Five Days That Blew Up The L.A. Mayoral Race

MONDAY, FEB. 2 

Things finally seemed to be breaking the right way for Mayor Karen Bass as she bounded onstage to the opening chords of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”

It was the first Monday in February and the former congresswoman was about to begin her annual State of the City address — held two months early, because she wasn’t leaving anything to chance. 

In the year since the devastating Palisades fire, voters across the city had been questioning not just her appeal, but her ability to do the job. 

And the city’s troubles radiated far beyond the ashes of the Palisades. Los Angeles was in a perilous financial position. Streetlights were routinely dark and potholes unfilled. Skyrocketing rents and home prices were pushing Angelenos to far-flung suburbs. Hollywood, an industry entwined with both the city’s economy and its identity, looked to be dying in slow motion. Planning for the 2028 Olympics was behind schedule. And a hostile and capricious presidential administration had stoked chaos and fear by conducting mass immigration raids — and could do so again at any moment. 

Yet on this balmy morning, only five days remained before the campaign filing deadline. And to the surprised relief of many of her supporters, it was beginning to seem like Bass might not face any real opposition in her reelection bid.

All L.A.’s first female mayor had to do was get through the week.

For months, former schools superintendent Austin Beutner had been widely seen as Bass’ most credible opponent. But his 22-year-old daughter Emily had died suddenly the month before, and the campaign had gone dark since, leaving it uncertain whether he would continue.

Two other prominent contenders, Republican reality TV antagonist Spencer Pratt and leftist activist Rae Huang, had snatched attention online. But neither was viewed as a legitimate threat to Bass. (In fact, Pratt’s candidacy offered Bass a dream scenario: the possibility of a November runoff where, in a heavily Democratic city, she would be all but guaranteed a landslide victory.) 

Meanwhile, although real estate magnate Rick Caruso had declared he wouldn’t run, he and several other influential figures — including a county supervisor and a tech entrepreneur —  were in the wings, publicly and privately toying with bids. But none had actually pulled the trigger. 

And so the speech at Exposition Stadium, complete with two marching bands, felt more like a campaign kickoff than an official address. Most of the City Council sat in the front row, though Bass’ longtime political ally Councilwoman Nithya Raman was absent for a last-minute family obligation. No one thought much of it at the time, if they noticed at all.

But before the week was over, Raman would shock the city with her own candidacy for mayor, blindsiding Bass in a betrayal dramatic enough to make local news anchors quote Shakespeare. 

Bass had touted Raman’s endorsement just weeks prior. The pair are both progressives, and broadly aligned politically. Inside the insular world of City Hall, where information is currency unstintingly swapped at all hours via Signal, no one had seen this rupture coming.  

This is the story of the week that remade the Los Angeles mayor’s race, and potentially the city: the grief that sidelined one challenger, the zeal that revived another, the scenarios gamed out in private rooms, the unlikely alliances between potential candidates and the late schism that turned Bass’ glide path into a turbulent contest. It’s an exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of how the city’s political class scrambled to marshal a challenge to Bass. And how voters’ options were determined during five feverish days among a handful of strange bedfellows, united by their raw ambition and their frustration with the mayor’s leadership. 

Bass’ team, meanwhile, positions the mayor as someone working tirelessly to address the municipal dysfunction, as others in the civic orbit spin their wheels plotting and planning. 

"Every Angeleno, including Mayor Bass and Councilmember Raman, is frustrated by the inevitable outcomes from decades of failures at City Hall. The question is, who’s doing something about it?” Bass campaign spokesperson Doug Herman said, touting the city’s declining street homelessness numbers. 

This account is based on interviews with more than 30 elected officials, staffers, political operatives and others who spoke on background to provide candid accounts of the private moments that set the course for the mayoral election. Scenes and conversations were verified by multiple sources with firsthand knowledge, except in the very few instances that by necessity rely on a single source with direct and unique insight. Contemporaneous videos, schedules, text messages and call logs helped reconstruct the timeline.

TUESDAY, FEB. 3: Four days until the filing deadline.

If the Beutner household had been running a tracking poll on whether to stay in the race, the results would have looked more like an EKG than a trendline, vacillating wildly in all directions.

Displaced from his own fire-damaged Palisades home, Beutner had entered the race the previous fall, pitching himself as a non-ideological Mr. Fixit. The measured 65-year-old former investment banker was never going to electrify the electorate. But he had experience running complex organizations. 

His last public event had been on Jan. 5 — the day before Emily’s death — and his team had since cancelled at least 15 fundraisers.

Beutner’s convictions about what the city needed remained potent even as his world cratered. Continuing the campaign felt necessary in some moments and impossible in others. 

Jeff Millman, his political consultant, checked in occasionally, but he was giving Beutner a wide berth to grieve.

Politicians come and go. Millman is one of a handful of operatives who are fixed stars in the civic firmament, guiding the messages and personalities that beckon voters to the polls. 

Boyish and energetic, the Harvard-Westlake- and University of Pennsylvania-educated tactician had fit easily into former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s brainy, hyper-credentialed inner circle, where he served as chief strategist for his 2013 bid. Millman later worked in-house for the 2028 Olympics — the organizational bête noire of L.A.’s far left — and previously for establishment Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein.

He had helped Beutner launch his campaign back in October, during a moment when the mayoral field had been stuck in place.

Despite the widespread frustration with Bass, other potential challengers had been waiting to see if Rick Caruso, the patrician powerbroker who’d lost to her in 2022 despite spending more than $100 million, would mount another run.

Caruso’s prior GOP affiliation had doomed him four years ago in deep blue Los Angeles, and it was unclear how things might play differently in 2026. But the billionaire developer had been a persistent thorn in Bass’ side since the fires, regularly appearing on local TV to deride her decisions.

Wary of Caruso, Bass had studiously fortified herself against a challenge from the center. She’d wooed the city’s pugnacious police union with massive raises and courted the business groups who’d once backed him. Her seeming lack of opposition was hardly an accident: It spoke to the systematic work of a politician who’d locked down power base after power base — sometimes, her opponents would argue, at great cost to the city. 

In a boon to Bass, Caruso’s uncertainty throughout 2025 likely froze out some would-be challengers, before he ultimately announced in mid-January that he wouldn’t be running for anything after all.

If Beutner stayed in the race, Caruso was ready to endorse him. Through a mutual friend, Caruso was inquiring about his plans and heard he might drop out. Without Beutner, the lane for a more moderate candidate focused on making a broken city work was wide open. And the developer was suddenly rethinking his options. 

Meanwhile, inside the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration — a mid-century slab of a building that houses the sluggish heart of county government — County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath was in the weekly Board meeting. Her phone buzzed.

It was one of the millennial supervisor’s oldest friends in politics — a man who had known her since she was a twentysomething advertising executive and political activist making a longshot bid for West Hollywood City Council. He was also the former mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti.

Horvath said she’d call him back after the meeting.

Impatient and fiercely ambitious, Horvath radiates the energy of someone who’s had her hand permanently raised in the front row of every class she’s ever taken, while somehow still seeming like she’d be fun at a party. 

When she was elected to the board in 2022, she catapulted from the farm leagues of local government (West Hollywood is its own 1.9-square-mile municipality of roughly 35,000 people) to a district representing more than 2 million, from the Ventura County line through the Palisades burn scar to the edge of Hollywood, where she now lives.

Within two years on the calcified Board of Supervisors, Horvath had pushed through a once-in-a-century overhaul of county government. Her smile-while-stirring-shit style netted her plenty of detractors and there have been several scandals at the county during her tenure. (High on the list: Horvath’s signature reform ballot measure inadvertently repealed an unrelated criminal-justice reform measure — a breathtaking administrative error.)

She had publicly sparred with Bass over homelessness funding and fanned speculation about her mayoral ambitions for months. But much of that had been theater. Only in the past few weeks had her team been truly probing a run.

When the former mayor of West Hollywood and the former mayor of L.A. finally spoke later that Tuesday, the topic of a mayoral run came up. Garcetti said there was nothing like being mayor of Los Angeles — a position of global influence. 

The pull of the mayoralty was seductive, especially compared to the county’s more under-the-radar bureaucracy.

But running for mayor would carry enormous political jeopardy for Horvath. Because the mayoral election coincided with her own reelection, she’d have to risk a safe board seat for an uncertain future, with little time to fundraise or garner institutional support. And she was widely thought to be eyeing the new role of elected county CEO in 2028 — a position her reforms had created. 

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 4: Three days until the filing deadline. 

The L.A. Times story detonated like a bomb.

At 10:30 a.m., Paul Pringle and Alene Tchekmedyian — two reporters who’d been chewing into fire response missteps like dogs with a particularly juicy bone — published a startling revelation.

Their story alleged that Bass had directed the city’s after-action report to be watered down, to downplay the city’s own failures — something the mayor had repeatedly denied for months. 

The mayor and her staff were gobsmacked by the story and furious over its sourcing, with some in the office suspecting it was being pushed by political adversaries, or leadership in the Fire Department trying to direct attention away from the department’s own failures.

“It is dangerous and irresponsible for Los Angeles Times reporters to rely on third hand unsourced information to make unsubstantiated character attacks to advance a narrative that is false,” a representative for the mayor told the Times. The paper stood by its reporting.

Thirty-some miles to the west in Malibu, Horvath was on the side of Pacific Coast Highway at a ribbon cutting. 

She hadn’t read the story yet, but constituents and others were already asking her about it.

When she finally opened the link she was in the passenger seat of her assistant’s Kia hatchback, hurtling back toward the city. As she scrolled, her fury mounted — yet another fire-related failure, another story likely to reopen wounds for survivors in her district.

She dialed Rick Caruso, an unlikely ally. Despite political divergences, the pair had built a relationship united in part by their shared Catholic faith.

“Can you believe this?” Horvath asked Caruso. 

Both Horvath and Caruso had been supportive of the other’s prospective candidacies; had either jumped into the race, they likely would have had the other’s backing.

She prodded him on whether he might reconsider getting into the race. There was a long beat. 

“Well,” Caruso mused, “I’m not actually sure.” He was thinking about it, again.

Caruso had previously spent months gaming out bids for governor and mayor. At one point last summer, he had convened roughly 20 political operatives for a summit at an airport hotel in Dallas, halfway between their offices on both coasts. (Caruso appeared virtually.)

He’d shifted his focus to governor around the end of the year. When he abruptly decided to pull out of contention for either role, he cited heartfelt conversations with his family, though foes suspected that despite the seemingly infinite consultants in his orbit, he just couldn’t chart a clear path to victory.

Scrambling through the logistics of how Caruso might plausibly get back in the mayor’s race with just days until the filing deadline, Horvath offered her own political team to help, including her chief of staff Estevan Montemayor. They set a Zoom for that afternoon. 

Montemayor is a charismatic political operative with the resting facial expression of someone who’s just heard a fabulous secret. He relishes the game and has long tentacles in L.A. Democratic politics. 

Back in 2020, he oversaw communications and strategy for Councilman David Ryu, whose political career flatlined after Nithya Raman ousted him from office in the race that first made her a progressive star. In 2022, he helped steer the committee whose vicious attacks on Caruso aided Bass’ victory. 

For the better part of that year, Montemayor had all but devoted his life to vilifying the mall mogul. He spent countless hours on the phone with reporters, parceling out oppo and trying to get the phrase “anti-choice Republican billionaire” into the civic ether. 

Now, Montemayor was giving the hard sell about why Caruso should get back in the ring, and offering his own services as a possible campaign manager. But first he had to come clean. 

“I can’t in good conscience work for you if I’m not honest about what I did to you,” Montemayor said.

He told Caruso that he regretted backing Bass, someone who he now thought wasn’t up for the job. He was sorry, he said. 

Hanging up, Horvath and her team thought that Caruso would get in — a decision he told her he would make by noon Thursday.

There had been no explicit plans to make Caruso’s deliberations public, but the developer sometimes shoots from the hip, and told local radio and TV stations Wednesday night that he was reconsidering running, unleashing a new round of rabid speculation about his plans. 

THURSDAY, FEB. 5: Two days until the filing deadline. 

After sleeping on his decision the night before, Beutner texted Millman around 6:30 a.m. telling him to please announce the end of his campaign. His family’s mourning was incompatible with the 24/7 demands of the mayoralty, or a race. 

His daughter Emily was “a magical person, the light of our lives,” Beutner wrote in a message fired into reporters’ inboxes about an hour later. He asked for privacy, and for Angelenos to keep his family in their prayers.

Mayor Bass’ own daughter had died in a car crash at 23, nearly 20 years prior, and she knew Beutner’s pain intimately. In a public statement, she described her heart as “broken for the Beutner family.” Even in casual conversation, her senior staffers were scrupulously careful to never seem to welcome Beutner’s exit.

With Bass’ only serious challenger out of the race, there were now fewer than 48 hours until the field would close. 

The mayor had been on the defensive for much of the past year, save for the previous summer, when she assertively took on President Trump as immigration raids sent a chill through the city. But frustration had continued to mount through the fall and into the new year. By January, a private poll circulating in political circles showed that just a third of Angelenos had a favorable view of her. 

Still, her campaign would argue that after years of civic neglect, she had been the first mayor with the stomach to really take on the homelessness crisis and that she was making substantial progress. She just needed a longer runway to prove her plans would work.

At noon that day, Horvath headed to Mass at her Hollywood church, planning to keep her phone in her purse and avoid obsessing about when Caruso would announce.

After the service, she joined a small group of women to pray the rosary. The group read the day’s passage, meditating on the moment before Jesus performed his first miracle. 

When it was Horvath’s turn, the words on the page felt like a sign: “What would you have me do?,” she read aloud. “My hour has not yet come.” 

As she stepped out of Blessed Sacrament Church and into the bright midday sun, she felt secure in her decision not to run, buoyed by the knowledge that this was Caruso’s hour.

But while Horvath was praying, Caruso had come to his own decision at home in Brentwood.

He fiercely desired the job. But the political climate had grown even uglier since his last run. He could take the heat, but couldn’t justify seeing that bile directed at his family. And after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on polling over many months, just one survey had shown him beating Bass in a head-to-head match. 

Caruso texted Horvath just after 1:30 p.m., saying he had arrived back at the place he’d been two weeks ago — he was not running. 

Horvath’s phone began to ping immediately after Caruso’s decision was published in the L.A. Times — a tidal wave of texts urging her to fill the vacuum in the race.

A few minutes later, Millman reached out to Horvath. He urged her to call anytime if she needed help processing her decision. She didn’t respond. He followed up a bit later with polling that showed the mayor’s popularity numbers painfully underwater. (A member of Horvath’s team had previously reached out to Millman to ask about Beutner’s status.) 

There is a reason contenders typically spend months if not years preparing mayoral bids: Los Angeles is a fractious metropolis splayed across 503 square miles in the center of the nation’s second-most expensive media market. Running a citywide campaign here requires more than vibes and media savvy. Candidates must mount massive outreach campaigns conducted in multiple languages, build sprawling field operations and spend millions on TV airtime — all while navigating the tangled geometry of coalition politics.

Bass had been carefully building her reelection operation and shoring up the support of the city’s immensely powerful labor unions, whose deep coffers and field experience make them invaluable partners.

Meanwhile, another challenger, tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, also publicly entered the race Thursday. An unknown political newcomer with deep pockets and a nonprofit focused on homelessness, it’s unclear how much impact Miller will have on the race, or how much of his own money he’ll be willing to spend. But he had set up the framework of a professional campaign infrastructure, working with former Obama adviser Bill Burton. 

Nithya Raman had none of that in place. 

Raman swept onto the City Council in 2020, ousting an incumbent for the first time in nearly two decades and mobilizing young renters who’d previously given little thought to local politics. Her grassroots, Democratic Socialists of America-backed victory upended long-established truisms about who succeeds in local races and served as a bellwether: Three other DSA-favored, incumbent-ousting progressives have joined the council since. 

While on council, Raman led the city's most dramatic expansion of tenant rights in 40 years, though her density-friendly land use advocacy also appeals to a more market-friendly housing crowd.

Foes caricature her as a radical, but the Harvard-educated, Silver Lake mom of two is more technocrat than ideologue. Her relationship with the DSA has grown more complicated in recent years, and she’s diverged from the group on certain issues.

The realization that Bass might not face a serious challenger began to set in for Raman that Thursday afternoon. From a big-picture ideological standpoint, the pair were aligned. And when Raman’s reelection fight turned particularly bruising in 2024, Bass burned political capital to help the councilwoman hang on to her seat.

But the councilwoman had grown increasingly frustrated with the mayor since. The city felt rudderless to her, Raman told L.A. Material. 

Bass had made several consequential decisions — including large police raises that were later matched for firefighters, and backing a risky, multibillion-dollar expansion of the downtown convention center favored by business and labor groups — that Raman feared were fiscally irresponsible, maybe existentially so, at a time when basic city services were crumbling. And she felt like the mayor’s team was ignoring her as she raised alarms about the costs of Inside Safe, the mayor’s signature homelessness program, she said.

She’d thought one of the many other contenders would be out campaigning with a different vision of how the city could function. But with fewer than 48 hours to the deadline, that seemed increasingly unlikely. 

A new question began to crystallize: Why not her?

Unlike Horvath, Raman’s next bid for reelection wouldn’t be for another two years, meaning she could run for mayor and still keep her council seat if she lost. 

Michael Schneider, a tech entrepreneur turned bike evangelist with TV actor looks, talked to Raman that Thursday about running. He was energized by the possibility of a local candidate who could appeal to the pro-housing YIMBY movement.

Millman, who by then was squarely without a candidate, also encouraged Raman that Thursday. And looking at a poll Millman sent her that showed how unpopular Bass was, Raman could see a path forward for a challenger. 

That night, she and her television writer husband Vali Chandrasekaran talked it over during a long dinner at Saffy’s, a buzzy Middle Eastern restaurant in East Hollywood. 

A campaign would be brutal, but Chandrasekaran seemed open to the idea, abrupt as it was. 

FRIDAY, FEB. 6: One day until the filing deadline. 

At 9 a.m., Raman was 30 miles east of downtown in Diamond Bar, serving on the influential South Coast Air Quality Management District governing board, which oversees air quality regulations for more than 17 million people across four counties. 

This was Raman’s final AQMD meeting, though she couldn’t tell anyone yet. Weeks earlier, she’d been informed that Bass planned to pull her from the board. 

The mayor hadn’t even bothered to call her about it. The explanation, relayed through a low-level staffer: Bass wanted her own pick, since Raman had been Garcetti’s choice in 2022.

Raman relished the wonkish, complex work: It felt like a rare lever for impact, especially as City Hall dysfunction left her increasingly despondent. Her sadness and frustration over leaving the board had been mounting all week. 

While Raman sat in the AQMD meeting, Schneider reached out to a Horvath aide, saying the councilwoman was interested in running and they should talk. 

Horvath called a few hours later and told Raman the path was clear.

The pair were not adversaries, but they certainly weren’t close. Still, Raman talked to Horvath with unfiltered intimacy, processing her decision aloud: The things she was feeling, the dynamics of a race, the massive impact it would have on her life. 

Raman wouldn’t make her final decision until that night, she said. Her husband had been at work all day and they needed to talk in person before she could be sure. 

At roughly 5:30 p.m., Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez was driving to an event when his phone rang. 

Soto-Martínez — a genial but intense former union organizer who speaks in the solidarity-heavy patois of the labor movement — has arguably been Raman’s closest ally on the council. 

I just heard a crazy rumor, the lobbyist on the other end of the call told Soto-Martínez. Is it really true that Nithya’s running for mayor?

Soto-Martínez burst out laughing. Raman, like Soto-Martínez, had already promised her endorsement to the mayor. 

“Dude,” he said, “I don’t think so. She would have told us.”

The councilman’s phone rang again not long after — another political insider with the same question. He wrote it off as too ridiculous to even ask his friend about. 

When Chandrasekaran got home, he and Raman made their final decision. 

Around 9 p.m., she called Horvath to tell her she was in. Horvath and her team put out a statement soon after, quashing the months of conjecture about whether she’d challenge Bass. 

Most dismissed the growing gossip about Raman's intentions. But a little after 10 p.m., KNX reporter Craig Fiegener posted that he'd heard Raman was running from a "credible source," setting off a frenzy in political circles.

SATURDAY, FEB. 8: Hours until the filing deadline. 

It was chilly out and not yet 8 a.m. when Raman and her communications director Stella Stahl sat on a low concrete ledge in Los Angeles State Historic Park and called reporters for embargoed interviews. Raman told the L.A. Times that she had “deep respect” for Bass, but the city couldn’t function without big changes. 

Then the councilmember hopped into an SUV with her chief of staff, Andrea Conant, and headed toward the City Clerk’s office at Piper Technical Center. 

She called the mayor as they drove. 

Bass was shocked and baffled, in part because she felt that Raman had never made the severity of her concerns known, publicly or privately, nor did the mayor think that Raman had presented a clear alternative during her six years on the council, or while chairing the council’s housing and homelessness committee.

The roof of Piper Tech, the building where candidates file, has sweeping views of the downtown skyline and distant mountains. But the journalists gathered up there were focused on the parking lot below, waiting for any sign of Raman. 

If she showed up, it was real. 

Raman strode into the building just before 9 a.m., with cameras clacking.

Millman — who was now acting as Raman’s campaign consultant — turned toward nearby reporters. Now that Raman was filing her paperwork, the embargo was lifted and they could reveal she was running.

”I was an outsider when I first ran, and I think I’ll be an outsider in this race, and I’m OK with that,” Raman told the cameras a few minutes later, positioning herself as a change candidate despite the fact that after five years on the council many will consider her part of the very establishment she is railing against. 

The breathless media comparisons to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the DSA-backed 34-year-old who breached Gracie Mansion in November, began before Raman had even left the filing area.

Just four months prior, Raman had cheered Mamdani’s election night victory alongside Soto-Martínez at a DSA watch party. But at the time, she’d thrown cold water on the idea that L.A. might get its own Mamdani narrative in the mayor’s race.

“Karen Bass is the most progressive mayor we’ve ever had in L.A,” she told an L.A. Times reporter that night.

As news of Raman’s decision reached Brentwood that Saturday morning, Caruso grew incensed that the city might end up with something he thought was worse than Karen Bass: a possible socialist mayor.

He started dialing around again, getting second, third and fourth opinions about whether he should change his mind one last time.

Still in his workout clothes, Caruso — who is typically ferried around town in an impeccably tailored suit — briefly considered getting in his car and driving himself down to Piper Tech to plunge into the race. But he was out of time to do anything but sit back in astonishment.

Six weeks later, the race remains wide open. According to a recent poll, more than half of voters don’t know which candidate they will back.