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      California Sends Democrats and the Nation a Message on Crime

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      LOS ANGELES — Voters in California delivered a stark warning to the Democratic Party on Tuesday about the potency of law and order as a political message in 2022, as a Republican-turned-Democrat campaigning as a crime-fighter vaulted into a runoff in the mayoral primary in Los Angeles and a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco was recalled in a landslide.The two results made vivid the depths of voter frustration over rising crime and rampant homelessness in even the most progressive corners of the country — and are the latest signs of a restless Democratic electorate that was promised a return to normalcy under President Biden and yet remains unsatisfied with the nation’s state of affairs.“People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood,” said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist. “It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.”The West Coast contests were being monitored closely by strategists and leaders in both parties around the country, as Democrats seek to hold together a fractious and diverse political coalition that can be divided both by race and ideology over criminal justice.In Los Angeles, Rick Caruso, a billionaire luxury mall developer, spent nearly $41 million telling voters how he would restore order in the city, vowing to add 1,500 officers to the police department and promoting the endorsement of William J. Bratton, the former police chief famous for his broken-windows policy. The race now heads to a November runoff. Mr. Caruso will face Representative Karen Bass, the Democratic former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Mr. Caruso had about 42 percent of the vote and Ms. Bass had around 37 percent early Wednesday morning.In San Francisco, about 60 percent of voters recalled Chesa Boudin, a former public defender who became district attorney in 2019 in a huge win for the progressive left. He promised then that “the tough-on-crime policies and rhetoric of the 1990s and early 2000s are on their way out.” Instead, he is.Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco district attorney, making final campaign appearances on Tuesday.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThe elections on Tuesday showed the extent to which the political winds have shifted even in Democratic cities in the two years since George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. The initial rally cry on the left then — “defund the police” — has since become so politically toxic that it is now more often used by Republicans as an epithet than by Democrats as an earnest policy proposal. And the crusading energy to overhaul policing in the face of rising crime has waned.For Democrats, the issue of crime and disorder threatens to drive a wedge between some of the party’s core constituencies, as some voters demand action on racial and systemic disparities while others are focused on their own sense of safety in their homes and neighborhoods.“People walking the streets, in many cases, feel themselves in danger, and that’s got to be dealt with,” said Willie Brown, a Democrat who is the former mayor of San Francisco.But Mr. Brown said too many Democrats do not want to talk about “what cops do” for fear of crossing the party’s activist class and offending “A.O.S. or A.O.C. or whatever that woman’s name is,” he said dismissively of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the influential progressive.In a sign of how crime can divide the party in unusual ways, public and internal polling showed how the crime-and-homelessness campaign of Mr. Caruso, who is white, helped him make inroads with a large swath of Black men, even as he ran against Ms. Bass, who is Black. In one May survey, Mr. Caruso was performing more than 30 percentage points better among Black men than women.Mr. Caruso found traction in the heavily Democratic city despite being a longtime Republican who then became an independent and only joined the Democratic Party just before running for office. He ran a campaign promising to “clean up” the city and hailed Tuesday’s results as “a great awakening.”Jefrey Pollock, a pollster for Mr. Caruso, said the results should be a take-heed moment for the party.“If the Democratic primary electorate is showing a shift toward the middle on police and crime issues, then it is an even larger concern when thinking about the November general elections,” said Mr. Pollock, who also works for at-risk Democratic congressional candidates in other states.Turnout was low on Tuesday across California. And there is always a risk of over-interpreting local races where distinctly local dynamics are often at play. Mr. Caruso’s vast financial advantage — he outspent Ms. Bass by more than 10-to-1 — is not replicable in most races, and he still faces a fierce fight in the fall.Steve Soboroff, a Los Angeles police commissioner who himself ran for mayor in 2001 and endorsed Ms. Bass this year, was unimpressed by Mr. Caruso’s “basic guttural knee-jerk messages” on crime and his final showing, given his vast spending.“Caruso hit a glass ceiling made of Waterford crystal,” he said.In her own election night speech, Ms. Bass referenced the tilted financial playing field. “All of us stood strong against an onslaught,” she said.Election workers wait for voters at the Avalon Carver Community Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Pollock noted that vulnerable congressional Democrats are already hearing about crime back home and racing to show how they differ with the “progressive trends on handling crime.” In Washington, House Democrats boosted funding and grants for local and state law enforcement by more than $500 million in this year’s appropriations package, delivering Democratic lawmakers a talking point to rebuff “defund” attacks from Republicans.And at the White House, Mr. Biden has made a point of outright rejecting the most severe rhetoric embraced by the activist left.“The answer is not to defund the police,” Mr. Biden said in February when he visited New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams, who won in 2021 primarily on a crime-fighting message, has been held up as an example of how to approach the issue.Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, met privately with Mr. Adams this spring in part to strategize on approaches to public safety. “He was empathetic to the plight and the issue that we’re all facing,” Frank Carone, Mr. Adams’s chief of staff, said of Mr. Klain.The extent to which crime is actually up depends on the category being measured and the particular jurisdiction. But strategists in both parties said that whatever the data shows, there is a widespread sense that daily life in big-city America is no longer as safe as it once was.“There are voters in the suburbs and exurbs all across this country — they’re seeing what’s happening in cities,” said Dan Conston, who heads the leading super PAC for House Republicans. “They’re both aghast and concerned for their communities.”Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      6 Takeaways From Tuesday’s Elections

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      For the most part on Tuesday, primary voters in seven states from New Jersey to California showed the limits of the ideological edges of both parties.A liberal district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was recalled in the most progressive of cities, San Francisco, but conservative candidates carrying the banner of former President Donald J. Trump did not fare well, either.For all the talk of sweeping away the old order, Tuesday’s primaries largely saw the establishment striking back. Here are some takeaways.California called for order.Wracked by the pandemic, littered with tent camps, frightened by smash-and-grab robberies and anti-Asian-American hate crimes, voters in two of the most progressive cities sent a message on Tuesday: Restore stability.In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, Rick Caruso, a billionaire former Republican who rose to prominence on the city’s police commission, blanketed the city with ads promising to crack down on crime if elected mayor.His chief opponent, Karen Bass, a veteran Democratic congresswoman, argued that public safety and criminal justice reform were not mutually exclusive, and disappointed some liberal supporters by calling to put more police officers on the street. The two are headed for a November mayoral runoff.Rick Caruso with supporters at his election night event Tuesday in Los Angeles.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesAnd in San Francisco, voters who were once moved by Chesa Boudin’s plans as district attorney to reduce the number of people sent to prison ran out of patience with seemingly unchecked property crime, violent attacks on elderly residents and open drug use during the pandemic. They recalled him.Statewide, the Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, advanced easily to the general election runoff. Mr. Bonta is a progressive, but was careful to stress that criminal justice reform and public safety were both priorities.The choices seemed to signal a shift to the center that was likely to reverberate through Democratic politics across the nation. But longtime California political observers said the message was less about ideology than about effective action. “This is about competence,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, who served in local government in Los Angeles for nearly four decades and is now the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.“People want solutions,” he said. “They don’t give a damn about left or right. It’s the common-sense problem-solving they seem to be missing. Government is supposed to take care of the basics, and the public believes the government hasn’t been doing that.”For House Republicans, the Jan. 6 commission vote still matters.In May 2021, 35 House Republicans voted for an independent, bipartisan commission to look at the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.At first blush, the vote should not have mattered much: The legislation creating the commission was negotiated by the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, John Katko of New York, with the blessing of the Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy of California. Besides, the commission was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate and went nowhere.Representative Michael Guest voting on Tuesday in Brandon, Miss.Hannah Mattix/The Clarion-Ledger, via Associated PressBut Tuesday’s primaries showed that the vote still mattered. In Mississippi, Representative Michael Guest, one of the 35, was forced into a June 28 runoff with Michael Cassidy, who ran as the “pro-Trump” Republican and castigated the incumbent for voting for the commission. In South Dakota, Representative Dusty Johnson, another one of the 35, faced similar attacks but still mustered 60 percent of the vote.In California, Representative David Valadao, who also voted for the commission, struggled to keep pace with his Democratic challenger, State Assemblyman Rudy Salas, as a Republican rival, Chris Mathys, took votes from his supporters on the right.In all, now, 10 of the 35 will not be back in the House next year, either because they resigned, retired or were defeated in primaries. And more are likely to fall in the coming weeks.In New Jersey, it is all about name recognition.In New Jersey on Tuesday, two familiar names won their party nominations to run for the House in November: for the Republicans, Thomas Kean Jr., the son and namesake of a popular former governor; for the Democrats, Robert Menendez, son and namesake of the sitting senator.Robert Menendez Jr. with voters in West New York, N.J., last week.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMr. Menendez goes into the general election the heavy favorite to win New Jersey’s heavily Democratic Eighth Congressional District and take the seat of Albio Sires, who is retiring.The younger Mr. Kean has a good shot, too. He narrowly lost in 2020 to the incumbent Democrat, Representative Tom Malinowski, but new district lines tilted the seat toward the Republicans, and Mr. Malinowski has faced criticism for his failure to disclose stock trades in compliance with a recently enacted ethics law.MAGA only gets you so far.Candidates from the Trump flank of the Republican Party could have done some real damage to the prospects of a so-called red wave in November, but with the votes still being counted, far-right candidates in swing districts did not fare so well.National Republicans rushed in to shore up support for a freshman representative, Young Kim, whose narrowly divided Southern California district would have been very difficult to defend, had her right-wing challenger, Greg Raths, secured the G.O.P.’s spot on the ballot. It looked as though that would not happen.In Iowa’s Third Congressional District, establishment Republicans got the candidate they wanted to take on Representative Cindy Axne in State Senator Zach Nunn, who easily beat out Nicole Hasso, part of a new breed of conservative Black Republicans who have made social issues like opposing “critical race theory” central to their political identity.And if Mr. Valadao hangs on to make the November ballot for California’s 22nd Congressional District, he will have vanquished a candidate on his right who made Mr. Valadao’s vote to impeach Mr. Trump central to his campaign.Ethics matter.Two primary candidates entered Republican primaries on Tuesday with ethical clouds hanging over their heads: Representative Steven Palazzo in Mississippi and Ryan Zinke in Montana.In 2021, the Office of Congressional Ethics released a report that said Mr. Palazzo had used campaign funds to pay himself and his wife at the time nearly $200,000. He reportedly used the cash to make improvements on a riverside property that he was hoping to sell. Voters in Mississippi’s Fourth District gave him only about 32 percent of the vote, forcing him into a runoff on June 28.Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke with voters in Butte, Mont., last month.,Matthew Brown/Associated PressMr. Zinke left what was then Montana’s only House seat in 2017 to become Mr. Trump’s first interior secretary. He departed that post in 2019 with a number of ethics investigations examining possible conflicts of interest and questionable expenditures of taxpayer funds. Still, when Mr. Zinke declared to run for Montana’s new First District, he was widely expected to waltz back to the House.Instead, he was in an extremely tight race with Dr. Al Olszewski, an orthopedic surgeon and former state senator who had come in a distant third when he tried to run for his party nomination for governor in 2020, and fourth when he vied for the Republican nomination to run for the Senate in 2018.If at first you don’t succeed …Dr. Olszewski may not win, but his improved performance could be an inspiration to other past losers. The same goes for Michael Franken, a retired admiral who on Tuesday won the Democratic nomination to challenge Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa in November.Mr. Franken has the résumé for politics: He is an Iowa native and led a remarkable career in the Navy. But losing often begets more losing, and in 2020, he came in a distant second to Theresa Greenfield for the Democratic nod to take on Senator Joni Ernst.Ms. Greenfield was defeated that November, and for all his tales of triumph over past adversity, Mr. Franken is likely to face the same fate this fall. Mr. Grassley will be 89 by then, but Iowans are used to pulling the lever for the senator, who has held his seat since 1981. Despite Mr. Grassley’s age, the seat is considered safely Republican. More

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      Rick Caruso and Karen Bass Head for Runoff in Los Angeles Mayor’s Race

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      LOS ANGELES — Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer, and Representative Karen Bass are heading to a November runoff election to become mayor of Los Angeles, in a race that has focused on voters’ worries about public safety and homelessness in the nation’s second-largest city.Though neither candidate earned more than 50 percent of the vote, which would have allowed them to win outright on Tuesday, they both comfortably outperformed their opponents. The runoff was declared by The Associated Press.The liberal city’s surge of support for Mr. Caruso, a longtime Republican who changed his registration to Democratic days before declaring his candidacy, is likely to deepen the Democratic Party’s divisions on issues of crime, policing and racial justice. San Francisco voters also moved on Tuesday to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive district attorney.As Mr. Caruso gave a speech to supporters at the Grove, his flagship shopping center in Los Angeles, he portrayed himself as an optimist with grand plans to address the city’s twin problems of crime and homelessness.“We are not helpless in the face of our problems,” he said, flanked by his wife and their four children. “We will not allow this city to decline. We will no longer accept excuses. We have the power to change the direction of Los Angeles.”Ms. Bass was widely seen as the front-runner in the crowded primary before Mr. Caruso’s entrance in February, but his lavish spending and tough-on-crime message quickly propelled him, leading several other candidates to drop out of the race to replace Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is term limited.The developer of several popular luxury shopping centers, Mr. Caruso, 63, tightly tied his campaign to the spotless image he has cultivated in the faux town squares of those properties. His campaign spent nearly $41 million, including $39 million of his own money, much of it on television, digital and radio ads that seemed to blanket the airwaves in recent weeks, portraying him as a successful businessman who could “clean up” Los Angeles.Mr. Caruso may face a steeper uphill climb during the general election if high-profile Democrats rally behind Ms. Bass.“Together we can make our city a place where you can afford to live, where you want to live, because you feel safe, because the air you breathe is clean, because people are no longer dying on the streets,” Ms. Bass told supporters at the W Hollywood hotel on Tuesday night. “Not with empty promises from the past but with a bold path forward.”A victory for Mr. Caruso would be a significant shift in this overwhelmingly liberal city, where Senator Bernie Sanders easily won the Democratic presidential primary two years ago. The city’s longstanding battles over housing, homelessness and crime have reached a new level of urgency during the pandemic.Mr. Caruso has portrayed the city as one in deep decay, promising to hire 1,500 more police officers and build 30,000 shelter beds in 300 days. The message has resonated among voters who are deeply frustrated with homeless encampments throughout the city, visible on residential sidewalks, nestled in parks and sprawling under freeway overpasses.Casting himself as an outsider, Mr. Caruso has blamed career politicians, including Ms. Bass, for the city’s ills. After voting in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Mr. Caruso criticized his rival for suggesting that it could take more than four years to solve homelessness in the city, an objection he repeated in his speech on Tuesday night.But experts and critics say many of Mr. Caruso’s promises may not be possible because of federal court mandates that allow people to camp in public spaces, as well as the city’s byzantine zoning rules. Compared with leaders of other large cities, the mayor of Los Angeles has relatively little power. Much of the sprawling region is controlled by the five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who oversee a $38.5 billion budget.Ms. Bass, 68, who spent years organizing in South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots before being elected to the State Legislature and then Congress, has described her campaign as a kind of homecoming and pledged to address questions of equity in this profoundly stratified city.Representative Karen Bass is a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and was on President Biden’s shortlist as a possible vice president.Alisha Jucevic for The New York TimesThe campaign between the two is also poised to become a test of whether voters this year favor an experienced politician who has spent nearly two decades in government or an outsider running on his business credentials.Latino voters are expected to play a pivotal role in the November election and will be courted aggressively by both candidates. Polling has also indicated a striking gender gap, with Black and Latino men appearing more likely to choose Mr. Caruso over Ms. Bass.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Rick Caruso Jumps Into Los Angeles Mayor’s Race

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      The longtime civic leader fits the profile of successful power brokers in the city’s past. Will that kind of résumé succeed in the present?Rick J. Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and longtime civic figure, jumped into the race for mayor of Los Angeles on Friday, shaking up a crowded field for the top job in the nation’s second-largest city after more than a decade of flirting with a run.Mr. Caruso, 63, whose candidacy had for the past year been a subject of intense speculation, filed a declaration that he would run with the city clerk hours before the deadline and is expected to make a formal announcement next week. “It’s a very meaningful day for me and my family,” he told a small group of reporters standing in the breezeway of a city building in an industrial section of downtown. “I love Los Angeles, I love the diversity of Los Angeles. I’m eager to be a part of this.”His brief statement was initially drowned out by a protester who shouted profanity-laced criticism, and that Angelenos “don’t want a billionaire mayor.”Mr. Caruso is known for signature outdoor shopping centers designed with Disney-esque nostalgia and attention to detail, as well as for his roles in steering a lengthy list of civic institutions.His fortune has been viewed as a powerful asset in a market where mounting a credible campaign can be enormously expensive, and his résumé, which includes serving as head of the city’s Police Commission and chairman of the board of trustees of the University of Southern California, evokes an older generation of Los Angeles power brokers.Those figures include Eli Broad, the businessman and philanthropist who died last year after putting his stamp on Los Angeles’s cultural and civic life, and Richard Riordan, an investment banker who was elected mayor in the tumultuous aftermath of the 1992 riots. Mr. Caruso’s experience and wealth give him the potential to serve as a more conservative alternative in a field that leans left.But Mr. Caruso’s candidacy for the officially nonpartisan post of mayor will face a political dynamic that has undergone substantial change over the past generation. Many people say the appetite for that style of leadership has waned in Los Angeles, a vast, racially diverse metropolis where the symptoms of gaping economic inequality — from the heavy toll of the pandemic on poorer Black and Latino residents to the city’s monumental housing crisis — have become consuming challenges.And political observers say that two factors are likely to significantly amplify voter turnout among underrepresented groups like renters, young adults, Latinos and Asians: the timing of the election, coinciding with the national midterms, and a revamped system that will mail ballots to every active, registered voter.“The electorate in 1993 is completely dissimilar to the electorate in 2022,” said Sonja Diaz, the director of the Latino Policy & Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We’re talking about two different Los Angeleses.”Homelessness — along with the constellation of thorny issues it touches, including crime, public health, transit, the cost of living and the environment — is likely to be a dominant concern.The contest is already stacked with big-name contenders, all Democrats, seeking to succeed Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to become U.S. ambassador to India and cannot run again after serving the maximum two terms.Representative Karen Bass, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus who was on President Biden’s short list for vice president, has perhaps the broadest base of support in the city, where she started as a community organizer in the 1990s. She has backing both from progressive activists and from members of the political establishment.Kevin de León, a councilman and former State Senate leader, is another well-known progressive in the race; he has touted his background as a son of Guatemalan immigrants in a city that is 49 percent Latino.Joe Buscaino, a city councilman and a former police officer, has tried to position himself as a moderate, in the vein of New York’s new mayor, Eric Adams.Mr. Buscaino and Mr. Caruso could find themselves fighting for many of the same voters, in a race that is likely to require a runoff after a June 7 primary. But at least one of the announced candidates, the local business leader Jessica Lall, will not be on the ballot; as speculation mounted that Mr. Caruso was about to enter the race, she announced on Tuesday that she was dropping out.The general election will be held Nov. 8.A former Republican in a city that is now overwhelmingly Democratic, Mr. Caruso announced in late January that he would register as a Democrat, and no longer be listed in the rolls without a party preference.“I won’t be a typical Democrat, that’s for sure,” he wrote in the statement. “I will be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.”He has enlisted help from some of the state’s top Democratic political strategists, including the consultants who led Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful campaign to keep his job last year in a contentious recall election.The grandson of Italian immigrants who grew up in Beverly Hills, Mr. Caruso has become known for properties — including the Grove in Los Angeles and the Americana at Brand in neighboring Glendale — that present a vision of Southern California that is clean, polished and tightly controlled. Streetcars trundle jauntily past fountains, sidewalk cafes and luxury stores where security guards stand sentry.In television interviews late last year, Mr. Caruso said a flash mob robbery at The Grove was the fault of efforts to “defund the cops,” drawing condemnation from activists who said developers have an incentive to protect their property rather than address the root causes of crime.Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, said the mayoral election could turn less on policy ideas than on perceptions of leadership.“The voters aren’t necessarily looking for somebody who has the best solution,” he said. “They want somebody who can take whatever solution and make it work.” More

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      Robberies. Drought. Tent Camps. Los Angeles’s Next Mayor Faces a Litany of Crises.

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      The city’s unease could prove pivotal next year, when Los Angeles will elect a new mayor in a contest that civic leaders say will have the highest stakes in decades.LOS ANGELES — Peter Nichols has lived for 22 years in a two-bedroom Cape Cod in the Fairfax District, in the flat, bungalow-lined midsection between the east and the west sides of Los Angeles. His block used to make him proud, with its neat lawns and palm trees: Crime was low. Streets were clean. When a problem arose — drug use in the park, traffic from the nearby Melrose Avenue shopping district — the city seemed to know how to address it.All that has changed.Homicides in his area have risen from one in 2019 to more than a dozen this year, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. He cannot drive more than a block or two without passing homeless encampments. Drought has withered the yards. Trash blows past on the Santa Ana winds.Waves of robberies have left armed guards posted for months outside high-end sneaker boutiques. Earlier this month, police officers responding to a burglary four miles from Mr. Nichols’s house arrested a parolee in connection with the slaying of an 81-year-old philanthropist in her mansion.“Now there’s this new variant,” he said about the coronavirus. “It’s like, what are we going to die of? Ricochet? Robbery gone wrong? Heat? Drought? Omicron? Delta? If you were watching this through the lens of a camera, you would think it was the makings of a disaster movie.”As the nation’s second-most-populated city struggles to emerge from the wreckage of the pandemic, a pileup of crises is confronting Los Angeles — and those who hope to become its next mayor next year.A Los Angeles police officer watching from a squad car as a homeless encampment is cleared in the Harbor City neighborhood of Los Angeles.Bing Guan/ReutersTens of thousands of people remain unhoused, violent crime is up and sweeping problems like income disparity and global warming are reaching critical mass. The anxiety is being felt in all corners and communities of the city. In a recent poll by the Los Angeles Business Council Institute and The Los Angeles Times, 57 percent of county voters listed public safety as a serious or very serious problem, up four percentage points from an almost identical poll in 2019.More than nine in 10 voters said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. And more than a third said they had experienced homelessness in the past year or knew someone who had — a figure that rose to nearly half among Black voters.“Rome is burning,” former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently said in a local television interview.In fact, crime rates are far below the historic peaks of the 1990s, coronavirus infections are a small fraction of last December’s terrifying levels and the city is making some progress in its breathtaking homelessness crisis, thanks to pandemic funding.But the unease is already shaping next year’s mayor’s race, a contest that civic leaders say will have the highest stakes in decades.“The problems we had before were big and they were complex, but they weren’t staggering and existential,” said Constance L. Rice, a civil rights lawyer, who sees mounting challenges from the pandemic, climate change and social injustice.“We’re in staggering-and-existential territory now.”The urgency comes as Los Angeles’s current mayor, Eric Garcetti, enters the homestretch of his administration. Ineligible for re-election because of a two-term limit, Mr. Garcetti is scheduled to leave office in December 2022.With roughly a year left on the job, he also is “between two worlds,” he said in an interview this fall: He has been tapped by President Biden to become the U.S. ambassador to India but it has taken six months for his confirmation even to be scheduled for its committee hearing on Tuesday. If confirmed, he could leave office early and the City Council could name an interim replacement, but the fate of his nomination is uncertain: Republicans have slowed approvals for scores of the president’s nominees, and additional hurdles have arisen involving City Hall.More than a dozen mayoral hopefuls are vying to replace Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is ineligible for re-election because of a two-term limit.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFederal prosecutors have charged a former deputy mayor in a bribery scandal. A former member of the mayor’s security detail has sued the city, accusing a former top mayoral aide of sexual harassment. The former head of the city water and power department has agreed to plead guilty to bribery charges in a case involving the city attorney. And at least three City Council members have been convicted or indicted on public corruption charges.Even without those distractions, Mr. Garcetti can only do so much. Los Angeles’s mayor is weak compared with other big-city mayors. Shaped by backlash to the East Coast machine politics of the early 1900s, Los Angeles is famously ambivalent about power and institutionally diffuse.Only about a fifth of the 20 million people in greater Los Angeles actually live in the amoebalike city limits. Newcomers often assume they can vote in city elections, only to discover that they actually live in West Hollywood or unincorporated Los Angeles County.Major initiatives require buy-in from myriad independent players — homeowners’ associations, unions, school districts, county supervisors, nearly 90 surrounding cities. Yet Los Angeles mayors are often held responsible for vast quandaries like homelessness and port backups.Mr. Garcetti has been dogged for the past two years by assorted protests, and at one point demonstrators spray-painted and toilet papered the Tudor-style, city-owned mayoral mansion. But he has tirelessly urged Angelenos to maintain perspective. His tenure has had some notable successes: The city moved aggressively to deal with the pandemic, has passed major initiatives to fund transportation and affordable housing, is considered a national leader in climate policy and in 2028 will host the Olympics.At a news conference to announce a crackdown after a spate of flash mob robberies — in which large groups rush into a store and overwhelm employees — stunned the city, Mr. Garcetti reminded that Angelenos were statistically still in perhaps “the safest decade of our lifetimes.”In the interview in his City Hall office — an iconic room decorated with Frank Gehry chairs and Ed Ruscha paintings — he framed the past several months as a delayed societal response to the pandemic. “You come up for air and you kind of feel all the trauma that you’ve had to see and push down and witness and give voice to,” he said.White flags outside Griffith Observatory honoring the Los Angeles County residents who have died from Covid-19, one of the area’s many crises.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMore than a dozen mayoral hopefuls are campaigning to succeed him. They include local politicians such as Mike Feuer, the city attorney, and Joe Buscaino, a former police officer now on the City Council, along with better-known figures such as Kevin de León, a councilman and former State Senate leader, and Representative Karen Bass, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus who was on Mr. Biden’s short list for vice president.Potentially in the mix, too, is the billionaire developer Rick Caruso, a former police commissioner and a onetime Republican. Shortly before Thanksgiving, Mr. Caruso’s own mall, the Grove, was stormed by a flash mob that smashed a Nordstrom display window with sledgehammers.Mr. Caruso, in television interviews, blamed the robbery on a $150 million cut to last year’s $1.7 billion-plus police budget and on lax prosecution, calling it “a manifestation of deciding we’re going to defund the cops.” (City leaders backed a modest increase in funding this year.)Rick Caruso has hired a team of political consultants to weigh his odds in a run for mayor of Los Angeles.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesMr. Caruso has not said he will run, but he has hired a team of top California political consultants to help determine his chances. But his remarks underscore the potential that the mayoral race will exacerbate the state’s long-running fight over criminal justice.In the calls for crackdowns, progressive activists hear a retreat from reforms won after the George Floyd protests and echoes of the tough-on-crime rhetoric in the 1990s that led to mass incarceration.“Folks like Rick Caruso have been waiting for an opportunity to put more money into policing,” said Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a co-founder of the city’s chapter of Black Lives Matter. “I think we need to be wary of that. When we say, ‘Defund the police,’ it doesn’t mean we don’t want public safety. It means we want resources for communities.”Ms. Bass, who is considered the front-runner and would leave her congressional seat to become mayor, says that “first and foremost, people need to feel safe,.” But she said she also is reminded of the 1990s, when she was a physician assistant in South Los Angeles advocating for social programs in the midst of the crack epidemic.Representative Karen Bass is considered the front-runner in the mayoral race.Erin Schaff/The New York Times“People were angry because of the violence — the Crips and Bloods, the crack houses,” she recalled, sitting in her Baldwin Hills living room. Through the sliding glass door of the modest ranch house, the city unfurled to the horizon, interrupted only by the Hollywood Hills and the abrupt metallic bar chart of downtown.“That’s what is frightening to me now — the anger,” she said. “And my concern is the direction the anger can move the city in.”Other powerful currents could also propel voters between now and June, when they will winnow candidates down to a two-person November runoff unless one gets a majority. Under a new state law, every registered and active voter will be mailed a ballot. And this will be the first mayoral race since Los Angeles began aligning local elections with those at the state and national level, holding them in even-numbered years.The new system is expected to amplify turnout among Latino, Asian and younger voters — groups that have historically been underrepresented in local off-year elections. The electorate’s new mix could challenge the center-left alliances among businesses and Black and liberal Jewish voters that long have determined mayoral contests.Mr. de León, a son of Guatemalan immigrants who rose through organized labor to lead the California Senate from his longtime Eastside district, noted that, while none of those groups are monoliths, sheer demographic math could sway the election as much as any crisis. Over a breakfast taco in the downtown Arts District, the energetic progressive swiftly corrected an outdated statistic when asked if the city’s 40 percent Latino population might be an edge for a candidate with a Latino surname.“Forty-nine percent,” he said with a smile.Kevin De Leon, a City Council member and former State Senate leader running for mayor, said demography could sway the election.Jessica Pons for The New York TimesHe is deeply aware, however, of challenges that await the next mayor. Mr. de León’s Council district, which includes Skid Row, has more homeless people than the entire city of Houston, and he has set a citywide goal of creating 25,000 new housing units by 2025.“We simply can’t go back to the old normal,” he said. “All you have to do is look at the encampments in every neighborhood in Los Angeles. Families standing in line for blocks just to pick up a box of food to feed their children — the panic and anxiety.”On Melrose, Mr. Nichols, who runs a community group focused on public safety, will be watching. This year, for the first time in the 14 years since it was founded, his group is holding candidate forums. In recent weeks, he said, more than 200 people joined a Zoom call with aspiring City Council members, and mayoral candidates will be up next.“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “People joined from all over the city. I expect a shake-up from the top down.” More