Democrats eye inquiries into Trump actions on energy, public land.

A Harvard-educated policy expert who served six years on the City Council, Ms. Raman turned the page on a liberal bastion whose leaders had been consumed with big-picture battles with the Trump administration. Instead, she zoomed in on the nuts-and-bolts distress of young voters who increasingly found themselves priced out of the famously expensive city. Polls consistently showed her ahead by a wide margin with voters under 35.

The vote also revealed a broad appetite for change among the four million residents of the city — an echo of calls for a fresh perspective that on Tuesday night propelled a Democratic wave from Maine to California. In Los Angeles, which is already deep blue, it also suggested a widespread openness to the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftist movement that helped elect New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

By Thursday, Ms. Raman was leading with 52 percent of the vote and D.S.A.-backed candidates had won races for city attorney and Congress. Members of the movement already hold three seats on the 15-member City Council. Ms. Bass called Ms. Raman, her one-time ally, to concede on Thursday morning as the ongoing vote count showed a widening lead for Ms. Raman.

“I have committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition,” the mayor said in a statement. “Moving this city forward is what Los Angeles needs from all of us.”

On Thursday evening, Ms. Raman, who until recently was little known outside of progressive political circles, spoke to reporters at a farmers market in the Fairfax District, surrounded by throngs of news cameras, supporters and onlooking shoppers. She wore a blood-orange leather jacket and seemed to pause in front of the microphones, as if taking in her first moments before the public as mayor-elect.

“The key priorities that we’ve heard across this entire city are homelessness, housing costs and public safety,” Ms. Raman said, adding, “These will have to be the priorities that I take on in the city.”

She sought to reassure those who voted for her opponent or opted to not participate in the election. “I think that’s a sign of the deep distrust and cynicism that has taken hold here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said. “My goal is to earn your trust.”

Ms. Raman, an immigrant from India with a screenwriter husband and two children, said her story of becoming mayor was emblematic of the opportunity the city represented to the rest of the world. “This city has opened its arms to people to come and build their dreams here,” she said. “And the idea that Angelenos voted for an immigrant to be their next mayor, at this moment in American history, is so deeply moving to me.”

Preliminary election results showed that Ms. Raman had amassed support on the city’s gentrifying Eastside and in neighborhoods dense with young people, newcomers and renters. Ms. Bass drew from homeowners on the city’s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley and historically Black neighborhoods in South Los Angeles.

In one largely Latino neighborhood — Boyle Heights — where a cold storage warehouse fire burned for days in June, filling the air with the stench of rotten meat and seafood, voters who had backed Ms. Bass during the primary election flipped and supported Ms. Raman by large margins in the general election vote.

In interviews this week, voters said they welcomed Ms. Raman’s return to basics. Anthony Nabea, 36, said that he liked her focus on city services and potholes. Marisol Medina, 52, disapproved of the money Ms. Bass had spent on the police, whose union was among her primary supporters.

Zanisha Butler, 33, said she was simply ready for a new face in the mayor’s office. “I feel like Karen Bass has run her course to be honest,” Ms. Butler said.

Others expressed concern over the loss by Ms. Bass, whom they viewed as a steady hand compared to the relatively untested Ms. Raman. Daquan Houston, 42, a truck driver in the South Los Angeles of Vermont Square, said the mayor deserved a chance to finish the work she had started.

“If you get someone new,” he said, “then they’re going to be starting from scratch.”

Overall, however, Zev Yaroslavsky, the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime civic leader, said Ms. Raman’s victory was “a reflection of an electorate that feels the city is on the wrong track.”

An annual survey conducted early this year by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at U.C.L.A., found that residents across the county were less satisfied with their quality of life than at any point in more than a decade.

Few members of the civic establishment publicly backed Ms. Raman. But those who did cited pragmatic motives.

George Kieffer, a former chair of the University of California board of regents and a principal coauthor of the Los Angeles City Charter, said that at 78, he had decided that only a major political shake-up would wake the city bureaucracy out of its lethargy.

“My party’s establishment is caught in its own bubble,” he said. “Nithya sees it. When she jumped, I did.”

A physician assistant and native Angeleno who organized in South Los Angeles against the crack epidemic in the 1980s, Ms. Bass rose politically as a progressive outside the city’s establishment circles. When she was elected mayor in 2022 , as the city strained to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, she defeated Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and civic leader who spent $100 million of his own money on the campaign.

But her fortunes turned in January 2025. Traveling to Africa at the behest of the Biden administration, she was out of the country when devastating wildfires erupted.

The disaster all but leveled the star-studded Los Angeles enclave of Pacific Palisades, and many survivors never forgave her for being absent during a time of crisis. Her campaign for re-election was an uphill battle from then on.

Six months after the fire, a violent crackdown on immigrants in Los Angeles by the Trump administration set off protests that the White House then seized upon to deploy some 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines into Southern California. Throughout the occupation, which lasted until the end of the year, the Republican president and his allies clashed with Ms. Bass.

The partisan tension shored up her support, but not enough to fend off a serious challenge. After Austin Beutner, a civic leader from Pacific Palisades, entered the race and then withdrew in the wake of a family tragedy, Ms. Raman jumped in.

Ms. Raman, a specialist in urban planning who had been elected to the City Council in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement, channeled both Mr. Mamdani and San Francisco’s more centrist mayor, Daniel Lurie. Los Angeles was “broken,” she charged, and Mayor Bass had fallen short on ensuring a basic quality of life.

Although Ms. Raman at times stumbled on camera, and had to scramble to clarify her missteps, her campaign also shrewdly deployed social media videos designed to reach younger voters. Following in the footsteps of Mr. Mamdani, she gamely appeared in spoofs of microdramas made by real Hollywood production crews and election-themed skits with D.S.A.-aligned actors and influencers. In one video, she talked about creating more shade in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, while pretending to be burned by hot surfaces — a car door, a picnic bench.

She also distanced herself in some ways from the D.S.A., supporting changes to a local “mansion tax,” for instance, that would have benefited one of the D.S.A.’s usual targets: apartment owners. But she pledged to replace the police chief, whose aggressive crowd-control tactics during immigration protests were denounced by the D.S.A. The group also accused the Police Department of protecting federal agents.

Ms. Bass seized on Ms. Raman’s promise, calling it reckless with the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028, and charged that her challenger was “untested” and “not ready for prime time.” Ms. Bass’s 2022 opponent, Mr. Caruso, came to her aid, urging voters to reject Ms. Raman and the D.S.A. Every member of the City Council expressed support of Ms. Bass, except for Ms. Raman.

None of it was enough. After a hedge fund manager and advocate for increased bicycle use in the car-crazy city, backed Ms. Raman, becoming the race’s largest donor, Ms. Raman began airing ads on Dodger games and national news shows.

As her victory became clear, lobbyists, unions, downtown businesses, nonprofits and other entrenched civic interests were already preparing for a realignment. The pressure will be on the mayor-elect, according to Mr. Yaroslavsky at U.C.L.A.

Ms. Raman, he said, “now must face the challenge of erecting a new administration and beginning to fulfill her promise to fix the city she will lead in six short weeks.”

Vik Jolly contributed reporting.