Karen Bass has officially won the Los Angeles mayor’s race Wednesday against Rick Caruso who waged the most expensive campaign in the city’s history.
With this win, Bass becomes the first woman in history to lead the city. The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County showed Bass with a major lead of more than 46,500 votes over Caruso.
As we previously reported, Caruso was leading the race after Election Day, but Bass quickly surpassed him last Friday. Ever since then Bass continued to be in the lead.
Bass is an L.A. native who has represented the city in Congress for a decade, she had an interview with Variety explaining that the debate over how to handle homelessness is what motivated her to leave Washington, D.C., for a run at Spring Street. Bass got her start as a community activist in South L.A. in the 1990s and says much of today’s debate about homelessness reminded her of missteps that were made back then. “It’s the déjà vu that drove me to enter the race,” Bass says. “I think we made serious mistakes in the ’90s, policywise, and it’s absolutely, positively contributed to what we’re going through now.”