challengers

Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto lagged behind her two well-funded challengers based on early returns Tuesday night. But her incumbent colleague, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, appeared to be faring better in his bid to stay in office, holding a double-digit lead over finance executive Zach Sokoloff.

Progressive Marissa Roy led the field vying to serve as Los Angeles’ top lawyer in the first batch of returns surfacing around 8:20 p.m.

L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney sat in second, while Feldstein Soto was positioned third. The top two finishers will advance to November’s general election. It could be days before the outcome of the race is clear. Mail-in ballots with a Tuesday postmark will be accepted by county election officials for another week.

With only two candidates running, the controller’s race will be decided this month and will not go to a runoff in November.

The city attorney’s race transformed suddenly this spring after the Los Angeles Police Department’s largest union broke with Feldstein Soto and backed McKinney. Independent expenditure campaigns have thrown $3 million behind McKinney in recent weeks, with much of that money coming from a political action committee controlled by Airbnb.

Feldstein Soto sued the rental giant for violating price gouging laws in the wake of the Palisades fire last year and has openly questioned whether McKinney would shy from aggressive litigation against Airbnb if elected.

“Special interests have gotten really accustomed to special treatment at City Hall. They get special treatment all the time,” Feldstein Soto said in a recent interview, suggesting that both McKinney and Roy had been compromised by outside spending. Independent expenditure campaigns supporting Roy also received roughly $725,000.

McKinney told The Times that if elected, he would “absolutely” sue Airbnb if necessary.

A representative for Feldstein Soto’s campaign declined to comment on the early returns late Tuesday night.

The three leading candidates often sounded like they were campaigning for different jobs.

Roy said she would run the city attorney’s office as L.A.’s “largest public interest law firm,” focusing on tenants’ rights, wage theft and other issues affecting working-class Angelenos. A deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice, she also vowed to sue the Trump administration, linking arms with the attorney general’s office and other city attorneys in aggressive litigation to curb what many Californians see as targeted abuses of power.

McKinney talked more like he was running for city prosecutor, leaning heavily on his experience winning high-profile felony trials in the downtown courthouse. He said he would improve the way the city attorney prosecutes gun crimes and animal abusers. Despite his lack of experience as a civil litigator, McKinney also said he could bring down the city’s litigation costs, which exploded under Feldstein Soto.

“While all votes have not yet been fully counted, we feel optimistic about qualifying for the General Election in November. People want political courage. They want leadership,” McKinney said in a statement Tuesday night. “What is already clear, is that this election has been shaped by the pressing and undeniable concerns of the people of Los Angeles.”

McKinney previously ran for L.A. County district attorney in 2024 but disappeared in a crowded primary field.

While her term has been marked by financial strain, allegations of misconduct and mistreatment of employees and recent questions about her handling of a data breach that led to the leak of a trove of LAPD records, Feldstein Soto maintained that her opponents are far too inexperienced to serve as the city’s top lawyer.

She said she improved public safety by repairing her office’s relationship with the LAPD and filed more misdemeanors than her predecessor. Although legal costs surged, Feldstein Soto said she did her best to mitigate damage on a number of difficult cases she inherited when taking office in 2022. The rise of so-called “nuclear verdicts” in civil claims reflects a nationwide trend rather than a fault of her leadership, she said.

Feldstein Soto was endorsed by Mayor Karen Bass and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Roy had the support of the L.A. County Democratic Party, the city chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). In addition to the police union, McKinney was backed by his boss, L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman.

The city controller’s race, normally a fairly sleepy affair, has turned into the second-highest-spending race in the city.

Mejia, 35, known for his two corgis that he often features on billboards across Los Angeles, sought to retain his seat as the city’s accountant and auditor.

His only challenger was Sokoloff, a senior vice president for asset management at Hackman Capital Partners. Sokoloff, 37, alleged Mejia did not properly utilize the controller’s office to run audits on city departments and failed to keep up the auditing pace of his predecessor.

Sokoloff’s mother, Sheryl, has spent $7.5 million on independent expenditures in the race, mostly on attack ads and mailers against Mejia. Often, the ads point to allegations that Mejia in 2023 fostered a toxic workplace and made inappropriate sexual remarks to female subordinates.

A woman who identified herself as Sheryl Sokoloff hung up on a Times reporter last week when asked about the race expenditures.

Mejia said Sokoloff’s mother — married to Jonathan Sokoloff, managing partner of private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners — was trying to bankroll the seat for her son.

Mejia has long run on accountability and transparency for the city’s budget and made public-facing databases across dozens of topics on the controller’s website in his first term.

A licensed certified public accountant, Mejia is a member of the Green Party and does not accept endorsements from political parties or politicians. He was endorsed by the Los Angeles Daily News and multiple labor unions, including the United Teachers of Los Angeles and United Auto Workers.

Sokoloff, a Democrat, was endorsed by multiple former controllers, notable Democrats — including Schiff — and the L.A. County Democratic Party, along with other business advocacy groups.

The city attorney’s office is charged with prosecuting a wide array of misdemeanors, including drunk driving, public intoxication, petty theft, trespassing and other lower level crimes.

Roy, 34, has promised to place a heavy emphasis on the legal process known as diversion, which allows defendants to avoid incarceration and instead obtain court-supervised social services, such as anger management or addiction counseling. In cases involving nonviolent crimes, diversion is more likely than jail to keep people from becoming repeat offenders, she said.

“It makes not only the person whole, but the community safer,” she said.

Ashouri, 43, said she is the only candidate to work within the city attorney’s criminal branch, handling cases involving guns, drunk driving and domestic violence. During a one-year stint as a reserve deputy city attorney, she concluded that too many minor cases were heading to trial.

“We need to focus on cases that are harming people,” she said. “Los Angeles is the capital of hit-and-runs. The city doesn’t take vehicular crimes seriously.”

McKinney, 58, pointed to his lengthy history prosecuting felony offenses, many of them homicides. In an interview, he argued that the city is not properly prosecuting quality-of-life crimes, which has in turn left the city feeling less safe.

“It looks dirty. It looks dingy. It looks chaotic. It feels chaotic,” he said.

McKinney criticized Feldstein Soto for dismantling specialized units in her office, including those focused on domestic violence and gangs and guns.

Feldstein Soto, 67, cast those changes in a different light, saying she carried out “a strategic rebalancing” of the criminal branch that redistributed the office’s workload. She said the office’s gang unit “lost its primary mission” in 2021, because of a legal settlement that effectively ended enforcement of the city’s 46 gang injunctions.

On the campaign trail, Feldstein Soto has highlighted her work fighting sex trafficking on the city’s notorious Figueroa Corridor and, more recently, nearby Western Avenue. She said the city has shifted emphasis away from arresting sex workers and toward the prosecutions of the johns.

The city attorney said she also has worked to expand “restorative justice” programs, including one that holds outdoor court proceedings on Skid Row.

Robert Luna seeks a second term as L.A. County Sheriff but faces nine challengers, including predecessor Alex Villanueva, whom he defeated in 2022.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Robert Luna is hoping to be the first L.A. County Sheriff to win a second term in more than 10 years. He points to a reduction in crime for the county during his term and says he brought stability after a series of one-term sheriffs since 2014.

Last year, deputy-patrolled areas of the county experienced a 12.5% drop in serious crimes from the previous year, including a drop of 12% in murders and 20% in auto thefts.

Perhaps the most vocal and well-known of Luna’s opponents is his predecessor, Alex Villanueva, who paints a picture of a department in disarray, with low morale and trouble in recruiting. Villanueva claims his return would keep deputies from leaving and appeal to new hires.

Former sheriff’s Lt. Eric Strong, who also served as chief of campus safety and security operations at the county probation office, has entered the fray once again after finishing third in 2022. Strong has called for increased transparency by the department, advocating for the agency to work with oversight bodies like the Office of Inspector General and the Civilian Oversight Committee.

“Nothing has really changed, and that’s why I’m running,” Strong said.

Mike Bornman, a retired former captain, also is vying for the job. He’s looking to lift morale inside the department, which he said has faced a series of challenges with social movements that have been “anti-cop,” such as the George Floyd protests of 2020 and calls to defund the police.

“There’s been no real pushback from law enforcement; there’s been nothing coming from this office relative to that,” Bornman said.

He said the department is struggling with difficulty in recruitment, significant overtime hours and deputies at risk of burnout.

Sgt. Karla Carranza is running again after an unsuccessful campaign in 2022. At one point assigned to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown L.A., Carranza has made jail reform one of her top campaign focuses, promising to reduce violence and lower the risk of lawsuits and what she says are preventable inmate deaths.

Brendan Corbett, also running for the job, served as assistant sheriff during Villanueva’s tenure. He’s looking to restructure the department, focus resources on patrol and line functions and increase the reserve program.

Lt. Oscar Martinez, assigned to the department’s Palmdale station, is running to unseat his boss and criticizes Luna for fostering relationships with the county board of supervisors and oversight bodies, saying his focus should be on law enforcement, not politics .

“The sheriff is more interested in protecting the political establishment,” Martinez said. “Under my leadership, the mission of the sheriff’s department is to fight crime. Our job is not to fix politics.”

Andre White, a detective with about 11 years at the department, also vowed to take a “community-oriented approach” if elected.

Some voters may recognize Sonia Montejano, a former senior deputy in the department’s court services division, as the court bailiff in the television court program “Judge Joe Brown.”

Montejano filed paperwork for the position and listed her personal website on campaign forms. Her website, however, makes no mention of her campaign or position on issues involving the department. She did not respond to requests for comment.