The Police Union Flipped. Bass Still Might Lose.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — One day before the November 3, 2026 runoff, Mayor Karen Bass is fighting to hold City Hall in a race The Guardian says she may already be losing, according to a three-day profile the newspaper published on November 1, 2026.

Read The Guardian's full report: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/01/karen-bass-los-angeles-mayoral-race

The profile, by columnist Charles M. Blow, follows Bass and her campaign through the final stretch of her runoff against Councilmember Nithya Raman.

At the end of 2022, the nation's four largest cities, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston, were all led by Black mayors elected in the political wave that followed the 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd. Six years later, Bass is the only one of the four still in office.

Bass told the newspaper the ground has shifted under her.

"Every now and then we're popular, but we go out of popularity very quickly," she said.

Affordability, Homelessness, The Fires

The Guardian points to housing as the pressure bearing down on the race.

The California Association of Realtors reported last week that just 15 percent of Los Angeles households could afford a median-priced home in the third quarter of 2026, a dip from levels already near historic lows.

An April poll by the Los Angeles Business Council Institute found 87 percent of city voters called housing affordability a serious problem, and 63 percent had considered leaving the city because of it.

Homelessness, the issue Bass campaigned on fixing, fell for two years and then ticked back up this year. Bass blames federal and state funding cuts.

According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, 34 percent of the city's unhoused people are Black, while Black residents make up less than 9 percent of the city's population.

Bass was on a diplomatic trip to Ghana when the Palisades fires began, and rebuilding has moved slowly since. At the final debate, she apologized, saying she was profoundly sorry she was not in her city when her city needed her.

A Flipped Union, A Friend Turned Critic

In Congress, Bass was the lead author of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. In her first run for mayor, the Los Angeles Police Protective League spent $2 million on television ads attacking her.

This year, the same union has endorsed Bass and spent nearly $3 million against Raman. Bass is campaigning on keeping the police chief, and last December asked the City Council to increase the police budget and expand the force.

Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and a longtime Bass friend, is now a critic of the mayor's record on policing.

"If she loses, she earns that loss," Abdullah told the newspaper.

The challenger, Raman, is a City Council member and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her campaign says young voters believe the status quo is broken and want a city that is more affordable and a government that is more responsive.

At a debate last month, Raman described Los Angeles as once the gold standard for non-cooperation with immigration enforcement under former Chief Daryl Gates. She apologized for the remark, and Bass has used it to argue Raman does not know the city's history well enough to lead it.

The runoff is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and polls close at 8:00 p.m. A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, released October 28, 2026, showed the race tied at 40 percent for Bass and 40 percent for Raman, with 19 percent undecided.

Sources: The Guardian, November 1, 2026; UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies / Los Angeles Times poll, released October 28, 2026.