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Page A3From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 30 September 2026

Raman leads mayor's race by eleven points, gets asked to explain one word

By SalStaff Writer

“Nithya Raman and Zohran Mamdani are both socialists — but there’s a key difference”, 29 September 2026 (Photo via New York Post — the original report)

As it ran on the front

On September 23rd, a poll from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored with the Los Angeles Times, put Mayor Karen Bass eleven points behind City Councilmember Nithya Raman, with a chunk of the electorate still calling itself undecided. Today's wire says five weeks remain until the election. Count backward from there and the poll landed six weeks out — a week before the fight over Raman's vocabulary had even started.

Twenty days before that poll, on September 3rd, the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed Raman, and she embraced the endorsement in return. Twenty days later she was leading the mayor of the second-largest city in the country by eleven points in a public poll. Endorsement first, lead second. The order is in the receipts. What ran in the opposition press treated the second fact as proof the first one was dangerous, never the plainer read: an incumbent mayor was losing.…

…(cont) One day after the poll's release, at the U.N. General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas the "buddies" of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Nobody at that podium said Los Angeles. Nobody needed to. Five days later, the New York Post ran Marx's line about history repeating "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" — aimed at Raman, three thousand miles from the mayor Netanyahu was actually talking about, in a piece whose whole argument was that she and Mamdani are "both socialists."

One day after that, at a mayoral forum in front of a Jewish audience, Raman used the word "genocide." She said afterward she'd used it after seeing reports and images she found disturbing. The Post's headline read "remarks rattle Jewish crowd" — active voice, her word as the subject. The word is what made the wire. The eleven points that put her there did not.

An eleven-point lead over a sitting mayor changes who has to answer questions. Right now those questions are about one word Raman said at a forum, not about the eleven points that got her invited to the podium. Five weeks from now, Los Angeles decides whether a lead built before anyone asked her to explain "genocide" survives five weeks of being asked to explain it instead.

“You don't spend five days getting Marx quoted at you over a city council seat unless the actual news — mayor down eleven — was the thing nobody wanted printed straight. Watch what gets the headline versus what gets buried in paragraph four: the poll's a stat, the word is a scandal. That's the whole con, and it works every time the lead is bigger than the microphone.”
Sal
“Look, comparing her to Mamdani isn't a smear, it's — okay it's a little bit a smear, but it's an accurate one, they're both — well, "both socialists" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, isn't it. The point is Los Angeles voters deserve to know if their next mayor uses words that... rattle people. Forget I said "rattle."”
Chip

The receipts

· Bass trails Raman in Los Angeles mayor's race: Poll from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026

· Bass trailing progressive challenger by double digits in new LA mayoral poll from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026

· Nithya Raman gets the socialists’ endorsement — and their baggage from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026

· Netanyahu rips Mamdani and calls Hamas terrorists mayor’s ‘buddies’ from the morgue, 24 Sep 2026

This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.