00:00The latest poll in the L.A. mayor's race is shaking things up in the City of Angels.
00:05The poll from UC Berkeley and L.A. Times shows incumbent Mayor Karen Bass losing right now by 11 points
00:12to socialist challenger Nithya Raman, who is a member of the city council.
00:16Now, there are still a large number of undecided voters in this poll, 33 percent.
00:21But this does show a momentum shift toward the challenger.
00:24And that's what we might expect after a run of bad news for the incumbent mayor.
00:29Bass made her whole campaign in the primary center on the fact that she had lowered homelessness over the first
00:36few years that she had been in office.
00:38But a new homeless count came out at the end of July, showing that the number of homeless people had
00:42actually gone up in L.A.
00:44And that undermined Bass's case for another term.
00:48If you add that to the outrage that many Angelenos still feel over the fires of 2025, you have the
00:54makings of a revolt against the incumbent mayor.
00:58Now, people don't really seem to know very much about Nithya Raman and the platform of the Democratic Socialists of
01:04America, which she belongs to, is pretty radical.
01:07But in a race like this where people are dissatisfied with the incumbent, the challenger has several advantages, the most
01:14important of which is that people just want something new.
01:16They just want something different. And they're willing to take a chance, even if on paper, the policies that the
01:22challenger is bringing to the table might simply take the city further in the direction it's already moving.
01:27And that's not a good one. We'll see what happens.
01:30The first ballots are mailed out at the beginning of October and the first votes will start coming in.
01:35The only poll that really counts at the end of the day is the one that's in the ballot box.
01:38But for now, it's looking like a very interesting race and a possible upheaval in L.A. in November.
