Zohran Mamdani stunned New York when he admitted on camera that he has many critiques of capitalism.
Now Los Angeles has a DSA candidate leading the mayor's race by double digits.
Nithya Raman called herself a capitalist on CNN and her socialist movement rejects the label entirely.
Raman Told CNN She Is a Capitalist After Months of Dodging the Question
In July, CNN's Elex Michaelson asked Raman a direct question: does she consider herself a capitalist?
She dodged it completely.
"You know, we are in a capitalist system," Raman said. "It's a city government."
Three months later, with the runoff weeks away, the dodge disappeared.
"I am a capitalist, and I'm also a democratic socialist," Raman told Michaelson, as if the two labels belonged together.
Los Angeles County Republican Party Chair Roxanne Hoge did not buy it.
"It's no surprise that Nithya Raman is confused by two mutually exclusive concepts," Hoge said.
"Perhaps she was in a fugue state when she agreed to co-govern with the DSA who proudly proclaim their desire to expropriate private property and to abolish the police."
Raman insists the two labels can coexist, telling CNN she wants capitalism to work "without harm to workers, without worker exploitation, without exploitation of poor people."
DSA Says Capitalism Steals From Workers and Raman Just Defended It
The Democratic Socialists of America does not share Raman's confusion.
"Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit," the DSA states on its website.
"We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society."
Replace, not reform, not coexist with – replace.
Lisa Cusack, president of the Don't LA My Burbank PAC, said the Los Angeles chapter backing Raman traces straight back to the Communist Party.
"The founder of DSA-LA, Dorothy Rea Healey, was a longtime leader of the California Communist Party," Cusack said.
Her autobiography is titled A Life in the American Communist Party.
Cusack said the chapter's current program is just as blunt: "Capitalists extract massive profits by stealing the surplus value of working-class labor."
Hoge summed up what she believes it means for whoever wins the DSA's trust: "When people tell you who they are, believe them."
Zohran Mamdani Already Ran This Exact Contradiction in New York
A year earlier, CNN asked Zohran Mamdani, the DSA-backed assemblyman who beat Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination and went on to win the mayor's office, whether he liked capitalism.
"No," Mamdani said. "I have many critiques of capitalism."
He traced his democratic socialist label to Martin Luther King Jr. and built his campaign on rent freezes, government-run grocery stores and a thirty dollar minimum wage.
Mamdani never pretended to be both a capitalist and a socialist, and Raman is trying to be both at once in a city watching Mamdani's first year in office like a blueprint.
CNN analyst Harry Enten called a Raman matchup "an absolute nightmare for the Democratic establishment and Karen Bass."
A Berkeley poll taken in late September found Raman leading Bass 39 percent to 28 percent, with a third of voters still undecided.
Betting markets moved with the numbers, with Kalshi pricing Raman's odds of winning at 58 percent to Bass's 42 percent.
If Raman wins on November 3, the DSA gets its second major American city and its first on the West Coast.
Even Raman's Own Socialists Are Starting to Doubt Her
The contradictions do not stop at economics.
DSA national leadership is reportedly weighing whether to pull the Los Angeles chapter's endorsement of Raman entirely, over her refusal to fully embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
At a forum weeks earlier, Raman called BDS "a legitimate form of peaceful protest" without saying she actually supports it.
That answer satisfied nobody in a movement that demands ideological purity from everyone except the person it just endorsed for mayor.
She told Michaelson in July that democratic socialism is "a big tent."
By October, she was trying to fit capitalism inside that same tent without asking anyone else holding it up.
What a Capitalist Socialist Mayor Would Mean for 2028 Democrats
Los Angeles Democrats are still living down a mayor who was in Ghana when the National Weather Service issued a fire warning and didn't return until the Palisades had already burned, a response bad enough to draw a recall campaign and a resignation petition with more than 176,000 signatures.
Now they're being asked to replace her with a woman who can't decide if she believes in capitalism before breakfast.
A DSA-run City Hall means rent boards, not landlords, setting what a fixed-income retiree can charge for the house she paid off decades ago, and it means public safety money pulled toward "community response" pilots while patrol officers get cut.
Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris already endorsed Bass, betting what is left of the party's credibility on stopping a DSA takeover of the country's second-largest city.
If Raman wins, every Democrat running in a swing district in 2028 inherits her.
They inherit a mayor who loves capitalism on CNN and wants to abolish police and prisons with her socialist club.
Mamdani already proved the model works in a bluer city, and the DSA wants it three thousand miles away with a candidate who can't keep her story straight.
Angelenos do not have to guess what they are voting for in November.
The Communist Party founded the organization asking for their trust, that organization wrote down exactly what it wants to do to capitalism, and its own candidate just told CNN she is one anyway.
Sources:
- CJ Womack, "LA Mayoral Hopeful Nithya Raman Calls Herself Both a Capitalist and a Democratic Socialist," Fox News, October 26, 2026.
- Daily Wire Staff, "Zohran Mamdani Says He Has Many Critiques of Capitalism," Daily Wire, 2025.
- Jonathan Turley, "Why NYC's Zohran Mamdani Looks More and More Like a Hardcore Marxist," Fox News, 2026.
- Ben Smith, "Spencer Pratt Warned LA This Would Happen, Now Nithya Raman Is Blowing Past Karen Bass," RedState, September 24, 2026.
- Cameron Arcand, "Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass Recall Effort Launches," Fox News, March 4, 2025.
