Los Angeles Mayoral Candidate Nithya Raman Was Once Poised to Be the City’s Mamdani—Then She Broke With the Local DSA

But ask Spencer Pratt—or just about anyone in the conservative media—and that guy on the little bike had Raman pegged. Right-wing observers of this year’s mayor’s race have labeled her a card-carrying member of the “far left.” In his viral campaign videos, Pratt, the registered Republican who came in third behind Raman in June’s primary, portrayed her as a “corrupt communist” and “champagne socialist” who cares more about bike lanes than homelessness or crime. And Raman is frequently compared in the national press to New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rise like hers began with the Democratic Socialists of America.

However, Raman's fractured relationship with the DSA has become the defining paradox of her candidacy here in LA. The 45-year-old became a rising star on the left after riding a DSA endorsement to an upset city council victory in 2020, but Raman drifted from the organization on issues ranging from Israel to the Mansion Tax once she was in office. Now, large parts of the city's democratic socialist left no longer see her as their standard-bearer, even though she is routinely portrayed by critics as the face of that coalition.

Her estrangement from the DSA was front and center in the final weeks of the campaign. Vanity Fair reported earlier this month that the organization’s national leadership was considering stripping Raman of the endorsement she received from its Los Angeles chapter in September, citing her refusal to explicitly embrace the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

Raman is getting by without them. She edged Pratt out in the primary, before DSA-LA endorsed her, by fewer than 30,000 votes, overtaking the brash newcomer as late-counted mail ballots vaulted her into the November runoff against Mayor Karen Bass. Just days after it was reported that her DSA-LA endorsement might be rescinded, Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, a Democrat who was once served as the vice president of her college’s Republican club, endorsed Raman’s candidacy. So while Raman’s relationship with the DSA has faded, she’s attracting support from elsewhere in the Democratic establishment.

But rather than writing off the frustrations that fueled Pratt’s campaign, she believes there is meaningful overlap between Pratt and Raman supporters. “[We have] to try and tap into a very nontraditional coalition,” Raman tells me a couple days after the CicLAvia event.

“The success of Spencer Pratt’s campaign showed how much frustration there is here in the city of Los Angeles. And while I think that he was not the right candidate for this moment, I’m also in this race because I’m frustrated and because I think things can be better.”

By September, Raman opened up an 11-point lead over Bass among likely voters in a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times. While 33% of voters surveyed said they were still undecided, the polling suggested that Raman could very well be the city’s next mayor. Some prediction markets are also giving Raman a slight upper hand, but at least one of those same sites showed Pratt advancing to the runoff over Raman in the lead-up to June’s primary.

Vanity Fair met up with the mayoral candidate at The Trails café in Griffith Park (her suggestion), not far from her home in Silver Lake, to learn more.

Raman sat down at the outdoor café in Griffith Park and placed a black moleskin notebook on the table. It looked like it could belong to a progressive college student, plastered with stickers championing conservation efforts in the Mojave Desert, a rainbow, and the Silverlake Conservatory of Music—an organization founded in part by Michael “Flea” Balzary, from LA’s own Red Hot Chili Peppers. She was wearing a black suit with black leather open-toe shoes. Raman had just come from a press conference where she received LA controller Kenneth Mejia’s endorsement, and admitted to being a little burned out.

Raman’s story begins thousands of miles from Los Angeles. Born in southern India in 1981, she moved to the United States at age six with her mother to join her father, who had come earlier to study engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

“When we came to the US we had nothing. We had budgets for groceries every month. We lived in an apartment,” Raman told Vanity Fair. Family vacations were limited to road trips, and eating out usually meant Pizza Hut.

Her family eventually settled in Burlington, Massachusetts, where an influx of East and South Asian engineers was reshaping the mostly white suburb. Raman said she had “some friends, not a ton,” and recalled being “bullied intensively” as one of many South Asian children caught in the racial tensions. Her parents were very protective, Raman said. Did she date as a teenager? “No one would have ever asked me out,” she told VF with a laugh.

“I just wanted to leave,” she said when asked about her career ambitions in high school. Hoping to escape to California, she applied to Stanford and Berkeley but ended up staying close to home at Harvard, where she still had little idea of what she wanted to do.

In Cambridge, she met her future husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, an editor at the Harvard Lampoon, made a lot of friends including Natalie Portman, and graduated with a small amount of student debt. She then went on to earn a master’s in city planning from MIT.

After working for a nonprofit in India and spending some time in New York—where Chandrasekaran wrote and produced for 30 Rock—Raman got married in 2010 and moved to Los Angeles in 2013. The couple first settled near Park La Brea and later Laurel Canyon. Chandrasekaran worked on Modern Family around that time. In LA, Raman said, they built “a really great network of smart, funny people.” The councilmember said she counts 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock, Modern Family cocreator Steven Levitan, and Tina Fey as friends.

In 2017, Raman became one of the founders of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, a homelessness nonprofit.

Raman’s frustrations with the government’s handling of the homelessness crisis ultimately pushed her into politics. In 2020, she pulled off one of the biggest upsets in recent LA political history, defeating incumbent councilmember David Ryu in a race that pitted the establishment against the insurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party. On the council, Raman gave the DSA some of its biggest policy wins, strengthening renter protections and passing a significant reform to the city’s rent stabilization ordinance. She also voted against a billion-dollar police union contract in 2023, opposed the multibillion-dollar downtown Convention Center expansion, and defended the independence of the controller’s office, which experienced budget cuts under the Bass administration.

But at the same time, she strayed from the DSA platform, and the organization’s grievances with Raman accumulated. “I did not join the DSA because I had a deep ideological drive, but I do really care about issues and they were the only political organization in LA talking about renters’ rights, the only one,” Raman told Vanity Fair. The mayoral candidate said she favors the Scandinavian model of social democracy, signaling a belief in a regulated free-market economy rather than the more explicitly anti-capitalist vision embraced by many in the DSA. (The DSA-LA platform calls for the expropriation of corporations in key industries including food, internet, and real estate.)

In 2024, DSA-LA censured her after she sought support from a pro-Israel political group (Democrats For Israel-Los Angeles) during her reelection campaign. Later that year, DSA-LA issued an “expression of disapproval” following Raman’s vote to approve LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, who collaborated with ICE in 2015 and opposed a sanctuary policy at the state level.

Then in 2026, Raman proposed changes to Los Angeles’s voter-approved Mansion Tax after evidence suggested the measure generated far less revenue than had been projected and suppressed housing construction. “My desire for reform of the Mansion Tax really created some challenges with the [DSA], and people within it,” said Raman.

And the thousandth cut came when Raman launched her mayoral campaign without first consulting the local DSA chapter, angering organizers who felt the race stretched their resources too thin. The local chapter had already closed its endorsement process, and ultimately decided not to endorse a candidate for mayor.

In the end, none of the DSA-backed members of the Los Angeles City Council endorsed Raman’s mayoral campaign either, instead opting to ride with Bass. And neither Estuardo Mazariegos or Faizah Malik—both of whom ran for city council this year with a DSA-LA endorsement—endorsed Raman during the primary.

“​​I understand those fears and feelings and I hope that we can build trust and work together again,” said Raman when asked about her strained relationship with the DSA.

Even Jane Fonda, who swore Raman into office after her 2024 city council reelection, endorsed Karen Bass for mayor instead. Raman insists the two remain close. Additionally, several young left-wing comedians in Hollywood who this year rallied behind DSA candidates including Malik, Mazariegos, and city attorney candidate Marissa Roy did not endorse Raman.

According to Raman, housing policy is the key issue that distinguishes her today from the Democratic Socialists of America. The city, she said, must build—densely, quickly, and at every income level. That conviction has increasingly put her at odds with activists who view private development with skepticism or who prioritize protecting existing neighborhoods due to gentrification concerns.

“Building more housing is the key thing for LA’s recovery and resiliency,” Raman told Vanity Fair. “If we can invite more people to live here. If we can bring young people here. If we can make this paradise into a place that welcomes immigrants, creative people, entrepreneurs from all over the world. That’s what made LA into what it is, and we won’t have that anymore if we don’t build more housing.”

Raman, who serves as chair of the city council’s housing and homelessness committee, secured a small victory on Friday when the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority released its annual point-in-time homelessness count. The data showed citywide street homelessness increased nearly 8% compared to the previous year, while it declined 49% in Raman’s own district.

“She got homelessness down in her district by treating each encampment as an emergency to be solved and going from person to person in that encampment, saying, ‘What do you need?’” said Adam Conover, a comedian and television host who met Raman when he volunteered for SELAH.

On the campaign trail, the city councilmember promised to cut unsheltered homelessness in half before the 2028 Olympics. It’s a big promise, and her opponent isn’t buying it. Bass has been forcing Raman to explain her own role in overseeing the city’s troubled homelessness response. At an October debate, Bass pointed out that Raman, as chair of the city council’s housing and homelessness committee, had repeatedly approved spending on Inside Safe, the very program Raman now criticizes as expensive and insufficiently accountable.

Homelessness could be the issue that gets Raman elected, but instead of neutralizing one of her biggest liabilities, Raman has stood by her opposition to a ban on homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools, opening herself up to attacks from Bass and Pratt.

“We look forward to winning a contest against an opponent who allows encampments near schools and fights against hiring more cops,” said Alex Stack, a campaign spokesperson for Bass, in a statement issued the day before Raman secured her spot in November’s runoff.

Raman’s break with Karen Bass might have been even more dramatic than her split from the DSA. Bass supported Raman during her 2024 city council campaign, and shortly before she entered the race, Raman endorsed Bass for reelection. The two women governed as allies through much of Bass’s first term, making Raman’s decision to challenge the incumbent all the more startling.

The mayor was given no indication from Raman that a challenge was coming, according to her campaign. Bass’s team alleges that she found out Raman was running from a reporter. Armed with that information, Bass called Raman on February 7, the last day candidates could enter the race, and asked the councilmember whether she intended to mount a challenge. Bass’s campaign says Raman “largely waffled on the call.” Raman entered the race hours later.

Raman told Vanity Fair she called Bass the morning of the filing deadline to let her know she was running. The following day, Bass invited Raman to her home for a private conversation, which had not previously been reported. “I didn’t want to move forward without having a conversation with her,” Raman told me. “I’m grateful that she made the time for me.”

She acknowledges that her entry into the race damaged relationships. Raman said she had expected a more established challenger—perhaps Horvath or 2022 mayoral candidate Rick Caruso—to emerge and didn’t seriously consider running until the final days before the filing deadline. “I don’t know how my decision-making process could have been different given the circumstances,” she said. “It was not an intentional effort to undermine our relationship or undermine our trust, but it was really just a product of that moment of the mayoral race playing out as it did.”

Lest anyone think Raman is on an island of her own, the city councilmember has begun winning over some powerful allies.

But the mayoral race has come to reflect a broader tension among Democratic officials navigating the party’s ideological civil war. An endorsement in this race could signal a preference for either the insurgent progressive wing of the party or for the more moderate establishment.

Meanwhile, the industry is showing Raman lots of love. Chelsea Handler, Mindy Kaling, Adam Scott, Fey, and Portman have all publicly lent their support to Raman or donated money, according to her campaign.

Conover, a member of the Writers Guild of America West’s board, spoke to Vanity Fair in an independent capacity. He said Hollywood’s creative class has embraced Raman because they view her as one of their own. “Her husband is a television writer,” he said. “This is the world that she comes from.”

As writers, actors, and crew members endure a prolonged slowdown in production, Conover said Raman’s Hollywood agenda—which calls for putting an experienced production hand in the city’s film office, streamlining permits, and cutting bureaucratic delays—resonates because workers may see in Raman somebody who “actually gives a shit.”

He contrasted that with Bass, whom he criticized for turning FilmLA into a “NIMBY” organization that’s more concerned with appeasing community complaints about production than driving it. He also is critical of Bass for failing to appear on the WGA or SAG-AFTRA picket lines while they were on strike in 2023.

“The improvements Mayor Bass made at FilmLA have resulted in permits being approved faster than at any point in LA history,” said Stack. “In nearly six years on the city council, Raman has never introduced a single piece of legislation to help the film industry—and when the council took up seven items in March 2026 to streamline film permitting and address the production downturn, Raman recused herself from four of them.”

In 2025, Raman supported a motion introduced by councilmember Adrin Nazarian that aimed to reduce fees and streamline other film production processes. But Stack also pointed out that Raman recused herself from votes on four other film-industry proposals, including measures to create regional permitting agreements with neighboring jurisdictions, establish a city film liaison handbook, develop a fast-track infrastructure program, and create a free micro-shoot permit for small public-space productions.

Conversely, most studio chiefs, agency executives, and major producers have not publicly lined up behind either candidate. “If I was putting myself in the mindset of a big executive at an agency or studio, I think I would feel pretty politically homeless, because the wealthy, center-right wing of Los Angeles hates Bass because they all lived in the Palisades,” said Conover.

The race has also attracted millions in outside spending from some of Los Angeles’s most powerful interests. According to the LA Times, the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters has put $9 million behind an independent campaign supporting Raman, two thirds of it supplied by hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick, an advocate for expanding the city’s bicycle and bus lanes. On the other side, the Los Angeles Police Protective League has committed at least $3.5 million to supporting Bass, while the county’s powerful Federation of Labor is also backing the incumbent.

By early afternoon on July 19, the people who gathered for the bike ride were peeling away in search of televisions showing the World Cup final, and Raman headed toward Griffith Park to attend a watch party at the Autry Museum. At that point, Raman and her team had talked with hundreds of supporters. Dozens of riders had attached “Nithya for Mayor” posters to their bikes, giving the candidate lots of free advertising all along the six-mile stretch of open streets.

Twenty-nine-year-old Tony Ketcham told Vanity Fair that he’s supporting Raman because Los Angeles has “put up with mediocrity for too long,” echoing a critique Raman herself has made throughout the campaign. Standing beside Ketchum, Erika Witt, a 30-year-old policy professional who described herself as “a big policy wonk” and “an urban studies person,” said she’s been following Raman since before moving to Los Angeles because of the councilmember’s work on housing, public transportation, bike lanes, and homelessness. “She’s bringing about real change,” Witt said, arguing that while comparisons to Mamdani are understandable, “she’s our own LA special.”