Karen Bass is in deep trouble.

Her reelection bid was already shaky, thanks to lingering public outrage over the Palisades Fire.

Then she began losing staff, even after winning the primary election with a plurality of the vote.

After longtime aide Doug Herman quit, she had to replace him with Julie Chávez Rodriguez, who managed Kamala Harris’s losing presidential campaign. 

Not exactly a hopeful sign.

But the mayor continued to argue that she had earned a second term, thanks to the progress that LA had made in reducing homelessness. 

Her campaign website boasted: “In the three years of the Bass Administration, LA has achieved its first-ever back-to-back decreases in homelessness.”

That argument is now toast.

On Friday, the LA Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) released its delayed homeless count for 2026.

It reported that the homeless population had risen almost 3.4% since 2025. And the number of “unsheltered” people living on the streets or in cars rose 7.9%.

That’s much worse than LA County, which recorded a 1.2% rise in homelessness and a 3.3% rise in the unsheltered population.

Bass tried to blame President Donald Trump. 

“The Trump Administration has driven up the cost of gas, groceries, and rent — pushing more families to the edge — and slashed critical safety net funding,” her office claimed in a statement on Thursday.

Nobody’s fooled.

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The city and LA County combined spend roughly $3 billion per year on homelessness. For that amount of money, LA should see dramatic progress, every year.

But instead of enforcing ordinances against homeless encampments, or addressing root causes like substance abuse and mental illness, the city invested in “housing first.”

Four walls do not solve the problem for people who pursue their cravings and their demons on the streets.

And LAHSA has been a disaster, with money flying out the door with little oversight or accountability. The city failed to monitor the agency and has been too slow in taking over its functions.

The homeless numbers are a major political problem for Bass. And under ordinary circumstances, the news should benefit Bass’s opponent in the general election, socialist City Council member Nithya Raman.

But there’s one problem: Raman chairs the City Council’s committee on homelessness. She is just as much to blame as the mayor.

If the homeless numbers had been available before the June 2 primary vote, it is possible that challenger Spencer Pratt would have qualified for the general election.

It does not seem that the homeless count was delayed for political reasons. Though it arrived later than expected, the homeless count has typically been delivered in late July.

Still, it would have been good for voters to know what was actually going on, as Mayor Bass claimed she had achieved great success.

“Los Angeles, we have been doing it for the last three years, and it’s the first time homelessness has gone down,” she declared during the televised mayoral debate.

Raman claimed that LA had made “incremental” progress, and introduced a new plan that, she said, would clear all of the homeless encampments by the end of her term.

Pratt cautioned against believing either of his two rivals on the homeless issue.

“This is an absolute failure for both of them,” he said. “They’re a team.”

Pratt, who lost his family home in the Palisades Fire, made homelessness a major focus of his campaign.

He drew attention to the issue on social media, and particularly to the abuse of animals within homeless encampments.

Pratt entered the election with tremendous momentum, and seemed to have finished in second place, until late ballots put Raman ahead of him, and into the general election.

In a further irony, Raman seemed to have benefited from a surge in LA neighborhoods with large numbers of homeless people. Critics suspect that she was boosted by ballot harvesting at homeless shelters.

So not only did Raman fail to improve homelessness, but she also may have benefited from that failure by using homeless votes to advance her campaign for mayor.

LA voters are left with a frustrating choice. On one hand, we can reelect a mayor who claimed to have improved homelessness, and failed. On the other hand, we can gamble on a radical politician whose socialist policies would arguably make the problem worse.

Voters should have had a real alternative. Spencer Pratt was that alternative. Now he is on the sidelines.

And thanks to California’s “jungle” primary system, there is no option for a write-in vote in the general election.

This is a crisis for local democracy.

Leadership is going to have to come from somewhere. But it won’t be the mayor’s office.

Joel Pollak is Opinion editor of the California Post.