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A little more on this from Leigh Ann…

In the month following the apocalyptic Los Angeles firestorms, Rick Caruso has been everywhere: Real Time With Bill Maher, the Sam Harris and Joe Rogan podcasts, NBC News, CBS Mornings, every local TV affiliate—basically wherever there’s a microphone and a camera. It’s a national media blitz befitting a presidential campaign, but wink wink, Caruso doesn’t hold any political office. He wants to help Los Angeles rebuild, and he has little faith that the city, county, and state can do it without the private sector expertise he’s bringing to the recovery effort. “We’re past four weeks now, and very little has happened,” Caruso told me by phone this week. “It’s just unacceptable.” Caruso—the billionaire property developer, L.A. civic fixture, and French cuff devotee—has been making the media rounds to promote his nonprofit, Steadfast LA. It’s just one of several public-private partnerships launched in the aftermath of the fires to “fight through bureaucratic delays” and accelerate the rebuilding of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena, and Pasadena with the help of other well-connected Angelenos, including Netflix chief Ted Sarandos and his philanthropist wife, Nicole Avant; Amazon’s Mike Hopkins; and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Caruso is Steadfast LA’s chairman and is funding the effort himself, seeding it with millions of dollars and promising to pressure local officials to get a move on. On Rogan, Caruso basically said the city is lucky to have him. “I’ve got to help the leadership figure out how to be successful,” he said. Rogan, who spent much of the episode bemoaning the state’s Democratic leadership, at one point snidely referred to “this woman” running the city of Los Angeles. That woman would be Karen Bass, the beleaguered mayor who beat Caruso for the job in 2022. Since the fires, it’s become abundantly clear that Caruso wants a rematch, or maybe more. Caruso is clearly passionate about the recovery: He lives in the Palisades and developed the area’s signature (and still standing) shopping mall, and his daughter, Gigi, lost her home in the blaze. But given his obvious ambitions and near-daily media condemnations of Bass, it’s impossible to talk to him about the fires and not also about his political prospects. He told me he’s considering a run for governor of California next year—which could set up a titanic showdown against Kamala Harris to lead the nation’s biggest state. “Each of them is looking at the other,” one Democratic consultant told me. “But it’s got to be easy-ish. They’d both want to walk into that job. I can’t imagine that’s going to be the case.”

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From her home in Brentwood, Harris will use the next year to presumably make some money off a book deal and the speaker circuit, but her next pursuit will almost certainly involve a campaign. Yes, she is considering another run for president in 2028, and last month she folded the leftovers of her presidential campaign into an LLC called Pioneer49, allowing her to travel and keep her name in lights. But I’m also told she’s taking seriously the idea of running for California governor instead. Her last three public appearances—visiting the ruins of the Palisades with local TV cameras, cheering on the L.A. FireAid concerts with Doug Emhoff, and watching her Warriors play the Lakers—suggest she’s trying the job on for size. In the meantime, she has frozen the rest of the potential Democratic field, a lackluster group of career California politicians, as they wait for her decision. “It’s a bunch of duds,” the Dem consultant told me. “It’s a field that’s been waiting for disruption for quite some time. The Kamala factor is looming over all this—that sends an earthquake through the rest of the field. And you’ve got Caruso out there, too.” Caruso, for his part, told me that Harris’s decision won’t factor into his own. “Right now, I’m trying to figure out just getting stuff cleaned up here,” he said. “But the question for me is, at 66, where do I want to spend the next four to eight years? Where can I make the biggest difference, the most impact? To be helpful? There’s no secret I love public service. I served under three mayors. I loved it. Obviously, I ran for mayor, but I’m not seeking to be a politician. I’m seeking to find a path that allows me to do some really good things, whether that is in the mayor’s office or the governor’s office. I frankly don’t know yet.”

Even if the governorship is the larger prize, Caruso clearly holds more personal animus for Bass. He told me that Bass shot him a text when he announced Steadfast LA last week: Happy to work with you. Otherwise, the two rivals have not been in contact. That’s probably not a surprise, given that Caruso has been spraying Bass with Kendrick Lamar levels of haterade since the January firestorms, when Bass was overseas, having departed for Ghana even after receiving warnings of dangerously dry fire conditions in Los Angeles. Since returning—after the Palisades was mostly destroyed—she has faced blistering criticism for a lack of leadership and clear communication. Ari Emanuel, one of her most prominent supporters in the mayor’s race against Caruso, told me that Bass’s decision to leave the country was “a dereliction of duty.” Even The New York Times noted this week that Gov. Gavin Newsom “often has seemed a more visible figure than Ms. Bass” during the cleanup effort. “The city is lost,” Caruso told me. “It’s like a black hole over there. Nobody knows what other people are doing. I put in a call to the mayor. She hasn’t called me back. … The county and the state have actually been good. Gavin, in particular, has been great. He came to my office. He took notes. He was asking a lot of great questions. He has been very responsive.” Meanwhile, Caruso’s commentary drips with contempt for Bass. “I’m not trying to throw her under the bus, but people need to see leadership and that things are actually tangibly happening,” he said. “The frustration level is at an all-time high. There aren’t a lot of answers out there. There’s no schedule. How could there not be a schedule after four weeks!” I asked Caruso whether his dialed-up criticisms—which began the first night of the fires, when he called up Fox 11’s Elex Michaelson and ripped Bass for being an absentee mayor—were hindering her ability to lead. “Should I maybe stop criticizing her? Criticizing her leadership?” he asked. “I guess what happens is, they keep stepping in stuff.” Caruso pointed to the recent scandal involving Steve Soboroff, the former Los Angeles Police Commissioner whom Bass appointed as her “recovery czar.” Somehow even that became a controversy: Bass approved a $500,000 salary for Soboroff to be doled out over three months, funded by charitable organizations that haven’t been named—her latest in a cascade of unforced political errors. Soboroff said his expertise was worth the price, but he and Bass were forced to backpedal after a predictable public retaliation. (Soboroff will now work for free.) “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Caruso exclaimed. “You can’t even manage one consultant’s contract, but you’re in charge of managing the second-largest city in the country? I’m sorry, I find that to just be so damn frustrating.” From my conversations with strategists around the state and people close to Caruso, making a second bid for mayor seems more likely than one for governor. Even so, he’d have a steep hill to climb. Yes, Los Angeles has plenty of independents and Republicans out in the Valley, and probably some new ones in the Palisades. But L.A. remains Democratic to its core—a city so progressive that it voted for Bernie Sanders over Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential primary.

When Caruso ran in 2022—funding his own campaign and promising to “clean up L.A.” as a consensus builder in the mold of Richard Riordan—he came close to beating Bass in the first voting round. Bass, and allies like Jeffrey Katzenberg, portrayed Caruso as a Trump-like billionaire while raising doubts about his wealth. They highlighted his Catholic faith, claiming that he would impose abortion restrictions in the city. (The mayor, of course, has no power to do so.) Caruso ran on funding the police and fire departments at a time when even left-leaning Angelenos had grown weary of lawlessness. He also had a plan to build more housing units for the homeless, and touted big celebrity endorsements: Snoop Dogg, Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow. He made inroads with Latino voters in the city. In the end, of course, Bass won by playing her ace: She was a lifelong Democrat. Organized labor helped get out the vote, and she called in late endorsements from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, which pushed her over the finish line. She beat Caruso by nearly 10 points. That’s why—as politically weakened as Bass is after the fires—running for mayor again is still a possibility.

If Caruso decides to run for governor instead, there’s chatter that he might do so as an independent. He could run as a Mr. Fix It outsider, as he did for L.A. mayor, cobbling together a coalition of suburban Republicans, Latino voters, and moderate Democrats, and perhaps capitalizing on recent revolts against liberal overreach throughout the state—including in San Francisco, which just tapped a centrist mayor to clean up the city’s drug and homelessness problems, and Los Angeles, which last year kicked out the progressive reformer District Attorney George Gascón in favor of his law-and-order opponent Nathan Hochman. Said one Caruso-friendly consultant: “You have arguably the most important governorship in America, and the lightest candidate field I can remember, even with Kamala in the mix. It’s a huge job. It shouldn’t be a consolation prize. California is wobbling.” But California’s top-two primary system—in which all the candidates, regardless of party, compete for two spots in a general election—would make election math prohibitively difficult for an independent. Despite his wealth, Caruso would be an underdog against any well-funded Democrats who run. He would get squeezed on the right, too. Any Republican candidate running under the MAGA banner, such as firebrand Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, would scoop up much of the remaining G.O.P. vote. “Rick would start 20 to 25 points behind,” one Sacramento veteran told me. “It’s just a much harder deal, no matter how much money he puts up.” Over the past 13 years, Caruso has changed his party registration four times, according to the Los Angeles Times, and he became a Democrat only a few months before announcing his 2022 mayoral bid. I asked him whether he’s still registered as a Democrat. He said he is—which would make it hard to switch parties again before a gubernatorial bid. But Caruso’s take on party affiliation is the same now as when he ran for mayor: Voters don’t care about parties, especially at the local level. The demand for political independence has become even more resonant after the fires, he argued. In fact, Caruso had nothing but kind words for Donald Trump and the televised meeting the president had three weeks ago with local officials, including Bass. During the meeting, Trump pressed Bass repeatedly on when residents would be allowed to start rebuilding, eventually prompting her to say the process would start sooner than the 18-month timeline presented by the Army Corps of Engineers. “I think we’ve got to get out of the business of, if you have an R behind your name or a D behind your name, you’re either right or you’re wrong, or you’re not allowed to talk to each other,” Caruso said. “It’s just such a foolish way to try to manage this country. Donald Trump is the president of the United States, period. End of story. And we need his help and we need federal dollars. And I was grateful that he was actually pushing the elected officials, Get this done. Now we need more of that. So of course I would work with Trump. I would have worked with Joe Biden. That doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t matter to anybody.”

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