ANGELES — For Airbnb, the gold medal game in the 2028 Summer Olympics is on Tuesday.

Since last year, the home-sharing giant and its nonprofit arm have spent at least $12.6 million building influence in Los Angeles and becoming one of the city’s top political contributors — backing Mayor Karen Bass and other candidates, lobbying City Hall and making charitable contributions at the behest of politicians. The company is pushing for friendlier regulation of vacation rentals in the games’ host city, and Election Day is its last chance to sway who’s in charge before the Olympics begin.

The stakes are enormous. Airbnb executives have told investors they expect the Olympics to spur rapid and lasting expansion of its home-sharing business in Los Angeles. But should Airbnb’s candidates lose, the company may face a reckoning in one of its largest U.S. markets. Bass’ challenger, City Council member Nithya Raman, has cast Airbnb’s largesse toward the mayor as “pay-to-play” politics that hurts residents struggling with housing costs, and vowed to crack down on short-term rentals if elected.

“Airbnb understands that the decisions made over the next few years could shape its business in Los Angeles for a long time,” said Jeremy Oberstein, a local Democratic political consultant. “The Olympics may be the immediate prize, but the bigger opportunity is influencing the rules of the game long after the torch goes out.”

Airbnb trained its eyes on Los Angeles in 2019 when it inked a nine-year sponsorship deal with the International Olympic Committee that ends with the LA games. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has told analysts on recent earnings calls the company not only positioned itself to fill the booming demand for accommodations during previous games, but found that a significant percentage of first-time hosts have continued to rent out their properties long afterward.

Megaevents like the Olympics, Chesky said, are “likely the very best way for us to add new supply.”“We have more than a 50% increase in the amount of homes in Paris on Airbnb because we hosted for the Olympics,” Chesky told analysts last year. He said the company has similar expectations for LA.

The boost in business would be a boon in a city where the short-term rental market has faced strict rules for nearly a decade. In 2018, in response to concerns over the proliferation of “rogue hotels,” the City Council clamped down, allowing only primary residences to be rented. Since then, Airbnb-backed bids to loosen the regulations have floundered in the face of fierce pushback from the hotel industry, neighborhood organizations irate over party houses, tenant advocates warning of threats to rent-controlled apartments, and multiple groups in and out of City Hall frustrated at the lack of enforcement for the thousands of unpermitted listings on Airbnb and other platforms.

Last summer, the company leveraged the city’s $1 billion budget gap to kickstart its push for change. Airbnb said its “Save Our Services” canvassers knocked on more than 300,000 residents’ doors while papering the city with flyers and signs. The effort lamented the city’s street, sidewalk and streetlight repair backlogs and urged calls to City Hall to support an expansion of short-term rentals that it claimed could bring in tens of millions of dollars annually in tourist taxes. The lobbying operation cost Airbnb $3.7 million, according to city regulatory filings.

The campaign continued the company’s efforts to seek influence with power brokers in the nation’s second-largest city. In 2023, it hired Justin Wesson, a City Hall insider and son of former Council President Herb Wesson to oversee its operations in LA and across California. Justin Wesson worked for his father before serving as a top official for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and also is married to City Council member Adrin Nazarian's chief of staff.

“They hired someone like [Wesson] because it was getting legislatively and politically to the point where they needed a player to move the needle," Oberstein said.

Bass included a version of the company’s idea in her proposed budget this spring, seeking to permit vacation rentals for second homes and investment properties through 2028. And in an unusual sweetener for the Council, Bass offered up a proposal to allow the company to pay in advance the Olympic-related taxes it anticipates owing to help cover the city’s current deficit.

“As the city was facing a challenge, we wanted to say we could help solve this problem,” Nathan Rotman, Airbnb’s director of policy strategy for North America, told POLITICO.

But the pitch was a dud with the Council, whose members chafed at Airbnb’s tactics, including leaving its name off Save Our Services flyers that were handed out to residents. The Bass administration’s roll-out of her expansion plan also hit a snag when the city planning department released a memo panning the idea of more short-term rentals, claiming it was unlikely to generate much revenue and would instead lead to the loss of long-term housing and put upward pressure on rents. Two weeks later, the department issued a new report saying the first one erred because it analyzed a permanent change to home-sharing rules, not the temporary revision Bass had proposed.

The whole effort, from the outside lobbying to the dangling of prepaid tax revenue, felt like a squeeze, said Council member Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the city’s budget committee. Yaroslavsky said that residents prompted to call her office by the Save Our Services literature were turned off once her staff explained that Airbnb was behind it.

“It really did irritate a lot of Council members and their staff,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s like, ‘We’ve talked to you already about what our concerns were. Don’t try and ram this through by some astroturf campaign.’”The Council rejected the home-sharing expansion when it passed the budget in May.

By then, the June primary was approaching, and Airbnb was deep into its political spending. Along with backing Bass, the company pumped $2.1 million into a political action committee behind LA city attorney candidate John McKinney. It was one of several high-dollar donations from outside groups that helped the largely unknown local prosecutor vault ahead of incumbent Hydee Feldstein Soto and into a runoff with another challenger. In July 2025, Feldstein Soto sued Airbnb, alleging price gouging after wildfires had decimated the Pacific Palisades neighborhood the previous January. The case is ongoing.

The company has poured at least $6.9 million into campaigns, according to public filings, making it one of the city’s largest donors this election cycle. Most of that money has gone to PACs supporting Bass, while Airbnb's charitable arm contributed $1 million worth of emergency housing at Bass’ request this summer for families affected by a fire at a cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights. The blaze left the neighborhood filled with the stench of rotting food for weeks and had emerged as a campaign vulnerability for the incumbent. The company also is spending to support two candidates running for open seats on the City Council.

Rotman said Airbnb’s donations to LA candidates were no different than its backing for like-minded officials across California and the rest of the country who believe that home-sharing helps hosts pay their mortgages and other bills.

“We’ve always supported candidates who champion solutions to the affordability crisis,” he said. The company’s aggressive spending has energized longtime antagonists.

Kurt Petersen, co-president of the UNITE HERE Local 11 hotel workers union, said Raman’s stance against Airbnb was one of the major reasons his members endorsed her. The union is deploying a large field operation on her behalf, Petersen said, and the mayoral candidates' positions on Airbnb are a major talking point.

A union-sponsored July poll of likely voters shared with POLITICO found 53% would be less likely to support an Airbnb-backed candidate, while only 7% would be more likely.

“When we find undecided people, we bring up the fact that there’s one candidate who is all-in on Airbnb taking over neighborhoods and the other one isn’t,” Petersen said. “That does matter to people.”Raman has made Airbnb a prominent campaign issue for months. In May, she held a press conference blasting the mayor’s home-sharing proposals and decried the company’s spending to support the incumbent.

“Bass delivers the policy Airbnb wants,” Raman posted on X. “Airbnb spends millions to elect Bass. Angelenos pay higher rents. Pay-to-play. In the open. With receipts.”Bass’ campaign has rejected Raman’s allegations and said the mayor’s support for expanded short-term rentals is to meet demand from the Olympics.

Should she win, Raman has promised a new city department to oversee home-sharing and fine bad actors. Asked if she was against loosening short-term rental rules entirely, a Raman campaign spokesperson referred POLITICO to the Council member’s statements on the campaign trail where she repeatedly touted her opposition to Bass’ proposals.

Rotman downplayed the potential fallout for the company if Airbnb’s preferred candidates lose on Tuesday. He noted that unlike its competitors in the industry, Airbnb shares data with the city to help monitor compliance with existing regulations. Rotman said that the company is in discussion with city officials to beef up enforcement.

“At the end of the day, we will work closely with any mayor or City Council that gets elected,” he said.

A University of California, Berkeley/Los Angeles Times poll released Wednesday shows the mayor's race in a dead heat, though other recent polling has had Raman ahead. The company’s allies acknowledge that a Raman victory would be a blow.

Ruben Gonzalez, president of the Valley Industry & Commerce Association, which is among a coalition of business and labor groups backing the Save Our Services campaign, praised Airbnb’s willingness to pour dollars into the election.

“Airbnb is doing what I would tell anyone with an investment in the city of L.A. has to do: Put their money where their mouth is,” Gonzalez said.

He called loosening short-term rental rules for the Olympics a no-brainer, citing potential tax revenue. Whether that happens, he predicted, “will depend largely on how this election turns out.”