Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso holds an event at the Los Angeles Police Museum in Northeast Los Angeles in September.
Photographer: Jason Armond/Los Angeles TimesIn LA, Mayoral Hopefuls Face Off With the City’s Thorniest Issue
Homelessness tops a long list of voter concerns that candidates Karen Bass and Rick Caruso are pledging to fix. But progress on the issue has been elusive.
Rick Caruso, the billionaire mall magnate running to be Los Angeles’s next mayor, will spend a total of more than $80 million on mailers, television commercials, and digital ads in pursuit of the city’s top office, a 13-1 advantage in ad spending. Now, in the final weeks of his campaign against U.S. Congresswoman Karen Bass, this media barrage has been joined by 400 paid canvassers who will walk the streets of LA, targeting inactive, low-propensity voters that the campaign believes can be swayed to support an outsider who has never held political office.
But one of the questions raised by the race, and the tens of millions of dollars Caruso has poured into the contest, is: Who would want this job?