Outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass apparently thinks voters just got sick of her.
The 73-year-old chalked up her loss to socialist Nithya Raman to a nationwide appetite for political change, pointing to “a wave that took place around the country.”
“This happens every five or six years, that voters get in a space where they just want everything new,” Bass said Thursday at a ribbon-cutting event for a $72 million taxpayer-funded homeless housing project at a converted motel.
“And I think that what happened here was part of that.”
The remarks echo earlier comments from Bass about midterm election results around the US.
When asked what went wrong with her campaign, she cited the broader wave of voter frustration and demands for change.
“I put the election in the context of the national scene,” she told NBC4. “To me, there was a wave and these waves happen. I’ve been around long enough to experience them, not where they necessarily affected me. But change waves happen where people are just frustrated. They just want change, they got it.”
Raman defeated the incumbent by capturing nearly 55% of the vote to Bass’ roughly 45%, according to the latest results.
The defeat makes Bass, a former state Assembly speaker and six-term congresswoman, the first sitting LA mayor to lose to a challenger since Jim Hahn fell to Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005.
“Obviously I was disappointed in the results,” she said. “But the results are the results.”
She also offered a decidedly bleak outlook on her political future, giving a one-word answer on Tuesday when asked by NBC4 whether she would ever seek elected office again.
“Doubtful,” she said during her first public appearance since the defeat.
Raman’s victory puts Los Angeles alongside New York and Washington, DC, as major cities led by democratic socialists, joining New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and DC Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George.
Raman is set to take office Dec. 14.
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