Los Angeles Mayor Race: Karen Bass and Rick Caruso Will Face Off In General Election

Gary Baum
·7 min read
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Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) and billionaire local developer Rick Caruso are headed to a November run-off election for the Los Angeles mayoralty after the Associated Press called the race on Tuesday night. The top vote-getters in the open primary go on to face each other in the general election in November.

Their candidacies — which divided Hollywood loyalties during the open primary — each promised solutions for a city grappling with deep anxiety over homelessness, housing affordability and crime.

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Two-time L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti was termed out. His nomination to become U.S. Ambassador to India has been held for months in the Senate over allegations he knew about (and didn’t properly address) a top aide’s sexual misconduct. Bass would be the first female and second Black mayor in the city’s history. A win by Caruso, an outsider to elected politics known for fashioning idealized urban environments (he cites Walt Disney as a key influence), would mark a rare renunciation of the city’s liberal Democratic political establishment.

L.A. City Council member Kevin de León, a former president pro tempore of the California state, lagged in third place. He’d been a lightning rod for local progressive activists due to his attempts to relocate homeless individuals and eliminate tent encampments in his Downtown L.A. district — also a source of ongoing friction for productions which shoot in the area.

Caruso, the son of the founder of Dollar Rent a Car, is a mall magnate known for The Grove and other upscale regional centers. He’s been a member or president of several city commissions and long toyed with seeking the mayoralty. Bass, who began her career as a local community organizer, has spent decades in Democratic politics, most recently serving six terms in Congress representing swaths of the Westside and South L.A. Joe Biden shortlisted her for vice-president.

Caruso, in a raw display of modern-day plutocratic power, quickly built support with a largely self-financed run — spending more than $40 million to blanket the airwaves with his advertising prior to the election, more than a dozen times the amount Bass has so far dispersed ($3.3 million) during her own campaign. “I’m fighting someone with unlimited funds,” she’s said.

Bass will need to energize the contingent that voted for now-vanquished fellow career civil-servant and moderate de León. That may be the easy part. Far trickier will be appealing to independents while not alienating her left flank, which has already bridled at her policy plans for ending homeless encampments and hiring more LAPD officers.

In a two-candidate field, Caruso will likely face a brighter spotlight in deep-blue Los Angeles on his history of conservative politics. The law-and-order candidate, a registered Republican until 2019 — he supported John Kasich’s attempt to challenge Donald Trump for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination — changed his party affiliation to Democrat less than a month before filing to run for mayor in February. While his ethos is decidedly Rockefeller Republican, not MAGA, he nevertheless retains a seat on the board of trustees at the Ronald Reagan Foundation alongside such right-wing luminaries as Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Ryan and Elaine Chao.

Both candidates have lined up bold-faced Hollywood support. Bass supporters include Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Norman Lear, Ariana Grande, Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel, Showtime’s David Nevins, ICM’s Chris Silbermann and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who has funded attack ads against Caruso through an independent expenditure committee, drawing a rebuke from the mall magnate. (Katzenberg, in return, derided him as “too thin-skinned and temperamental to serve as our mayor.”) Other industry Bass backers run from Donald Glover, Magic Johnson and Tracee Ellis Ross to Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Garner, Yvette Nicole Brown, Michael Eisner, director-producer Phil Lord and Tiffany Haddish, who previously told THR she admired Bass’ work with foster youth and the unhoused.

For his part, Caruso has drawn prominent endorsements ranging from fellow billionaire Elon Musk (“Executive competence is super underrated in politics – we should care about that a lot more!”) and Kim Kardashian (“I really believe in what he stands for”) to AMC CEO Adam Aron (The Grove features one of its multiplexes) and Gwyneth Paltrow (there’s a Goop Sundries shop at Caruso’s Montecito resort, the Rosewood Miramar Beach). His other declared fans include CAA’s Bryan Lourd, UTA’s Jay Sures, Disney’s Dana Walden, Brian Grazer, Scooter Braun, Snoop Dogg, Irena Medavoy, Snap founder Evan Spiegel, Katy Perry, Maria Shriver and George Lopez.

An X factor through the arc of the general election is the potential for a polarizing recall of progressive L.A. County District Attorney George Gascon. Along with the L.A. County Sheriff slugfest (incumbent, Fox News favorite and Gascon arch-nemesis Alex Villanueva will attempt to fend off his challenger, former Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna), the D.A. referendum may shadow the mayoral race, reorienting it from its prevailing top-line emphasis on housing and homelessness toward crime and punishment.

Gascon’s opponents are mounting an aggressive direct-mail drive to collect the required signatures by July 6 to get the recall on the ballot. Caruso, like Villanueva, has endorsed the recall effort, which is led by prosecutors and law enforcement officials, including the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which has also financed a multi-million-dollar attack ad campaign against Bass. They deride Gascon, elected in 2020, as soft-on-crime, blaming his justice-reform policies for increased lawlessness, including an uptick in murders such as the December 2021 killing of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant, wife of music executive Clarence Avant and mother-in-law of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who’ve both since backed Caruso. (Gascon and his defenders reject the attacks, contending he’s simply pursuing the practices he campaigned on.)

Sures, the co-president of UTA, told THR — as early results were trickling in — of Caruso’s showing that, “I think the campaign is thrilled that he started at 6% and it’s now at north of 40%. There’s a way to go [in the general election]. I think the difference is that Rick has such a clear message. It’s crystal-clear. The other candidate’s message is not clear enough.”

Entrepreneur Jon Vein — who along with his wife, manager-producer Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, is a prominent supporter of Bass — predicted success for his preferred candidate in November and called out Caruso for running what he described as a negative campaign.

“I think that for Rick to deliver an onslaught of negativity, he’s done as much damage as he’ll ever be able to do and she’s still standing so I think that when we head into the general and there’s going to be real money and real scrutiny on his record, I think there’ll be as close to clear sailing as you’ll get,” Vein tells THR. “My impression is that his chance to win was locked into getting 50 percent now. And that’s why they went so unnecessarily, aggressively negative. I’m sure that’s the advice he was given by the people around him. … I think it’ll be a lot easier for her to raise money now. People have been on the sidelines.”

Sures, for his part, has a different take on how Caruso’s campaign is playing: “I think that ultimately, at the end of the day, people go towards the clear message, the message that they can comprehend, that they can understand, that they think is implementable. And I think people will be attracted to Rick because of the clarity of his message.”

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