The mad scramble that remade the L.A. mayoral race

Good morning, it’s Thursday, March 19, and you can expect another day of ruthless sunshine, with slight relief from the heat by the end of the weekend. Here are three stories to know about today, beginning with an excerpt from our first L.A. Material exclusive.

Lindsey Horvath, one of Los Angeles County’s five powerful supervisors, grew increasingly irate as she scrolled. 

The fiercely ambitious millennial politician was in the passenger seat of her assistant’s Kia hatchback and she couldn’t believe what she was reading: The L.A. Times had just published a bombshell story alleging that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass had directed the city’s after-action report on the Palisades fire to be watered down to downplay the city’s failures. (Bass has forcefully denied the allegations.)

It was Wednesday, Feb. 4 — three days before the deadline for candidates to file in the mayoral race — and Horvath had been very publicly flirting with a run for months. Despite the widespread frustration in the city and Bass’ unpopularity, the incumbent mayor looked like she might close out the week without any serious opposition to her reelection bid. 

The report’s allegations solidified Horvath’s belief that someone had to challenge Bass, but running would come with enormous political jeopardy, forcing her to forfeit her safe supervisorial seat. 

“Can you believe this?” Horvath asked Rick Caruso. 

Caruso, the billionaire real estate developer who’d lost to Bass in 2022 despite spending more than $100 million, had been a persistent thorn in the mayor’s side, particularly since the fires. He had spent months openly toying with either a mayoral or gubernatorial bid, then announced just two weeks prior that he wouldn’t be running for anything after all. 

But Caruso had been privately reconsidering that decision, as it looked more likely that Bass’ most credible opponent, former schools superintendent Austin Beutner, might drop out of the race following the sudden death of his daughter.

Despite their political differences, both Horvath and Caruso had been supportive of the other’s prospective mayoral candidacies. Had either jumped into the race, they likely would have had the other’s backing.

Back on the call, Horvath prodded Caruso about whether he might reconsider getting in. There was a long beat. 

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

Scrambling through the logistics of how Caruso might plausibly launch a campaign with just days until the filing deadline, Horvath offered her own political team to help, including her chief of staff Estevan Montemayor — a charismatic political operative who’d helped Bass clinch victory in 2022. 

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. But that was then. 

Now, Montemayor was on a Zoom with Horvath, Caruso, and other members of their teams, 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.

This is an excerpt from our first L.A. Material exclusive, “Five Days That Blew Up The L.A. Mayoral Race.”

The story is an inside look at 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 an alternative to Bass. And how the city wound up with a race almost no one saw coming: a challenge from the left, from the mayor’s close ally, Councilwoman Nithya Raman. 

The New York Times dropped a brutal and detailed report Wednesday accusing revered labor leader Cesar Chavez of sexually assaulting two girls in the 1970s, and raping fellow organizer Dolores Huerta.

Huerta posted her own statement Wednesday, which began: “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”

The revelations come less than two weeks before the March 31 Cesar Chavez holiday. Almost every city and town in California has at least one street, park or school named in Chavez’s honor, and often more than one.

Later this morning, Bass will hold a press conference with several female members of City Council where she’ll talk about renaming a number of city landmarks, though the city is still assessing what logistics will be required. The name of Cesar Chavez Avenue, a major east–west thoroughfare running from downtown through East L.A., is also potentially on the chopping block. (West of Figueroa, the same street continues as Sunset Boulevard.)

The news also came just as many school children are about to begin their required curriculum studying the labor leader. One LAUSD teacher told L.A. Material that her school was scrambling to figure out how to address the allegations. The Los Angeles Unified School District issued a statement saying that it was “reviewing curriculum and resources to ensure the emphasis remains on the important work of the farmworker movement, not on any one individual.” 

There’s been a massive shakeup on the Board of Fire Commissioners, the civilian group that oversees the city’s embattled Fire Department, with four of its five members departing, the L.A. Times reports. 

One outgoing commissioner who spoke to the Times expressed frustration that the board didn’t have more sway, criticizing it as a “ceremonial role”; others cited personal reasons for their departures. 

A quick zoom-out: The city has dozens of advisory boards and commissions whose members are appointed by the mayor. But only a handful — like the commissions overseeing LAFD, LAPD and a few other important departments — wield actual power. Or at least theoretically wield actual power — in practice, city departments often steer the commissions, rather than the other way around.

Bass spokesperson Yusef Robb said Wednesday that the mayor was confident her "reform agenda" would accelerate under the leadership of her new appointees. Several of Bass’ newly named commissioners have deep ties to her, including her longtime political ally and former state Assembly colleague John Pérez, and government affairs advisor Jose Campos Cornejo, whose wife Lupita Sanchez Cornejo is president of the Getty House Foundation board, the nonprofit tied to the mayor’s official residence. 

A LOOMING SCHOOL STRIKE: The nation’s second-largest school district could screech to a halt on April 14, unless the unions representing teachers and service workers at Los Angeles Unified reach a contract deal with the district before then, the unions said Wednesday. Such a strike would massively disrupt the city.

A RED CARPET LIGHTMARE: The Hollywood Reporter has an appropriately dishy dispatch about celebrities dissatisfied with the too bright and brutally unforgiving lighting at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. “One poor actress looked like a Diane Arbus character. She was on her phone looking at her pictures and shrieking at her publicist,” an insider sniped. 

WORLD CUP WRANGLING: After President Trump suggested last week that the Iranian national soccer team not attend its two L.A.-hosted World Cup matches this summer “for their own life and safety,” one of Iran’s ambassadors announced negotiations with FIFA to relocate both matches to Mexico. FIFA, however, refused to allow the move, saying that all World Cup teams would compete "as per the match schedule."

GET ME TO GILROY: Ralph Vartabedian, the dogged chronicler of California's ill-fated bullet train, is back with more bad news on the massive construction project, which he writes has become an “object of global ridicule.”  In LA Reported, he reveals that the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority is now proposing to send a train 220 miles per hour from …. Palmdale to Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world. Slower methods of transportation would then get passengers to where they might actually want to go.

SIDE HUSTLE: The head chef of Dunsmoor, one of L.A.’s most lauded restaurants, “nearly won” the world’s largest amateur pool tournament recently, per SFGATE. (And he isn’t the only high-profile Angeleno who knows how to line up a clean shot. L.A.-area Congresswoman Laura Friedman is a former semi-professional pool player who posed in front of the Capitol with a cue stick on the cover of "Billiards Digest” last year.)

For today’s peek inside our subscriber-only Discord server, L.A. Material contributor Alex Zaragoza learns a life lesson in the #celebritysightings channel. 

AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “Zona” by Jim Harrison.