Karen Bass Becomes First Woman Elected as Los Angeles Mayor

Her biological daughter and son-in-law died in 2006 in an automobile accident, two years after Ms. Bass first was elected to public office. The tragedy, she has said, made her part of a “club that you didn’t ask to be a part of,” and left her with “a choice as to whether to go back to work or hide.”

In a Democratic stronghold so liberal that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont received the most Los Angeles votes in the 2020 presidential primary, Ms. Bass will bring a liberal perspective to the nonpartisan office.

As a child during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, she said, she grew up watching demonstrations on the news with her father, a mail carrier, and volunteered to walk precincts for Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated not far from where she grew up. In the 1970s, she joined a group of young leftists working on construction projects in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, the Venceremos Brigade.

By California standards, however, she is viewed as more center-left than progressive. As assembly speaker during the 2008 financial crisis, she worked with the governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to negotiate billions of dollars in deep cuts to balance the state budget. In Congress, where she has served since 2011 and was chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, she has represented a district that spans affluent West Los Angeles and some of the city’s poorest quarters. She was shortlisted as a running mate by Joseph R. Biden Jr. during his presidential campaign.

She will be the city’s second Black mayor, taking office nearly three decades after Tom Bradley retired as the longest-tenured executive in Los Angeles history. And, as the first woman to be elected to the post, she will join an increasingly female pantheon of local leaders, including the city’s first female city attorney and the county’s powerful, five-member Board of Supervisors, which is dominated by women.

Ms. Bass said in the interview last year that she welcomed the opportunity to work with so many women in powerful positions.

“These are general statements, OK? But women are more collaborative. Women are not as transactional. And I think women focus on different issues,” she said. “I think women tend to lead differently.”