Six of the most powerful business groups in Los Angeles have announced that they are prepared to spend seven figures to reelect Mayor Karen Bass. On its own, that is a major political development. But paired with Bass’s governing record over the past three years, the endorsement reads more like a confirmation of a broader shift in who the mayor is working for.
The business groups backing Bass, including VICA, the Central City Association, the LA Area Chamber of Commerce, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, BizFed, and the Building Owners and Managers Association, opposed her in 2022 and instead supported Rick Caruso’s campaign. At the time, Bass ran and won as the progressive alternative to a billionaire developer, building her campaign around a long career rooted in organizing and advocacy for working class communities. That history was not symbolic. Bass founded Community Coalition in South Los Angeles in 1990 to fight corporate disinvestment, overpolicing, and the systemic neglect of Black and Latino neighborhoods. She carried that identity through Sacramento and Congress, and it formed the core of her successful mayoral campaign.
The new alignment tells a different story. Business leaders have been unusually direct about why they are backing her. “When [the Federation of Labor] meets, everybody’s in the room,” VICA president Stuart Waldman told Politico. “We wanted to show that we are coordinated and we are working together.” Waldman’s framing suggests that these groups see Bass not as an adversary to be managed, but as a partner whose administration has already delivered key policy wins.
Those wins are visible across several major issues. On wages, Bass signed the Olympic wage increase into law, then helped broker a backroom deal to delay its full implementation and weaken certain provisions for airport workers. Business leaders explicitly cited that intervention as a reason for their support. Labor leaders, by contrast, publicly criticized the move as “shameful”.
On public safety, Bass approved a police contract projected to cost an additional billion dollars by 2027 while proposing cuts to other parts of the city budget, including the Fire Department and civilian services. At the same time, her administration backed decisions that expanded LAPD power and loosened oversight even as outcomes moved in the opposite direction. She also paved the way for controversial off-budget hiring that pushed the department beyond its authorized staffing levels without clear funding or council approval. The result is a pattern of rising costs, expanding police authority, and worsening use-of-force outcomes, with little clarity about accountability or long-term public safety impact.
Housing policy has followed a similar pattern. Measure ULA, the voter approved tax on high-value property sales that funds affordable housing, has generated over one billion dollars for housing programs. Yet Bass explored proposals that would have reduced or redirected that revenue, including exemptions and state legislation that could have cut funding significantly. Those efforts were withdrawn after public backlash, and more recently the administration has emphasized its support for ULA funded projects.
Bass has also sided with conservative Councilmember Traci Park in blocking the Venice Dell affordable housing project. At a high-dollar fundraiser in December of 2024, she characterized the development of affordable housing in high-resource neighborhoods as “shoving something down peopel’s throats.” The 120 unit affordable housing development has been approved multiple times over nearly a decade, and a coalition of more than 70 organizations urged the mayor to intervene. She refused. The project is still in limbo, and the site remains unused while the housing crisis deepens.
On homelessness, the administration’s signature program, Inside Safe, has moved thousands of people through encampment clearances and temporary placements. But permanent housing outcomes have lagged behind overall spending, and audits have raised concerns about how funds are tracked and deployed. Recent reporting shows that 40% of people “housed” through Inside Safe are back on the street. The program’s emphasis on clearing visible encampments has drawn support from business groups, even as advocates insist that the program is not producing lasting solutions.
Taken together, these decisions help explain why business organizations that once opposed Bass are now investing heavily in her reelection. The endorsement is not just about electoral strategy. It reflects a governing approach that has consistently accommodated the priorities of corporate and property interests, often at the expense of the constituencies that defined Bass’s earlier career.
Polling suggests that many Los Angeles voters are looking for something very different. A recent Loyola Marymount University survey found that nearly half of respondents would vote for a democratic socialist candidate, while only a small share favor a traditional establishment approach. That gap between voter preferences and political alignment may explain why the business community is rushing to embrace the most viable pro-business candidate.