Nithya Raman wants the keys to Los Angeles. She will not tell voters which parts of the socialist program that put her on the map she intends to run once she has them.
That is not a slip. It is the strategy. The Los Angeles Police Protective League, speaking for 8,700 officers, just said the quiet part out loud. Raman and the Democratic Socialists of America Los Angeles chapter are running a long game. Soft language up front. Hard policy after the oath.
“They are wolves masquerading as sheep, skilled at misinformation and distraction. Make no mistake, they are playing a long game designed to embed a socialist regime in Los Angeles.”
That is Tom Saggau, the union spokesman. He did not invent the metaphor. Scripture already named the type. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
The November 3 runoff against Mayor Karen Bass is six weeks away. Raman’s campaign had more than a week to answer sixteen straight questions drawn from the DSA-LA program she has ridden since 2020. The campaign answered none of them.
The Program She Will Not Own
DSA-LA did not hide the list. The New York Post put the demands in front of her campaign and asked her to say yes or no. Expropriate privately owned housing. Use eminent domain to move homes into public or “community” hands. Cut police funding. Close jails. Replace sworn officers with unarmed workers on traffic stops and mental-health calls. Further decriminalize drug use. Roll back the city’s no-camping rule near schools. City-owned grocery stores and internet service. Free transit. Universal rent control. A vacancy tax on empty units. Noncitizen voting in local elections.
The chapter’s own language is not subtle. Candidates who want the endorsement and want to keep it are expected to “commit to our Program.” Raman is a dues-paying member. The chapter backed her first council win in 2020, her reelection in 2024, and her mayoral run this month after an internal vote of 937 to 484.
When the union ran focus groups, most people had never read the DSA website. Then they heard the word “expropriate.” Armenian and Jewish participants did not need a seminar. They have family memory of governments that seized houses and called it justice.
“Once people figure ‘expropriate’ means they could lose their house, everything gets real.”
Saggau again. A longtime family business owner, filmed for upcoming union ads, put it even plainer. “What do you mean my family built this business and they can just take it?”
That is the whole argument in one sentence. Somebody has to pay for the “free” city the socialists keep advertising. Saggau’s line on that was crude and accurate. “There’s not a tax they don’t embrace. They are the party of free sh**.”
Co-Governing Means Marching Orders
Raman will not answer the sixteen questions. She will talk all day about “partnership.”
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, replayed by the Post, she called DSA “a partner for a lot of the work that we’ve done.” Tenant protections. Charter reform. Asked what that relationship looks like if she becomes mayor, she refused to draw a line.
“I will continue to welcome their partnership and will always work alongside organizations that are active in Los Angeles and are trying to shape the city.”
Asked whether she is still in the chapter’s “co-governing” process, she said, “With everyone, with everyone. Yes. With everyone.”
Venice Neighborhood Council member Nico Ruderman, who helped lead the recall of former Councilman Mike Bonin, translated that for people who still live in the neighborhoods the last DSA experiment wrecked.
“Let’s call co-governing what it really means. Taking political marching orders from DSA while making city policy.”
Ruderman has watched this movie. Bonin gave the Westside the first cut. Encampments near schools. Needles. Overdoses. RV explosions. Open drug use. Raman opposed a blanket 500-foot anti-camping buffer around schools and daycares. The union says she has voted more than 75 times against banning camps at more than 500 sensitive sites. A new LAPPL ad puts a child on that walk and lets her say what grown politicians will not. Walking to school should not be scary. Kids should not have to keep their heads down so they do not step on a needle.
Councilwoman Traci Park did not dress it up. “The DSA has already proven they will make our city unlivable. That must serve as cautionary tale for voters headed to the polls in November.”
The Defund Walk-Back and the Votes That Did Not Walk Back
In May, Raman told CNN she no longer believes in defunding the police. The Daily Caller carried the clip. Days later she would not give a clean answer when pressed again. This week she voted no on $100,000 so LAPD could stay in the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, the fusion shop that shares terrorism and major-crime intelligence with federal and local partners.
She will fund de-escalation classes. She will starve the part of the department that tracks people who want to kill civilians. That is not a pivot. That is a preference.
Her platform still talks about scaling unarmed response citywide and wiring it into 911. DSA-LA wants fewer sworn officers, period. Raman wants voters to believe those two sentences describe different futures. They do not.
Meanwhile the force is already short. Chief Jim McDonnell has said LAPD sits near 8,550 officers and would need something like 12,500 to police the city the way a city this size, heading into a 2028 Olympics, actually requires. Raman has voted against hiring packages and against the 2023 contract that tried to keep officers from walking out the door.
The Race Is Closer Than City Hall Wanted
Bass finished first in June. Raman finished second after mail ballots buried Republican Spencer Pratt. Primary night tears. Then a late surge. That is Los Angeles.
Now Raman’s own Hart Research internal, reported by Breitbart, has her up 44 to 39 with 17 percent still loose. Bass allies have started talking, off the record, about energy sitting on the challenger’s side. Hollywood ads. Carpenters money. Unite HERE. DSA door-knockers. The comparison writing itself is Zohran Mamdani in New York. A socialist who talks affordability while the program behind him is expropriation, weaker police, and a city that treats property as a moral defect.
Bass is a bad mayor. That is not an argument for handing the office to the faction that wants to finish what Bonin started and call it justice. Raman chairs the homelessness committee in a city that still cannot clear the sidewalks. A $62.6 million initiative she championed had housed three households by late June against a goal of roughly 2,000. The Blaze caught her celebrating eight months of work that produced painted stripes on a cracked street and calling it a win. That is the competence resume.
Susan Collins, who helped lead a recall effort against Raman, said the faction is “legislating people out of their homes and commercial properties.” Focus-group voters needed one word explained. Then they understood.
Raman can keep calling DSA a partner. Partners who demand you commit to their program, then knock doors for you, are not civic clubs. They are a government-in-waiting. Los Angeles already tried the humane-sounding version of this on the Westside. The needles did not care about the press release.
Voters have six weeks. They can demand a yes or a no on seizure, on cops, on camps by the schoolyard, and on ballots for people who are not citizens. Or they can take the smile, the partnership talk, and find out after Inauguration Day what “co-govern” was always going to mean.
