Nithya Raman turned into a political celebrity almost overnight when she emerged as the face of a rising progressive vanguard to campaign for the Los Angeles City Council in 2020. With a master’s degree in urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and experience working with slum dwellers in India, Ms. Raman zeroed in on the city’s soaring housing prices and promised to give renters and homeless people a seat at the political table — her seat. Ms. Raman, 42, wound up receiving more votes than any council member in the city’s history and began to draw comparisons to the progressive New York congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — “LAOC,” one local critic derisively called her. Barely a year later, though, Ms. Raman ran into an adversary her grass-roots army was powerless to confront: the bruising power politics involved in running a city of 3.8 million people. The City Council had embarked on its once-a-decade redistricting process, and Ms. Raman, who had few allies among the city’s old-guard politicians, was threatened at one point with losing virtually all of the constituents who had elected her.

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Persons: Nithya Raman, Raman, Alexandria Ocasio, Cortez Organizations: Los Angeles City Council, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York, The City Council Locations: India, Alexandria