Can LA Mayor Karen Bass survive her mistakes and climb the political ladder?

One might think that becoming mayor of the nation’s second largest city would catapult someone into the upper ranks of American politics.

However those who’ve captured the mayoralty of Los Angeles sooner or later discovered 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 bit of trivia that illustrates that harsh reality: Every one of the five Los Angeles mayors who preceded current Mayor Karen Bass tried to climb another rung on the political ladder but failed.

That list includes the most recent former mayor, Eric Garcetti, who flirted briefly with running for president but had to settle for ambassadorship to India, and his predecessor, Antonio Villaraigosa, who lost a bid for governor in 2018 and is running again this year but barely registering in the polls.

We’ll see whether Bass tries to succeed where others have failed. But first we’ll see whether 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 was waltzing off to Ghana to attend the inauguration of its new president, even though the National Weather Service had issued warnings that Santa Ana winds were creating “critical fire conditions.”

Bass later blamed others for not warning her about the peril. But as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote, “She should have called me. I had all the information I needed, along with a garden hose at the ready, and so did everybody else.”

During her time in Congress Bass had a penchant for international junkets. But when running for mayor she promised that “the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.”

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

The newspaper first revealed that a draft of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s after-action report was massaged “in what amounted to an effort to downplay the failures of city and LAFD leadership in preparing for and fighting the Jan. 7 fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.”

Subsequently, the Times dropped another bombshell, reporting that Bass “told then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva that the report could expose the city to legal liabilities for those failures. Bass wanted key findings about the LAFD’s actions removed or softened before the report was made public, the sources said — and that is what happened.”

As Bass began her campaign for a second term this year, it appeared that her lapses could be fatal to her political career — but that depended, of course, on whether a credible challenger would appear.

For weeks, the names of would-be challengers surfaced and faded — very similarly to what was happening at the state level among potential candidates for governor. In fact one name, that of Los Angeles businessman Rick Caruso, was prominent in both.

Eventually, Caruso bowed out of both contests and Bass wound up, instead, with an opponent from the left, City Councilmember Nithya Raman. She filed at the last moment, even though she had endorsed Bass and hopes to emulate New York’s leftist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

How that came about is chronicled in precise detail by Julia Wick, a veteran journalist and cofounder of a new Los Angeles news site called L.A. Material. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in Bass’ struggles, or just the political minefield that is Los Angeles.