharpened the choice. Bass, 73, and Raman, 45, sparred over homelessness, police department leadership and public safety in the second-largest city in the United States. Raman, who had endorsed Bass for re-election before deciding to enter the race, accused her of being a missing-in-action mayor for her absence when the city battled the fire, saying she was herself in the city’s emergency operations centre attending to evacuated constituents throughout the disaster, and asking, over and over, where is our mayor. Bass, on the offensive, accused Raman of being unserious and indecisive and not ready for the top job, and pointed to her own plans to expand the Los Angeles Police Department to 9,500 officers and overhaul homeless housing.
Homelessness, policing and the choice Los Angeles faces
Beyond the fire, the race turns on homelessness, policing and the city’s budget, issues on which the two candidates offer genuinely different approaches. Bass’s supporters point to billions spent on homelessness and to her experience managing a large city government, while her critics say voters have grown tired of the increasing homelessness problem despite that spending, of dwindling Hollywood jobs as studios move to other cities, and of a city budget that only seems to get bigger each year. Raman’s supporters point to her six years on the City Council and to a platform that promises a different approach to housing and public safety, while her critics, including Caruso, have expressed extreme concern about her proposal to replace LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, with Caruso saying he shows extreme concern when a candidate talks about firing a chief of police.
Endorsements have split in ways that reflect those divides. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath threw her support behind Raman, becoming the only member of the five-person Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to back the challenger, while the other four support Bass. If Raman wins on November 3, she will be the first Indian-American mayor of Los Angeles, a historic fact that her campaign does not emphasise as much as her platform, but which underscores how much the city’s politics have changed. If Bass wins, she will have survived the most serious political crisis of her career, with a mandate that is, by any measure, damaged: a mayor re-elected by voters who, in large numbers, disapprove of her performance.
That is the deeper story of this race, and it is why the survivors’ testimony matters more than any single poll. A city that has lived through a catastrophic fire, a homelessness crisis and a budget squeeze is not choosing between enthusiasm and anger. It is choosing between two kinds of doubt: doubt about a mayor whose failures are known, and doubt about a challenger whose politics are, for many voters, unknown or feared. On Tuesday, Los Angeles will answer that question, and the answer will shape not only who runs the city, but how it rebuilds the Palisades, houses its homeless residents, and polices its streets. For the national midterm context, see USN’s coverage of Trump and Obama on the campaign trail.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from New York Post, ETV Bharat and Deccan Herald.