One thing was clear on election night: Angelenos want change

A huge, waning moon glimmered over Los Angeles on election night, a metaphor for a trend that emerged in early returns.

The city’s political establishment seemed to be on the retreat in favor of populist insurgents from both the left and the right.

Mayor Karen Bass held a cushy lead in her bid for a second term, and the Associated Press declared that she had made it into the November runoff election. But the underwhelming amount of support she got thus far showed that many voters in a super-blue city didn’t have enough confidence in a Democratic stalwart to return her to office. Instead, many chose self-proclaimed upstarts from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Raman launched her campaign at the last moment, just weeks after endorsing her longtime ally Bass, figuring that enough Angelenos were tired of the incumbent and would join her message of change from inside City Hall.

Raman’s instincts were half right. Voters did want change. But they didn’t view her as a challenge to the status quo — to many, she is the status quo.

The mayoral hopeful didn’t articulate a platform that radically departed from Bass’, and voter antipathy to her muddled messaging showed: she ended the night in third place. If the current results hold, Bass would face Pratt in the runoff.

At Raman’s election-night party at Boomtown Brewery on the outskirts of Little Tokyo, I saw why her chances of becoming L.A.’s next mayor were slim from the start. The gathering felt like happy hour at a Silver Lake bar: far whiter than the city overall, with few Latinos. Her address to a packed house was a grab bag of platitudes mixed with a broadside against MAGA, which is a political nothing in L.A. politics. It was an uninspiring cri de coeur and reflective of a campaign that wasn’t apocalyptic enough for those, like Pratt’s people, who want radical change, while offering nothing new for Bass supporters.

Yet Raman still insisted she had unlocked something transformative.

“Together, we built something extraordinary,” she said to cheers. “And it gives me so much inspiration to be a part of it, a movement powered not by cynicism or political insiders, but by ordinary people who still believe Los Angeles is worth fighting for.”

Raman then went on the dance floor to greet well-wishers, pumping her fist while a DJ blasted Daft Punk’s “Lose Yourself to Dance.”

Across town in West Los Angeles, Pratt reveled in his second-place position, enjoying a Mexican dinner with friends and family. It was a peaceful conclusion to a spring of fulminations against Bass (“Karen Basura”), nonprofits, homeless people (“zombies”) and anything that reeked of Democratic pieties, even as the Republican swore he was campaigning for all ideologies in a nonpartisan race.

Long dismissed as a has-been joke, Pratt correctly judged that Angelenos are angry and don’t want to be polite about it anymore. He and his supporters will take his unlikely rise as a mandate to double down against liberal L.A.

But if Pratt, who lost his house in the Palisades fire, does move on to the general election and is serious about winning, he needs to learn from the political revolution successfully pursued by his polar opposites, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Six years ago this spring, L.A.’s political establishment wrote off DSA-LA as wokoso upstarts in their long-shot quest to get a political novice named Nithya Raman elected to the city council. Even as Raman and three other DSA members joined the council, skeptics dismissed them and their progressive policies as anomalies that didn’t reflect how Angelenos actually wanted the city to work.

Tuesday night, four of the six DSA-endorsed candidates in L.A. city elections were in first place by large margins and another was comfortably in second, reflecting DSA’s multicultural, citywide reach. In a telling sign of its newfound king-making status, the local chapter declined to endorse Raman or any other mayoral candidate. Without that powerful backing, their trailblazer, along with DSA member Rae Huang, withered on their L.A. revolutionary vine.

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez and L.A. Unified school board member Rocío Rivas looked to be coasting to outright victories. Marissa Roy was on her way to a runoff that would exclude the incumbent city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto, who was a distant third in the early returns. In District 9, where Curren Price is terming out, Estuardo Mazariegos stood comfortably in second place and looked to headed to a runoff against a fellow Latino candidate in a race that will see South Los Angeles elect its first non-Black council member in 63 years.

The most surprising outcome involved Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who became a punching bag, along with Bass, for people who thought L.A. had transformed into a hellhole. So-called dark money groups, which don’t have to reveal where their funding comes from, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into negative mailers. Opponents vying for her seat cast federal raids against drug dealers and gangs in the MacArthur Park area as an indictment of her leadership, berating her during debates and on social media.

Even Hernandez’s supporters were fretting about what might happen on election night. But by the time I arrived at her raucous soirée in Highland Park, early returns showed her way ahead of the field and perhaps avoiding a runoff.

“It’s reassuring to see [DSA’s success],” she said as jubilant supporters lined up beside her to get tattoos — real ink, not temporary — of hummingbirds, her campaign’s logo. “That means people see us. That means people want more.”

Hernandez pointed to her fellow DSA member, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“What happened with DSA over there didn’t happen overnight,” she said. “In L.A., we’re getting there.”

L.A. hasn’t suddenly become a land of Trumpers and closet commies, of course. Two incumbent council members who are centrist Democrats are also on their way to easy victories, while Councilmember Monica Rodriguez walked into a third term because no one ran against her. Centrists Timothy Gaspar and Barri Worth Girvan have a huge lead over their rivals for the San Fernando Valley council seat that Bob Blumenfield is leaving due to term limits.

But anyone who wants to win in Los Angeles needs to realize that antiestablishment sentiment is in the air.

At the same time, I would remind the victorious populists to look up in the sky and remember their Shakespeare.

“O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon / That monthly changes in her circle orb / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable,” Juliet warned Romeo.

Politics, like la luna, waxes and wanes whether we like it or not, and anyone who bets on a permanent transformation at City Hall will probably lose.

Angelenos have declared that they want dramatic change. But how will they feel in November?