Tuesday night’s midterm election results were unquestionably historic.
Let us count the ways:
In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected to be the first Black woman governor of a state in U.S. history.
New Mexico Democrat Deb Haaland was elected to be the first female Indigenous governor of a state in U.S. history.
In Michigan, Democrat Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will be the first Muslim senator in U.S. history.
Texas Democrat Gina Hinojosa will be the first Latina governor in the state’s history.
Xavier Becerra won in a landslide, becoming California’s first elected Latino governor.
Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom is on track to be the first Democratic senator from the state since Dixiecrat and segregationist John Stennis retired in 1989. If Colom wins the incredibly close race, he’ll also be the first Black senator from the state since Reconstruction.
And right here in L.A., Karen Bass was defeated by Nithya Raman, making her the first one-term mayor of the city since James Hahn lost his reelection race to Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005.
Across the country, this week’s midterm election delivered a historic repudiation of the cruelty, corruption, and racism of MAGA Republican politics, and their corporate, billionaire, and trillionaire backers. As the great historian Greg Grandin wrote on X, it was “a referendum of humanity over barbarism.”
Here in L.A., Angelenos delivered a historic repudiation to the business, homeowner, developer, and LAPD-friendly old guard of L.A. politics in favor of a wave of younger, more progressive democratic socialists who promise to make the city work for renters, working people, street vendors, immigrants, and yes, even upwardly mobile gentrifiers.
Raman will be the poster child for this historic change in city politics, and it won’t be the first time.
Raman will be the poster child for this historic change in city politics, and it won’t be the first time.
In 2020, Raman was the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America to get elected to L.A. City Council. Since then, three other members of DSA have been elected to the Council. None of them supported Raman’s mayoral campaign. One of them, in fact, Hugo Soto-Martinez, actively campaigned with Bass in her re-election bid.
Raman’s ability to actually accomplish what she campaigned on: fast-tracking affordable housing projects, improving city services (including for street vendors), subsidies and rental vouchers to house people, expanded street medicine teams, reigning in the LAPD and increasing civilian oversight, protecting immigrant communities, and revitalizing the city’s film industry; then she’s going to have to work, not only with her democratic socialist frenemies, but also a council full of other old-guard conservative and liberal Democrats that seem to despise her.
But Raman isn't without friends in city government.
If you went to just about any Raman campaign event, or saw one on social media, you probably noticed progressive City Controller Kenneth Mejia standing beside her.
Mejia, a popular presence on social media, a frequent critic of the old guard political establishment in city politics, and maybe most importantly, a dogged auditor of the city’s spending on homelessness services and the LAPD’s horrific liability payouts, is Raman’s most vocal advocate in City Hall and probably her biggest ally as she takes office.
Another important ally for Raman will be Marissa Roy, a fellow DSA-LA member who won the race for City Attorney in a landslide, mainly by campaigning everywhere around the city like the organizer of an activist group, promising people she will use the power of the City Attorney’s office to actually hold corporations and lawbreaking politicians accountable.
Normally, the City Attorney's office is pretty conservative, focusing on criminal prosecutions. The outgoing attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto, spent a good portion of her time in office trying to thwart even slightly common-sense and somewhat decent government initiatives, like trying to block a contract for people to get free legal eviction protection services, lobbying City Council to file a motion in a lawsuit that defends the LAPD’s right to use excessive force against journalists, and trying to prosecute protesters.
Roy has promised to uphold a federal judge’s injunction against the LAPD’s ability to use force against journalists covering protests. She also wants to sue tech companies and private prison groups for helping implement Trump and ICE’s immigration policies. She has also promised to use the City Attorney’s office to pursue stronger rights for workers and tenants and to prosecute ICE agents who break the law.
In the primary election in June, Feldstein Soto got 18% of the vote, while Roy got 41%.
There’s also Angela Gonzales-Torres, another DSA-LA member who promises to abolish ICE and stop military aid to Israel, and who trounced pro-Israel centrist Democrat Representative Jimmy Gomez’ re-election bid in the U.S. House of Representatives District 34 race, a district which extends from Downtown L.A. to Koreatown and Highland Park.
It’s obvious that here in L.A., and around the country, people want a change. In other parts of the country, that looks like electing a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in almost a hundred years. In L.A., that looks like toppling the old guard L.A. political establishment and electing a slate of democratic socialists.
What’s true in L.A. is true everywhere else in the country, though. Whether we’re talking about the moderate Democrats elected in formerly majority Republican areas, or progressives winning against centrist Democrats, the promise of change has to be fulfilled by action by these politicians.
They have to actively fight against the urge to turn from progressive outsiders into jaded establishment figures like Bass did in her term in office, or to compromise their stated beliefs in human rights and equality, like a good chunk of the Democratic Party in their support of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, or their support for more funding for U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers and increasing restrictions on the ability of people to claim asylum (both of which were parts of what tanked Democrat Kamala Harris’ bid for the presidency in 2024).
That usually necessitates a strong activist movement with creative organizers to pressure them to keep to their promises and think beyond the often narrow blinders of city government.
If centrist Democrats in Kansas or progressive socialists in the L.A. city government can’t deliver what they promised to people, it’ll be too easy for those who supported them—or at the very least had hope in them—to slink back into apathy, cynicism, and disgust, which leaves a window open for reactionaries to convince them that their neighbors are the source of their problems again. Or that nothing can change for the better.
Be that as much as whatever MAGA personality tries to take up Trump’s mantle, like J.D. Vance.
