It's been a summer of bad news for Mayor Bass. Can she reset the narrative?

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Set us as preferred Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was riding relatively high two months ago, weathering pitched challenges from Spencer Pratt on the right and Nithya Raman on the left to emerge as the top vote-getter in the city’s June 2 mayoral primary.“Tomorrow begins the second half of this journey,” an ebullient Bass told supporters at the Line Hotel in Koreatown on election night.There’s been a lot less to cheer about lately.Bass’ summer has been beset by a string of negative news.Staff members on both her campaign and administration teams have left.

She was away from the city — just as she was at the start of the devastating 2025 firestorms — when a blaze ignited at the Lineage cold-storage food warehouse in Boyle Heights, inundating the heavily Latino surrounding neighborhoods with noxious fumes.And that was all before the release of a new report showing that homelessness in the city rose for the first time in three years, undercutting a pillar of Bass’ fall runoff campaign against Raman.“In terms of policy, politics and operations, I don’t know if there has been a single piece of good news that has come out of her camp since the primary,” said Dan Schnur, a professor of political communications at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.“Bass’ only possible path to reelection at this point is raising so much money that Raman simply can’t be heard,” Schnur said.With three months to go in the campaign, Schnur and other analysts say Bass has time to turn things around.

Nonetheless, they say, the summer of bad news will force Bass to reset her campaign narrative — including shoring up her support with Eastside Latinos in the wake of the Lineage fire.Bass carried 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods in the June 2 election, including Boyle Heights, compared to seven for Raman and just one for Pratt.Yet w...