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Rep. Karen Bass (D-California) will be trading her job as a member of Congress for a new office as mayor of Los Angeles after beating real estate developer Rick Caruso, according to an Associated Press projection Wednesday night. After serving six terms in Congress, Bass will become the first woman to serve as LA mayor, and the city’s second Black mayor.
With the last votes still being counted when the race was called, Bass led Caruso by a bit more than six points, even though Caruso, a billionaire, had outspent Bass’s campaign by an 11-to-one margin. Dude put $100 million into his own campaign and lost, so sad. At least he conceded, which is something that doesn’t go without saying these days.
Bass was already a familiar name for voters, what with her time as a top progressive member in Congress, where she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus in 2019 and 2020. She also served on the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. Before running for Congress in 2010, Bass had served in the California Assembly for six years, becoming its first black Speaker in 2008. [This is why your Editrix did not want her to run for LA mayor, an office which spits people out, but instead to stay in Congress and take over from Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she is ready to retire. Herding Democrats is not an easily learned skill.]
Caruso, on the other hand, was an influential mover and shaker in commercial real estate, as the developer of lots of great big rich-people places. Also, he was a Republican his entire life until January of this year, when he changed his registration to Democratic less than three weeks before filing as a mayoral candidate. One might almost think, if they were cynical, that it was largely a matter of branding:
Caruso blanketed his campaign materials with the word “Democrat” and largely sought to avoid discussion of his partisan political evolution on the trail. But he shifted tactics in mid-October, airing a TV ad that addressed the subject head on and discussed how the Republican Party “shifted to a place that didn’t represent my values.”
Somehow he made it through the entire Trump “presidency” before discovering that he was shocked, shocked at how awful the GOP had become. Caruso ran on a Git Tuff on Crime platform, and the early results of June’s everybody runs and we’ll put the top two in the general primary election actually showed him leading Bass, because the Voting Day returns get counted first. Ultimately, when all the votes were counted, Bass came out on top in that primary. But by then, Caruso’s early lead, plus the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, convinced some Very Srs Think Pieces about how progressive calls for criminal justice reform were toxic with voters, even though they were dead wrong.
Read Moar!
Oh, So ‘Crime Backlash Crushes Dems’ Turns Out To Be A Canard? The Duck You Say!
C’mon, Los Angeles, Don’t Vote For Billionaire Who Was Republican Until Five Seconds Ago For Mayor
Yes, LA Mayor Hopeful Rick Caruso, You Are A White Guy
Caruso’s campaign probably wasn’t helped much by his bizarre insistence in an interview that, as an Italian-American, he shouldn’t be thought of as “white,” but as “Latin,” which was so stupid it drove Yr Welsh-Irish-American Doktor Zoom to eat a potato and go to confession.
Bass ran ahead of Caruso throughout the campaign, gaining endorsements from every California Democrat you can name and probably several you can’t. But Caruso’s money did at least accomplish something: He helped the bottom line at a lot of ad agencies and TV stations; as the LA Times observes,
It was only in the final weeks of the race that polling significantly tightened, as Caruso poured roughly $3 million to $4 million a week into his barrage of advertising.
Caruso aimed to run up his lead with San Fernando Valley voters, Latinos and moderates, but Bass maintained strong backing from women, liberals and registered Democrats.
Once Bass is sworn in on December 12, she won’t have to travel to Washington DC to do her job anymore, so that should significantly reduce her personal carbon footprint, yay! She’s said her top priority after taking office will be declaring a state of emergency in response to homelessness, and to get the city’s estimated 41,000 unhoused people into housing. We wonder if there are any real estate developers in the area who might have the resources to help with that.
Also too, in other very good Los Angeles election news, LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his bid for a second term and will be replaced by Robert Luna; Villanueva conceded Tuesday after getting only 40 percent of the vote. Villanueva had run as a progressive reformer, but once in office turned into a Trumpian paranoid who went on Fox News to complain about vaccines and “wokeness,” and notoriously tried to “investigate” a reporter for the crime of reporting on his apparent role in covering up a horrible incident at the county jail, in which a deputy knelt on a handcuffed inmate’s head for three minutes. He also raided the home of County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, which was just fucking weird. Meanwhile, his deputies have regularly run interference for marauding Proud Boys while letting anti-vax lunatics scream at and throw down on cancer patients trying to enter Cedars-Sinai Hospital, because the hospital mandated masks.
We wish Sheriff-Elect Luna success in cleaning up the LASD — be sure to google #LASDGangs — and hope that Villanueva turns out to be too toxic even for a job at Fox News, but we’re not getting our hopes up there.
[LAT / Daily Beast / Photo: Karen Bass for Mayor, Public Domain]
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