Los Angeles Is All About That Bass!
It was a close call, but Rep. Karen Bass (D) beat out anti-abortion billionaire Rick Caruso to become the first woman mayor of L.A.
PoliticsThe highly-publicized election that divided Hollywood between Bad Celebrities™ and Less Bad Celebrities™ has finally yielded a winner. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) defeated billionaire entrepreneur Rick Caruso (D) on Wednesday to become the first woman mayor of Los Angeles, and is now one of four Black mayors simultaneously presiding over the country’s four largest cities: Chicago, Houston, New York and finally, L.A.
In the immediate aftermath of last week’s election, it appeared Caruso would take the lead. However, this week, Bass ultimately pulled ahead by some 45,000 votes.
Caruso, who was a Republican until 2019, ran as a Democrat on an anti-poor-people and “public safety” (read: Reagan-era tough-on-crime policy) platform. As any billionaire with political aspirations so often does, he poured over $100 million into his own campaign. Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, Gwenyth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg, and Katy Perry were among his star-studded stable of elite supporters. Nevermind the fact that Caruso has a record of donating to anti-abortion politicians and helped USC conceal the full extent of damage inflicted by a school gynecologist who sexually assaulted thousands of female students between 1991 and 2016. Another Caruso curiosity: When Lori Laughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade, discovered her parents’ scammed her way into USC, it was Caruso’s yacht she was partying on. Cool!
Meanwhile, Bass, a former social worker and longtime community organizer, assembled her own band of big-name supporters, including Ariana Grande, Donald Glover, Steven Spielberg, Octavia Spencer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jennifer Garner, and J.J. Abrams. Her record reads like your run-of-the-mill liberal Democrat, which is why many key members of the party’s establishment backed her.
The L.A. County Clerk’s office is expected to certify the results on Dec. 5. In the meantime, someone should really check on Katy Perry.