Under ordinary circumstances, the mayoral race in Los Angeles should be a walkover for Democrats, and especially Karen Bass. The longtime member of Congress ended up on Joe Biden’s shortlist for running mate in 2020 and has been rumored to be a top pick for Gavin Newsom if he has to appoint someone to fill Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. Los Angeles County is already a “sea of blue,” as LA Almanac put it in September 2020, and even more so in the city itself, where registration data shows only 13% of registered voters are Republican.

And yet, despite Democrats having 58% of the city’s registerted electorate, the New York Times reports that Bass could lose in an open primary — to a billionaire who only just re-registered from Republican to Democrat. Meet Rick Caruso, who might get a chance to upend Angeleno politics, and perhaps shake up the entire state of California:

Los Angeles faces vexing crises over who can live there and how, as its longstanding problems with housing affordability, homelessness and crime have taken on new urgency during the pandemic. And Mr. Caruso, 63, whose malls across Southern California made him a billionaire, has gone directly at voters’ frustrations with those problems, portraying Los Angeles as a city in deep decay and promising swift action on a law-and-order agenda.

Heading into Tuesday’s primary election to replace Mayor Eric Garcetti, who faces term limits, Mr. Caruso has flooded the airwaves with so many ads that he is almost certain to make it into a runoff with his top rival, Representative Karen Bass, who was on President Biden’s short list for vice president and has much of the city’s Democratic establishment behind her.

But Mr. Caruso has an outside shot at coming away with more than 50 percent of the vote. Under the city’s unusual primary rules, that would let him skip the November election and go directly to the mayor’s office in December.

A victory for Mr. Caruso — a one-time Republican who became a Democrat just before announcing his run — would be a stark shift in this overwhelmingly liberal city, which Senator Bernie Sanders easily carried in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

That’s probably too much to hope for, but it would be a political earthquake if it happens. For one thing, knocking Bass out of office in her own stomping grounds would change California politics significantly in the short and medium term. A loss like this for Bass would likely end her career; it certainly would make her a much less attractive candidate for a Senate run when Feinstein retires.

More to the point, this would signal for perhaps the first time that progressives may have hit a high-water mark even in urban city centers. Earlier today, I wrote about the corrosive effects of progressive policies on policing and incarceration, which all sounded great until the entirely predictable consequences of scaling back policing and prosecution started arriving. The massive increase in property and violent crime has made living in cities like Los Angeles miserable, and everyone knows it — especially Caruso, who’s heavily leveraging that daily lived experience in an effort to get the city’s voters to change directions.

Even if it comes to a runoff, Caruso’s message will likely still outshine Bass’ progressive-establishment status. It doesn’t help that she’s already coasting on name recognition in the primary, too:

While Mr. Caruso has spent more than $25 million on advertising alone, Ms. Bass’s campaign has spent a total of less than $3 million, not just on ads but in its entirety.

That disparity has left Mr. Caruso almost alone in appealing to voters and describing how he would tackle homelessness and crime — vowing to “clean up” the city by hiring some 1,500 new police officers and building 30,000 shelter beds in a year.

An outright win by Caruso here would also send a very strong message to progressives over their radical-reform District Attorney project. Los Angeles County voters are already working to recall George Gascón over his refusal to effectively prosecute offenders; yesterday, Gascón’s deputies won an order by a state appellate court panel ordering Gascón to enforce three-strikes and special-circumstances laws, which Gascón claimed he could ignore through prosecutorial discretion:

A three justice panel of the California Appeals Court ruled Thursday that LA County District Attorney George Gascón cannot order prosecutors to sidestep elements of the state’s 3-strikes law that may increase prison terms when filing criminal charges, and cannot order prosecutors to drop or withdraw special circumstance allegations that could lead to sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

“We conclude the voters and the Legislature created a duty…that requires prosecutors to plead prior serious or violent felony convictions to ensure the alternative sentencing scheme created by the three strikes law applies to repeat offenders,” the Appeals Court said. …

“Today the Appellate Court gave a civics lesson to DA George Gascón,” said Eric Siddall with the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the prosecutors’ union that brought the suit. “They basically told George Gascón you don’t have absolute power as LA DA, that you’re an elected official, that you have to abide by the law.”

Voters have grown sick and tired of crime and of criminal-coddling prosecutors, even Democratic voters in the party’s power base of urban cores like Los Angeles. Even if Bass makes a narrow escape on Tuesday and survives to win the general election in November, the party is doomed as long as its radicals continue to lead it by the nose into disarray and destruction.