In deep blue California, frustration with Democratic status quo fuels governor, L.A. mayor race
As primary voters head to the polls Tuesday to determine which candidates will face off in November to become California’s governor and Los Angeles’ mayor, both races are wide open, with a new crop of candidates challenging the Democratic status quo.
For Democrats, little clear consensus has emerged so far on who should lead the city and state into the future.
In California’s crowded gubernatorial race, Democrats have struggled in recent months to settle on a candidate to succeed term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom.
After former Rep. Eric Swalwell suspended his campaign in April amid allegations of sexual misconduct, Xavier Becerra, a former Biden cabinet member, inched ahead by positioning himself as the safe, experienced Democratic candidate. Another Democrat, billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer, and Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator, trail close behind.
In L.A., experience seems to be as much a liability as an advantage.
Mayor Karen Bass finds herself in the extraordinary position, as an incumbent, of fighting to make the runoff as she is assailed from the left and the right. The latest UC Berkeley-L.A. Times poll shows Bass leading with just 26% of the vote, one point ahead of City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a wonkish Democratic socialist, and four points ahead of Republican Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star.
“There’s a clear sense of frustration with the Democratic Party,” said Sara Sadhwani, a professor of politics at Pomona College. The reason a wave of conservative outsiders like Pratt and Hilton are doing so well in such a solidly liberal city and state, Sadhwani said, is that they’re more willing to spell out the challenges that L.A. and California face.
“Democrats tend to be very concerned about not upsetting one coalition or another, so it’s politics as usual with many of the Democratic candidates,” Sadhwani said. “Spencer Pratt has blown a hole in that by just naming the problems that everyday residents and voters are seeing and feeling on the ground.”
On homelessness, many Angelenos are frustrated Bass hasn’t significantly moved the needle.
“We can point to facts and figures that might suggest that things have changed,” Sadhwani said. “But when you walk down the streets of Los Angeles, it doesn’t feel like it, so she hasn’t passed the field test. That’s the problem.”
A growing segment of Angelenos also chafe at the city’s high cost of living. And many are angry about the Bass administration’s lack of preparation and response to the 2025 Palisades fire.
“The Democrats have to account for those challenges,” Sadhwani said. “They have been in power for all of this time.”
California, of course, remains a Democratic stronghold, and polls show state voters are overwhelmingly opposed to President Trump. His second-term agenda — including a sweeping immigration crackdown, tariffs and the war in Iran — only seems to have cemented California’s status as a resistance state.
But after so many years of Democratic dominance, in Sacramento and at Los Angeles City Hall, leaders have to answer for voter frustrations.
The top two vote-getters in California’s nonpartisan primaries will advance to theNovember runoff, unless one candidate manages to pick up more than 50% of the vote.
Republicans have turned out at higher rates than Democrats in early voting. Paul Mitchell, vice president of the Sacramento-based bipartisan firm Political Data Inc., said that older Democrats who reliably turn in their ballots were slower to vote this year, likely because two Republicans were on the gubernatorial ballot and the Democratic field was fractured.
“That has caused them to dive into a lot more strategic voting,” Mitchell said, noting many seemed to be waiting to cast their ballots for the Democrat who looks to have the best chance of moving on to November.
For the GOP, getting a candidate on the November ballot for governor means more than just demonstrating Republicans are players in California. A GOP candidate would bring out more Republicans to vote in the general election, raising the party’s prospects of winning down-ballot races and passing a GOP-led ballot initiative on voter ID.
For Democrats, the midterm races offer the party its first major chance to chart a new path for the future.
As polls show Trump cratering in popularity, Democrats in California and beyond are struggling a year and a half after Kamala Harris’ bruising 2024 defeat to agree on what went wrong.
The Democratic National Committee’s long-awaited autopsy of that election — which said Harris “wrote off rural America,” wrongly assumed identity politics would win over voters of color and failed to develop “defined or consistent” strategy against Trump — has only generated more hand-wringing.
“There is not a clear vision, there is not a clear policy agenda, and the Donald Trump presidency upended the policy world as we knew it,” Sadhwani said. “It’s unclear how any Democrat, including any of the individuals in these two races, is going to navigate the waters into the future. One thing is for certain: We aren’t going back. So, which of these candidates is going to lead us into an uncertain future?”
Referendum on Bass
In L.A., the election is a referendum on Bass, who pledged in 2022 to solve homelessness, cut crime and make the city more affordable.
“How has L.A. changed in four years?” said Christian Grose, a professor of political science and public policy at USC. “The Bass campaign is saying it has changed for the better and she still needs more time. All the other candidates, from very different perspectives, are saying that it’s much worse than it was four years ago, and it’s time for new leadership.”
Bass told The Times she plans to win in November by demonstrating her administration’s progress in clearing homeless encampments and accelerating the building of affordable housing. She has also noted that data shows homicides in the city are at their lowest since 1966.
Challenging Bass from the left is Raman, who was elected in 2020 as the first DSA-backed L.A. City Council member. Pitching herself as the viable progressive in the race, Raman has accused Bass of not doing enough to make the city affordable and critiqued Bass’ spending on Inside Safe, her program to move unhoused people into stable housing. Although Raman presents herself as an outsider, she is a former Bass ally who has chaired the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee for more than three years.
“She’s absolutely a part of the establishment,” Sadhwani said. “She’s been in City Hall longer than Karen Bass.”
As Raman tacked to the center during the campaign to appeal to more moderates and distanced herself from past calls to defund the police, she alienated some DSA members who complained they didn’t know what she stood for. Her three fellow DSA City Council members endorsed Bass.
Pratt is challenging Bass and the entire Democratic status quo.
A former star of “The Hills” who lost his home in the Palisades fire, he has surprised many political observers with his success assailing the city’s handling of the 2025 firestorms. He has called unhoused people drug-addled “zombies” and argued that L.A.’s housing crisis requires heavy-handed policing.
Pratt has raised vastly more campaign contributions than Bass and Raman. He has also generated national online buzz by waging an aggressive social media campaign and inspiring supporters to post a stream of viral AI election campaign ads.
Still, most political experts agree that Bass has the most viable path to victory, starting with a solid base of Black voters and a large share of Latino voters, plus support from powerful unions.
“Under normal circumstances, or at least under historic circumstances, that would be plenty to get her over the finish line,“ said Jim Newton, executive director of UCLA Blueprint magazine and a former political journalist for The Times. “What’s problematic for her is that there are people who are angry with her.”
A reset in California
Newsom has emerged in recent years as the national face of Democratic resistance to Trump, bolstering California’s status through a barrage of lawsuits and all-caps trolling against Trump.
Whatever candidate replaces Newsom, things are going to be different.
The emerging front-runner, Becerra, is a safe-bet career politician who has served as California attorney general and U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. Asked recently why he had climbed in the polls, Bercerra said he thought voters wanted experience, not “glitz and sizzle.”
He has pledged to issue executive orders declaring California’s housing shortage a state of emergency and directing state agencies to maintain coverage for every Californian affected by federal or Medi-Cal cuts. He also touts his record, as the state’s attorney general, of suing Trump 122 times.
Steyer, a hedge-fund billionaire, calls himself “the most progressive candidate on the ballot.” He has pledged to build one million affordable homes, make the wealthy pay more taxes, and defend the environment — stances that are certain to unsettle Sacramento lobbyists and test the limits of California’s progressivism. But his past investments in coal plants and ICE prisons raise questions for some voters.
“His wealth is in one way his Achilles heel in the election,” Grose said. “Voters think of him as a billionaire more than progressive.”
Republicans seem to have rallied around Hilton — a British immigrant and former top strategist forconservative prime minister David Cameron — who has secured Trump’s backing and is campaigning on the message that California is a failed state in need of radical reform.
Hilton has pledged to cut government spending, make housing more affordable and bring gas prices down. But to achieve some of his goals he would scale back public services and environmental regulations and ramp up domestic production of oil and natural gas — strategies that many Californians might hesitate to get behind.
Whichever candidates make it to the runoff, the California Democratic Party will face questions about its strategy and vision. Less than two months ago, the party chair had urged Becerra to drop out of the race to make way for Swalwell.
“Clearly, the party itself has lost its way in California,” Sadhwani said. “I would not be surprised if the California Democratic Party looks for new leadership after this election.”
Can a Republican win?
Because the top two spots in each contest are up for grabs, elections experts warn that the vote results may not be known for days.
If Republicans make it to the runoff, they face steep odds of being elected in November in a state where Democratic registered voters outnumber Republicans by more than 20 percentage points.
Rob Stutzman, a GOP strategist, said neither Hilton nor Pratt was likely to win. But if they made the runoff they could have a huge impact on the political environment by advancing “grievance issues that really put up a spotlight on what I call the blue state incompetence.”
Of all the candidates, Mitchell said, Pratt as an outsider adept at Instagram and TikTok has the greatest opportunity to create a new surge electorate. But he’s also going after the hardest voters to get to turn out: disaffected voters who are upset at the system.
Pratt had more retweets and viral videos than any other candidate, Mitchell said. “But that doesn’t buy him the vote of the disaffected DoorDash driver who believes that the system is broken, and who hasn’t voted in the last five elections.”
If Republicans don’t make it past the primary, Mitchell said, Democrats would likely hit the reset button.
“Pratt running has kind of obfuscated the differences between Raman and Bass,” Mitchell said. “It’s like a WWE match versus a chess match. I think Raman versus Bass would be more of a strategic and nuanced election than Spencer Pratt trying to hit Karen Bass over the head with a chair.”
