When Angelenos vote in November, one name on the ballot will be a democratic socialist with a real chance of running this city. Councilmember Nithya Raman took about 29% in the June 2 primary, enough to force Mayor Karen Bass into a November runoff. 

Bass is vulnerable: She declared homelessness to be in a state of emergency her first day in office and spent two years touting falling numbers. This year, the declines stopped — and the sharpest rise came in the unsheltered population, the group her Inside Safe program was created to move indoors, up 7.9% within city limits, per the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s July count. 

The L.A. Times reported Aug. 11 that a shelter-data quirk inflated the count’s headline 3.4% overall increase — closer to 1.9% corrected — and shaved down the two years of declines she campaigned on. 

Per the L.A. County registrar, Bass finished the primary with 34% to Raman’s 29% and nearly 26% for Spencer Pratt — a reality TV personality and registered Republican running on the Palisades fires response. 

Raman’s ascent is part of a national pattern, one powered by young voters who are disillusioned by our country’s bipartisan model. The left-of-establishment opponents channeling that disenchantment come in two forms:

There is the ideological insurgent — for example, Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, and Abdul El-Sayed, who narrowly won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary by a point, beating out nearly $65 million in reported outside spending. 

And there is the ordinary-person candidate, whose case is that he is not a politician: Graham Platner, an oyster farmer with no prior office, won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary June 9 with 72% of the vote and more than 150,000 votes — more than any Democratic Senate candidate in state history, per a Maine Public analysis of Associated Press and state election data.

Both answer a documented feeling. In the spring Harvard Youth Poll, hope about the country’s future among young Democrats fell from 78% to 12% in five years, and half of 18- to 29-year-olds said people like them have no say in government actions. In the same poll, youth ages 18 to 29 gave congressional Democrats 26% approval and Republicans 25%, a statistical tie, with majorities saying both parties care more about elites than people like them.

This is why the establishment is losing its grip: It has spent a decade treating young voters as a turnout problem — something to be fixed with younger faces, slicker content, maybe a podcast strategy — while the costs shaping our livelihoods went unaddressed. Harvard’s respondents said it plainly: 37% ranked shared values first in a candidate, while age, outsider status and demographic background each polled at 5% or below. Clearly, young voters aren’t starved for biography.

Young people — and, increasingly, all people — cannot afford the basic architecture of a life: rent, groceries, healthcare, accessible education. The Democratic Socialists of America built its platform on those costs. 

Mamdani did not win New York with a manifesto; he won it with prices — a rent freeze, fare-free buses, free childcare. Seven months in, some promises are still in progress, but the small steps forward are more than either party’s establishment has managed.

These priorities have proved popular with young people. DSA crossed 120,000 members on July 4, and its leaders describe an endorsement as access to a trained canvassing operation. Its structure is another draw: The establishment assumes young people will show up every other November, so DSA lets them run the operation — phone banking, canvassing, voting on endorsements. 

The difference shows in the data. New York’s nonpartisan Campaign Finance Board found turnout among voters 18 to 29 hit 41.9% in November 2025, more than triple the 11.1% rate in 2021. 

The one asset distinguishing DSA from the party it challenges is being withheld from the country’s biggest mayoral race — DSA-LA declined to endorse Raman or commit canvassers — while centrist Democrats spend the summer preparing, by their own account, for war on the left. 

That is the establishment’s tell: It musters more money and more urgency against the insurgents naming the affordability crisis than it ever did solving it. Republicans are no healthier, with Trump’s approval near 41% for a year in YouGov’s weekly tracker.

Neither party is winning converts. Both are fighting over whoever hasn’t walked away, and according to the Harvard poll, only 12% of young Americans feel motivated to participate. 

And forgive the skepticism, but the calendar is doing a lot of heavy lifting: Our cohort spent five years telling pollsters no one was listening, and the listening began, en masse, the very season the midterm map started relying on us. Parties do not rediscover young people out of conscience. 

The seeds are genuinely in the ground, no matter how much centrist Democrats and the right spend to salt them. 

Raman has to nearly double her share, and most of us at USC live inside the undecided 40% — the share of voters a late May UC Berkeley-L.A. Times survey found undecided or not planning to vote at all — that she needs. We’re three miles from City Hall, watching what is either political theater or a movement take root, and waiting to believe it is the latter. A movement that wants to outlast its primaries has to give young people a reason to stop just watching.