Go vote, particularly if you live in LA
There are a bunch of extremely tight races in LA!! You should vote in them.
I am unable to vote for any of the LA City specific races, like Mayor, because I live in Culver City, a separate municipality which is nearly completely surrounded by the city. I spend the vast majority of my waking hours every single day in LA-the-City, however, so the outcome of those races are particularly important to me.
If you're voting for mayor, I think you should vote for Nithya Raman. She is not actually a socialist, but she does deeply understand transit. I am not quite a single-issue voter, but I'm close to it - aside from overturning Prop 13 at the state level and instituting a major campaign to build public housing (something no electable politician is genuinely trying to do at the moment), I think that the fastest way to mitigate everyday human misery in this city is to increase transit service and accompanying residential density.
Transit is an urgent need, and the quality of transit we get here directly affects public health, cost of living, traffic violence, and more. If you want your children and your children's children to be living safe and happy lives, breathing clean air and not roasting to death or getting killed by cars, you should be urgently concerned with the frequency and affordability of public transit in LA.
It's completely crazy that Southern California's urban design requires so many of us to buy an object that costs tens of thousands of dollars, and thousands of dollars a year in upkeep (plus an unknown amount of cost and harm in negative externalities to society) just to have basic independence and employability. You should not need to own a car. Working class people should not fear a sudden slide into poverty or homelessness just because their car breaks down or their access to an automobile is taken away. They should not be stuck living a half-hour walk to their nearest high-frequency transit option, or relying on a bus that comes once an hour. Transit should be cheap or free, rapid, and widespread, not because this will save the city money but because it will save lives.
Reminder: I don't hold these beliefs because I am some kind of dilletante white transit enthusiast whose only experience of these things is through a subway planning videogame, or whatever our mayor thinks people like me are like. (Find more context on her astonishingly bad-faith approach to transit here.) I will probably make less than 50k USD this year, and I ride the train 3-4 days a week. I am concerned with these things not only because of sincere beliefs and ideologies I hold, but because improved transit service is in my brutal self-interest. More people who ride trains and buses should vote in their brutal self-interest, I think.
Anyway - a pro-transit government is achievable! And if we get it, you'll probably see me and others start to campaign for an even more radical approach to transit and housing in this city. We shouldn't be looking for or anticipating "LA's Mamdani" to transform the city, because the way our government is organized makes this impossible. We should instead be looking for a toehold that allows us to start centering regular people's wellbeing and safety in our long-term planning.