Los Angeles just fired its mayor and made history in the same motion.
Nithya Raman won the mayoral race, defeating incumbent Karen Bass. Raman is Kerala-born, and she becomes the first Asian-American mayor in Los Angeles history.
Beating an incumbent mayor is hard anywhere. It is especially hard in a city the size of Los Angeles, where the mayor's office controls an enormous machinery of services and where incumbents usually enjoy every advantage money and name recognition can buy. Voters looked at all of that and chose change anyway.
The result fits the night. Tuesday's elections were a Democratic wave nationally — both chambers of Congress, seven flipped Senate seats, governorships falling across the map. But the Los Angeles result was not a party story. Raman beat a sitting mayor of her own political world, in a fight over who should run America's second-largest city.
And it is one more first on a night stacked with them. The first Latino governor of Texas. The first Native American woman governor, in New Mexico. The first Black woman governor of a state, in Georgia. The first Latino governor of California. The first openly gay man and the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. Add Los Angeles: first Asian-American mayor.
There is a pattern in that list, and it is not subtle. Barriers that stood for generations fell in bunches, in one election, in every region of the country.
Raman's win also carries a specific weight for Los Angeles. The city is one of the most diverse on earth, home to communities from everywhere. For the first time, its mayor will come from one of those communities — born in Kerala, now elected to lead the city.
Bass's defeat closes her tenure at City Hall and opens a transition. Raman will inherit the whole sprawling job: the budget, the bureaucracy, the crises scheduled and unscheduled.
But first, the history. Los Angeles has a new mayor, and she is the first of her kind the city has ever had.
The win also fits a cycle that rewarded change almost everywhere it was offered. Across the country on Tuesday, voters replaced incumbents, flipped legislative chambers and ended streaks that had lasted decades — including 31 years of Republican governors in Texas. Los Angeles was asked the same question in its own way, about its own City Hall, and it gave the same answer as the rest of the country: someone new.
For Bass, the defeat ends a tenure that began with her own historic election. For Raman, the work starts now — and so does the scrutiny that comes with being both a change candidate and a first.
