The recall of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is kaput. Today is the deadline by which her opponents had to collect the signatures just to put the recall on the November ballot, and they failed miserably. They fell so far short that they never even started collecting signatures.
Yes, it’s hard to get those signatures. It costs about $15 a piece to hire professional canvassers, and you need 330,000 valid signatures, or 15 percent of LA voters, which means you actually need closer to 400,000 signatures, since some of those will not be valid. In other words, you need upward of $6 million.
But that should have been surmountable given that Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergei Brin, was spearheading the recall effort. (It’s unclear how much money Shanahan spent on the recall; she estimated it would cost $4 million in total.)
It didn’t help that Bass’s former rival, developer Rick Caruso, had come out against the recall. (He’s keeping his powder dry, given that he has his eye on a Bass rematch in 2026.) But still.
In mid-January, in the immediate wake of the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and Altadena (which is not in LA proper), there was a tremendous amount of anti-Bass sentiment in the city. A Change.org petition demanding Bass’s resignation garnered 125,000 signatures by January 12. (That did not count toward the recall.)
