(The Center Square)–Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, has been elected mayor of Los Angeles.
Current Mayor Karen Bass conceded Thursday, congratulating Raman on her victory in Tuesday’s election.
With Raman’s win in the close race, Los Angeles joins Seattle, New York and Washington, D.C., as cities electing mayors who identify as democratic socialists.
As of Thursday afternoon, Raman had 429,450 votes or 52.1%. Bass had 394,796 or 47.9%. The figures come from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office.
In a video posted on X, Raman said that she is “deeply honored” to be the next mayor.
“Thank you to the thousands of people who knocked on doors, sent texts, made phone calls, convinced their neighbors to believe in the promise of this big, beautiful, joyful city that we get to call home,” said Raman, seen standing on a hill overlooking Los Angeles. “To every voter out there who voted for Mayor Bass or who chose not to vote in this election at all, please know this, I am going to City Hall to work every single day to earn your trust and to earn your trust in this city again.”
While Raman will not be sworn into office until December, the mayor-elect noted work starts now so Los Angeles can “build housing that people can afford, parks for children to play in, a transit system that can get people where they need to go, a city that is safe for its working people and its families, and a city government that is actually capable of delivering on its promises” for Angelenos.
Bass said that while this is not the outcome her campaign hoped for, the people of Los Angeles have spoken.
“I have called Councilmember Nithya Raman to congratulate her on her victory, and I have committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition,” said Bass. “Moving this city forward is what Los Angeles needs from all of us.”
Raman, who is of Indian descent, will be the city’s first South Asian mayor.
Bass, a Democrat who previously served as a congresswoman and the California Assembly speaker, was Los Angeles’ first female mayor. She was also the city’s first first Black female mayor.
“You gave me the honor of serving the city that raised me, and every single day since, I have carried that responsibility with me,” said Bass.
Raman and Bass did not agree on many issues. Bass said in a debate Raman was not prepared for the job. Raman accused Bass for mismanagement and criticized her for being out of the country during the 2025 fires.
With the election over, Raman “wanted to pay tribute to Mayor Karen Bass,” adding that she has “given decades of her life” to making Los Angeles what it is today.
“From her time as an emergency room nurse, to starting Community Coalition, to her leadership in Sacramento and in D.C., and then becoming the first woman mayor of Los Angeles, she has served Los Angeles for so many decades and I know so many people, not just across the city, but across this country are grateful for her dedication to the promise of Los Angeles,” said Raman.
Spencer Pratt, a mayoral candidate whom Raman leapfrogged in the days immediately following the June primary as mail-in ballots were counted, said in an X post that Nithya did not win.
“Karen lost,” said Pratt, a Republican. “You simply can’t destroy a city as much as she did. She played with fire, and she got fired.”
Bass was heavily criticized for being in Ghana for a presidential inauguration when the devastating Palisades Fire broke out on Jan. 7, 2025 in Los Angeles.
Raman, meanwhile, has faced criticism for saying she didn’t see a problem with homeless encampments being close to schools and for saying the Los Angeles Police Department set “the gold standard’ for non-cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs officers under Police Chief Daryl Gates. Raman later apologized for her comments about the Gates’ era, explaining she was referring only to the former police chief’s order against cooperation with ICE. The 1978-1992 Gates era was controversial because of racial tension and the Rodney King beating, which set the stage for the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
In criticizing Bass, Pratt made it clear he wasn’t endorsing Raman.
“Nithya won’t offer any reprieve,” said Pratt, who predicted Los Angeles would continue to decline under her administration.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.