Los Angeles voters have been moving steadily left this election year

from Jim NewtonCalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

How liberal is Los Angeles?

That question is very much on the minds of politicians and observers these days as the city heads to its municipal elections and makes important decisions about its future: how much to invest in public safety, how much to tax its wealthiest residents, how to treat those who live here without official immigration papers.

One trend is clear: Los Angeles is leaning more to the left, a phenomenon that has implications for this year’s elections, which include mayoral race along with campaigns for two other citywide offices and eight seats on the 15-member council that governs America’s second-largest city.

Once a bastion of conservative politics under the protection of Republican business leaders and a Republican newspaper, Los Angeles has moved steadily left in recent decades. The days when Richard Riordan, a moderate Republican, could win the support of the electorate are long gone in today’s Los Angeles.

Some of this is evident in voter registration. When Reardon was elected in 1993, more than 30 percent of the city’s registered voters were Republicans. Today, the number is about half that. As measured by voter registration, Los Angeles is significantly more Democratic — and less Republican — than New York City, which recently elected the democratic socialist Zochran Mamdani as its mayor.

But voter registration is only the first part of the issue. Some of the evidence for the changing political center of Los Angeles is more local and impressionistic.

Rising liberalism

Always a city of neighborhoods, Los Angeles has seen the rise of more liberal activism in many of these communities in recent years, some of it due to greatly improved outreach and voter outreach by the region’s Democratic Socialists.

The result is a surge in liberal representation on the city council, where Democratic Socialists Eunice Hernandez, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman anchor a council that is well to the left of many mainstream Democrats. These members and a growing number of their colleagues are skeptical about spending more on the police and are eager to find new sources of taxation that affect the wealthy. They are also committed to higher wages for working people and fiercely defend Los Angeles residents regardless of immigration status.

This program, supported by grassroots organization and sophisticated political leadership, touched voters and made the left much more viable in local elections.

The political muscle of Los Angeles’ growing liberal faction is demonstrated not only in the number of candidates who identify with Democratic Socialists, but more broadly in how it helps shape the policies and priorities of the city as a whole.

Not long ago, support for increased LAPD spending was a unifying city goal. Conservatives supported the idea of ​​stricter enforcement of the law, while liberals saw it as a way to pay for police reform and mandate police oversight. Not more.

Although “defunding the police” is a bygone slogan, critics of the LAPD are numerous and unwilling to agree to the once-routine budget requests to maintain or expand police ranks. Today, the department has about 8,500 employees, well below peak staffing levels and well below the long-sought goal of 10,000. However, Mayor Karen Bass’ recent request for additional funding has run into opposition on the City Council.

The council ultimately approved a watered-down version of the mayor’s request, but the compromise is unlikely to allow the LAPD to withstand retirements and other attrition. Four council members — Hernandez, Soto-Martinez, Raman and Councilwoman Isabel Jurado — opposed even that.

Taxing the rich

Some of these same forces are at work in the debate over “estate tax“, a favorite idea of ​​the left in Los Angeles. The tax, which voters approved in 2022, applies to multimillion-dollar real estate transactions, adding a 4 percent tax to sales over $5.1 million and 5 percent to properties over $10.3 million (thresholds are indexed, hence the unusual threshold numbers). The tax revenue goes to building affordable housing.

Taxing the rich is always good populist policy, but here it helped shape the city’s changing politics. Bass, for example, tried to vacate properties affected by the Palisades fire as he worked to balance his support for affordable housing with her fire recovery commitment.

The result is more confusion than clarity, a testament to the challenges of managing a changing electorate — especially in an election year.

The fight over the tax continues, but its very tenacity says something about the city’s drift to the left. It is inconceivable that Mayor Riordan, for example, would have supported the estate tax, and it is hard to imagine that voters 20 years ago would have approved it. Reardon lived in Brentwood in a home that would have qualified for the surcharge, and the emphasis of much of the city’s politics in those days was on safety and job creation, not capital or government-backed affordable housing.

There are many reasons for the shift to the left, and not all of them are specific to Los Angeles. The economic of the nation inequality continues to widenand the plight of those left out of economic growth is increasingly dire and visible in the big cities, where wealth and poverty live side by side.

This is inevitable in modern Los Angeles, with its grand homes, glitzy boutiques and terrifying homelessness.

Trump and the election year

The local left is also clearly thriving in the era of President Donald Trump. The president who likes to vilify Los Angeles and California is vilified in Los Angeles. His influence radicalized liberals, causing them to vote for new congressional maps—Los Angeles County preferred last year’s Prop. 50 by a staggering 74% to 25% — and to stand up for undocumented migrants.

More purely political changes also contributed. Los Angeles in 2015 changed its election schedule from voting in odd-numbered years to coinciding with the gubernatorial and presidential election cycle.

It was a change with mixed results, but one clear consequence was the broadening of participants in city elections. An electorate once dominated by homeowners and wealthier interests now increasingly includes lower-income voters and renters, whose interests tend to pull the city toward programs like rent control and away from priorities like strong police protection.

And so 2026 is a landmark election year for Los Angeles.

One indicator of the turning cycle came this week when Mayor Bass held the first of two State of the City addresses to present his perspective on where the city is right now.

The gathering was telling in many ways: Held near the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in one of the city’s most black and brown communities, it anchored Bass among some of her staunchest supporters. The location also highlights Los Angeles’ role as host of the World Cup and, in 2028, the Summer Olympics. As a gesture of civic unity, Bass’ presentation even included performances by the UCLA and USC marching bands.

The state of the city

The audience’s response to Bass’ lines also said something. She was politely applauded when she made her point the city’s historic progress against crime: Last year, Los Angeles recorded 230 murders, the lowest number since the 1960s and a startling change from the 1990s, when several years in a row saw more than 1,000 murders.

The public applauded Bass’ promises to promote accessibility and her record tackling street homelessnesswhich has declined slightly for two consecutive years—small steps, but at least steps in the right direction.

The biggest cheers of the day, however, came when Bass hit his sharpest notes. Condemning Trump’s ICE raids and the “devastating loss of life” caused by his agents, Bass urged his audience to stand up to Washington.

“Staying silent or minimizing what is happening is not an option,” she said. “This senseless death, lawlessness and violence must end. And so must the presence of ICE in Los Angeles.”

At that, the audience jumped to their feet, giving literal voice to the fact that in today’s Los Angeles, defiance of Trump and Washington is an act of popular politics, not extremism.

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