The LA mayoral race has officially become a circus, and I’m not sure whether to laugh or cringe. It started with a fake poll that was supposedly propping up Mayor Karen Bass—and the polling company behind it has now shut down completely. They admitted the whole thing was a “short-term social experiment” to see how unverified data spreads. The site is scrubbed, the company is gone, and yet the damage was already done because several news outlets and Bass’s own team shared those bogus numbers before quietly retracting them.
I mean, come on. A poll that shows Bass leading Nithya Raman by twelve points? A poll that says she’s winning over Spencer Pratt voters? And the company only had about twenty followers on social media when they suddenly appeared in August.
But people still ran with it. The LA Times reporter kept pressing them for a lead pollster, got no response, and then they announced they were discontinuing their polling operation. That’s not a scandal, that’s just an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Then we get to the debate, and honestly, it’s even harder to watch.
Both candidates spent the whole time telling voters, “I failed less than she did. ” That’s the pitch. Vote for the one who screwed up the least. They clashed over homelessness, and Raman was bragging about reducing street homelessness in her district by 49% and cutting tents and encampments by 70%.
But Bass kept cutting in, saying, “Hold on, that was Inside Safe that did that, not you. ” And Raman fired back, “No, no, no, sorry, but the encampment on the 101 was removed by Inside Safe. ” They talked over each other so much the audience couldn’t tell who was telling the truth anymore. One of them even claimed there were no encampments near schools in her district.
The other one pushed back, saying there were when she first started. And that’s the thing—neither of them convinced anyone they have a real plan. All they’ve done is watched the homeless population grow while the city pours money into programs that don’t seem to change anything. People are given housing and they stay on the streets.
They’re given needles and they stay on drugs. It’s a sickening cycle, and both of them are responsible for letting it continue. And if that wasn’t enough, Karen Bass’s campaign is begging for donations with a matching program that sounds too good to be true because it basically is. For every dollar a Los Angeles resident gives her campaign, the city—the city she runs—matches it six to one.
So you donate five bucks and the city turns it into thirty-five. You give twenty-five and they turn it into one seventy-five. The campaign even put out a video saying, “We had to start over from scratch after the primary, so rush your matching donation right now. ”
Six to one.
My 401K gets matched maybe dollar for dollar at three percent, but the mayor gets a six-to-one taxpayer-funded amplifier. They say this program was meant to give underprivileged candidates a chance, but you have a state that keeps talking about a wealth tax, claiming there’s not enough money, and meanwhile they’re handing out taxpayer dollars to boost a political campaign. It’s legal. It’s on the books.
But that doesn’t mean it looks right. So what are we left with? A fake poll, two candidates arguing over who failed less, and a city handing free money to its own mayor’s campaign. And the sad part is, this is the best we can do.
We built this system, we updated it, we let everyone with the qualifications run, and these are the candidates who ended up in front of us. It’s real, it affects people’s lives, and yet it all just feels like entertainment at this point. People watching probably think neither of them should win, but one of them is going to. My tiebreaker is usually to avoid the socialistic, communistic type because I haven’t seen that turn out well.
But I’m curious what everyone else thinks. Who’s going to win this thing? And more importantly, who should?
