They wanted Karen Bass out — now they’re voting for her

Many residents of Pacific Palisades wanted Karen Bass to resign after the fire in January 2025. Now they will vote to re-elect her as mayor of LA.

It’s not because she’s done a much better job since then. It’s because Nithya Raman is a socialist with radical ideas and extremist supporters. 

After the pandemic, the riots, and the fire, the last thing residents want is more upheaval. 

Rebuilding lives, and homes, is difficult enough as it is. What people want most is stability.

Before the fire, most of LA’s problems didn’t reach Pacific Palisades.

Residents tried to keep the city’s failures at arm’s length. Until the fire brought them home.

Many residents supported Spencer Pratt for mayor in the primary election.

They were — and remain — furious about all of the government failures in the fire.

Karen Bass wasn’t even in LA. She was in Ghana, on a mission for the outgoing Biden administration.

Ironically, President Joe Biden was in LA. The reason Pacific Palisades had no police directing evacuations during the fire was that they were protecting the president.

The city and state also failed to position firefighters where they were needed.

So residents were on their own.

Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters

People fought the fire with garden hoses, until the water ran out. 

The reservoir was empty, which was inexcusable.

But even if it had been full, the water system would have lost pressure due to the sudden demand. The system wasn’t designed for wildfires. 

That wasn’t Karen Bass’ fault. But plenty of things were.

In the aftermath, she seemed to have no idea what to do. It was only after President Donald Trump visited, and publicly argued with the mayor, that she allowed residents to visit their burned homes.

As people sifted through the ruins, and fought with their insurance companies, they wondered if rebuilding was worth the risk.

Many wanted to come back to Pacific Palisades, but they wanted a commitment from the city that nothing like the fire could ever happen again.

Spencer Pratt channeled that desire for change. Not everyone liked his style. But at least he was offering common-sense solutions to the city’s problems.

As for Raman, she was invisible in Pacific Palisades after the fire. Her campaign staff will claim that she visited — and she did, once she was running for mayor.

But she’s also a socialist. And the deepest fear many residents had in Pacific Palisades is that the rest of the city would refuse to help — that people would see the place as a bunch of rich white people on the hill and leave residents to fend for themselves.

Some also feared that the city would try to seize land for low-income housing in Pacific Palisades, which is exactly what Raman’s socialist party manifesto says it wants to do, in general.

Raman seemed like a fringe candidate. She had trouble explaining to reporters why she was running. And Pratt ran circles around her and Bass in their primary debate.

So it was a shock to many in Pacific Palisades when Raman finished ahead of Pratt and qualified for the general election.

After that, many residents gave up on changing the city, politically. The focus has shifted to what they can do for themselves.

They just want the politicians to stay out of the way. And Karen Bass has been good at that.

Raman and her staff are — like Zohran Mamdani’s team in New York — bright, confident, and determined. 

They also seem to have no idea why socialism has never worked. But they’re going to try.

The Pacific Palisades wants no part of it.

The local Jewish community is also wary of Raman.

Her socialists have targeted Jewish houses of worship and schools with anti-Israel protests.

It’s noteworthy that their manifesto singles out a Jewish security group for de-funding.

Raman told a Jewish community forum in September that she believed Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza.

That is plainly untrue. And it is also the pretext that radical protesters have used when targeting Jewish institutions in LA.

At the community forum, Raman also defended appearing on a podcast with antisemite Hasan Piker. She also said she would appear on other podcasts hosted by hateful people, as long as they had an audience to reach. 

Why would any mayor of LA want to reach an audience of bigots?

Some of the Jewish residents of Pacific Palisades were prepared to give Raman a chance before that forum. 

Not anymore.

In short: Residents face a choice between the incompetent and the malevolent; between an apparatchik who let most of Pacific Palisades burn, and a radical who might destroy what remains.

No one can really know whether Bass will do a better job in a second term. They just don’t want to see what Raman, and her supporters, will do with power.

Joel Pollak is Opinion editor of the California Post and a displaced resident of Pacific Palisades.