Can the mayor of Los Angeles survive mistakes, climb the political ladder?

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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One might think that becoming the mayor of the nation the second largest city will catapult someone into the upper echelons of American politics.

However, those who have captured Los Angeles City Hall sooner or later find that navigating the city’s bewildering array of cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic fragments is difficult at best and often impossible, making it a dead-end job.

Here’s a little trivia that illustrates this harsh reality: Each of the five mayors of Los Angeles prior to current Mayor Karen Bass tried to climb another rung on the political ladder and failed.

That list most recently includes former mayor Eric Garcetti, who briefly flirted with a run for president but had to settle for ambassador to India, and his predecessor Antonio Villaraigosa, who lost a bid for governor in 2018 and ran again this year but barely registered in the polls.

We’ll see if Bass tries to succeed where others have failed. But first, we’ll see if she can even win a second term as mayor after making some spectacular mistakes in handling the incredibly destructive and deadly wildfires that swept through Los Angeles and its suburbs early last year.

The first one was waltzing to Ghana to attend the inauguration of its new president, even though the National Weather Service issued warnings that Santa Ana winds were creating “critical fire conditions.”

Bass later blamed others for not warning her of the danger. But as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote, “She had to call me. I had all the information I needed, along with a garden hose at the ready, and so did everyone else.”

During his time in Congress, Bass had a penchant for international entertainment. But when she ran for mayor, she promised that “the only places I’ll go will be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in conjunction with L.A.”

bass it failed again a year later when the Los Angeles Times published revelations about a report that was supposed to be a factual account of the mistakes made during the 2025 fires.

The newspaper first revealed that the Los Angeles Fire Department project after action report was massaged “to the extent of efforts to downplay failures of city leadership and the LAFD in preparing for and fighting the Jan. 7 fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.”

The Times subsequently dropped another bombshell, reporting that Bass “told then-Interim Fire Chief Ronny Villanueva that the report could expose the city to legal liability for these failures. Bass wanted key findings about the LAFD’s actions to be removed or toned down before the report was released, the sources said — and that’s what happened.”

As Bass began her campaign for a second term this year, it looked like her slips could be fatal to her political career – but that depends, of course, on whether a credible challenger emerges.

For weeks, the names of would-be contenders floated and faded — much like what was happening at the state level among potential gubernatorial candidates. In fact, one name, that of Los Angeles businessman Rick Caruso, was prominent in both.

After all, Caruso dropped out of both races and Bass found himself instead with an opponent on the left, a member of the City Council Nithya Raman. She filed at the last minute even though she had endorsed Bass and hopes to emulate New York City’s left-leaning Mayor Zochran Mamdani.

How it worked out is chronic in precise detail by Julia Wick, veteran journalist and co-founder of a new Los Angeles news site called LA Material. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Bass’s struggles or just the political minefield that is Los Angeles.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.