Nithya Raman, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, just defeated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in Los Angeles with 52.1% of the vote. She joins Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., and Katie Wilson in Seattle — giving the DSA the mayor's office in four of America's largest cities simultaneously.
That's roughly 44 million Americans now governed by self-described socialists. The media covered it like a lifestyle feature.
The Gateway Pundit flagged something the network coverage buried: this isn't happening in isolation. Law professor Jonathan Turley, writing at Fox News, warned that Democrats are using their midterm momentum — the GOP lost roughly 46 seats — to push for something far bigger than city hall. "After the midterm elections, the Democrats are moving in for the kill," Turley wrote.
The kill, in this case, is the Electoral College. The mechanism is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award all their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. It hasn't been tested in court. It doesn't need a constitutional amendment. It just needs enough states to hit 270 electoral votes, and with new Democratic governors in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the math is getting uncomfortably close.
Turley laid out the full playbook: kill the filibuster, add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states for four guaranteed Democratic Senate seats, pack the Supreme Court to prevent legal challenges, then lock in the popular vote compact so the Electoral College exists on paper but never functions again. "The key is to destroy minority protections by killing the filibuster and creating an insurmountable majority," he wrote.
Meanwhile, the DSA mayors aren't hiding what they want. Mamdani told ABC News, "I think a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere across this country for any position." He's not posturing. In June, he endorsed three House candidates in New York — two of them, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, beat incumbent Democrats in their primaries. The DSA isn't primarying Republicans. They're replacing regular Democrats with socialists and calling it progress.
Raman's win in Los Angeles is the template. She ran openly as DSA in America's second-largest city, beat an incumbent, and won. The national DSA almost pulled her endorsement days before the election over her stance on Israel and the BDS movement — they held a vote on November 3, two days before Election Day, and narrowly decided to keep backing her. That's the ideological purity test now operating at the municipal level in cities that run global economies.
The framers built the Electoral College specifically to prevent high-population centers from steamrolling the rest of the country. Turley pointed to the founders' fear of what they called "mobocracy" — pure majority rule with no structural protections for smaller states. "We are now toying with the very elements that could produce the mobocracy that the framers sought to avoid," he wrote.
The pattern is worth stating plainly. The same political movement putting DSA socialists in charge of New York, Los Angeles, D.C., and Seattle is simultaneously working to eliminate the one constitutional mechanism that prevents those cities from picking every president. They want socialist mayors running the biggest cities and the popular vote deciding the presidency.
Four cities. 44 million people. And one compact that hasn't been tested in court sitting between the Electoral College and a footnote in a history textbook.