Mayor

A top spokesperson for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass left her administration Monday after a brief tenure, joining a growing list of communications aides who have departed over the past nine months.

Kolby Lee, who started as Bass’ director of communications in February, said he was resigning to spend time with family and loved ones.

“I’m very grateful to Mayor Bass for giving me the opportunity to be part of her team and serve the people of Los Angeles,” Lee said in a statement.

Bass’ communications office said in a statement to The Times, “We thank Kolby for his contribution to the office and wish him and his family well.” Bass is running for reelection against City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

The departures began in October, when Zach Seidl, Bass’ longtime deputy mayor of communications, left for the private sector.

Press secretary Clara Karger left in January after working for the mayor for nearly three years.

Bass then brought on Amanda Crumley to replace Seidl. But Crumley lasted little more than a month, leaving in March.

Lee started as communications director shortly before Crumley’s departure, serving for about five months.

During Lee’s time in the administration, Bass was also receiving pro bono communications help from Yusef Robb, an outside consultant who worked on her 2022 campaign.

Robb was not paid by the city for his work and served in an unofficial role providing comments on important issues, including Bass’ involvement in damage control surrounding the 2025 Palisades fire.

Lee provided comment to The Times in a story published Saturday about Robb’s work for the Bass administration at the same time that he is a crisis communications consultant for Lineage Logistics, the company whose Boyle Heights warehouse erupted in flames last month, inundating the area with toxic smoke and rotting food odors.

Emergency crews are searching for survivors after a Russian air strike on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia killed at least one person and injured 29, including two children. The city’s mayor says Russian troops have advanced to just over 20 kilometres away.

On my way through Skid Row to meet up with Estela Lopez, things looked pretty much as they did when I spent time there more than 20 years ago and first heard the promises that things would be better soon.

Tents lined some of the sidewalks, making them unpassable. Some people wore the damage of physical or mental disease, addiction, poverty, or all of the above. Outreach workers with ID lanyards strode through the trash-strewn landscape like lifeguards working against endless tides of fresh emergencies.

When I arrived at Lopez’s office in the 700 block of Crocker Street, where she runs a business improvement district on behalf of 600 or so beleaguered merchants, she had just completed a tour of the neighborhood with John McKinney, a candidate for city attorney.

She held a note card in her hand and shared some numbers, telling McKinney that by her latest count, 131 of the 702 streetlights in the district were out, 27 children were living on Skid Row, and 72 RVs were parked in the area.

“I came out here because I think this symbolizes the greatest failure in government,” McKinney said. “I think it’s the result of bad law and bad policy. I think it’s the result of a lack of leadership and indifference to the way people are living out here. To me, it’s completely untenable.”

But will anything ever change?

It’s a question two people in particular need to address, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

A lot of people I trust and admire work tirelessly to make a difference on Skid Row, and they’re always eager to share the success stories of those who move through and move on. (I’ve got a column on that coming up soon.)

The long-standing problem is that Skid Row is both a social service center and a mecca of drugs and other vices, with traps on every block. And so it’s a neighborhood at war with itself, with some viewing Skid Row as one of the largest recovery centers in the country while others see a snapshot of social collapse.

Estela Lopez has reached out to me several times over the years. About illegal dumping. Typhus. Calls to City Hall that don’t get answered. About the relentless plague of fires, overdoses and assaults.

“Can you imagine, in 24 years, how many people I’ve seen dead on these streets?” Lopez asked me near her office last week.

Estela Lopez runs a business improvement district on behalf of 600 or so beleaguered merchants.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

When the local post office closed recently in part because of security issues, Lopez told The Times’ Melissa Gomez that “we have reached a point in this city where we are unable to address criminal activity. … It’s surrender.”

We walked to the corner of 8th Street, where paramedics had just pulled away from a medical emergency. Cars and pedestrians stopped at tents for brief transactions, leaving little doubt as to the nature of the business being conducted.

We passed a caged dog and saw a puppy on a short leash being loaded into a vehicle. There’s a lot of talk about dogs being bred and sold, and Lopez said she’s seen evidence of animals being mistreated.

On 7th Street we passed the charred residue of a recent fire. A half block east, four men were slumped on the sidewalk, hitting pipes. Lopez gets calls from exasperated merchants dealing with vandalism and with people blocking their storefronts.

“I’ve never seen so many people overdose right here,” said Sergio Moreno, who runs a check-cashing business and said his family has been in business going back to the ‘70s. He said he’s seen paramedics use naloxone to revive opioid users, only to see the same people go down again just days later.

“How can you run a business?” asked Moreno, who chairs the board of the business improvement district Lopez runs. “This business is our life. This is how we got through school, this is how we put our kids through school.”

And yet despite paying city taxes and BID fees, Moreno said, problems persist and his customers fear for their safety.

Dr. Susan Partovi, a street medic for 22 years, has been advocating for more proactive intervention for those in obvious distress. Partovi told me she recently saw a man rise from a gutter, pull down his pants and defecate in front of her. She called to get help for him but said neither paramedics nor police determined him to be gravely disabled.

Lopez walks past residents of Skid Row last week. By her latest count, 131 of the 702 streetlights in the district were out, 27 children were living on Skid Row, and 72 RVs were parked in the area.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“We have become complacent with having people lying in the gutter, having diarrhea, speaking nonsensically and putting their lives at risk,” said Partovi, whom I once accompanied as she administered long-acting anti-psychotic injections, arguing that people need clear heads to make better choices.

One sore point for Lopez is the Skid Row Care Campus in the 400 block of Crocker Street, which opened a little more than a year ago and offers all sorts of social services, meds that reduce drug cravings, and supplies that allow for safe use of drugs.

Lopez said she understands the theory of harm reduction: Engage people with a goal of getting them into treatment and back on track. But she wonders how successful such programs are, and argues that they become magnets for lawlessness.

As we talked, a young man approached and told Lopez he’d seen her airing her grievances on TV news.

“I’m wondering, what would be your solution?” he asked.

“I would hope that people could return to life in sobriety,” Lopez responded.

The man said he is “trying to elevate” himself, but that he’d been on a waiting list for housing for six months.

Lopez is tired of being on a waiting list, too.

“If something is working down here,” she told me, “you can’t prove it by me.”

Progress is undeniable, said Sieglinde von Deffner, a social worker and Skid Row coordinator for the Los Angeles County Department of Homeless Services and Housing. But given the “highly vulnerable” nature of the population, “the need is colossal,” she said.

A man stands among his belongings along 7th Street in Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“I have not yet met someone here who doesn’t want housing of some kind. We just don’t have enough affordable housing for everyone,” Von Deffner said, and long-term homelessness makes people harder to reach. “Now, if we could just stop the inflow.”

Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor who researches homelessness and served as an L.A. County consultant, said there are other ways to get people indoors than investing billions of dollars in new housing that takes years to build. Culhane said single adults who are not veterans, including the elderly and disabled, constitute a majority of the homeless population. But assistance is scarce.

“It’s like you have a famine, and you’ve only got food for 15% of the people,” Culhane said.

Rapid rehousing is critical for the newly homeless, he said. But it can take two years for them to qualify for Social Security disability, and once they do, the $1,000 a month “is completely deficient in the face of rising rents.”

Culhane recommends faster approval of SSI benefits and supplementing that income with additional sources of rental assistance. He believes there are enough vacancies at the low end of the housing market to make a sizable dent in homelessness without new construction.

Judy Mauricio, 65, who has been homeless for nine years, rests inside her tent next to her walker. She says her drug addiction has kept her on the street. She receives state disability funds and says she has cancer.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

As campaign season warms up, I’d like to know if Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, Councilmember Nithya Raman, agree.

The mayor of L.A. is limited by a power split with the City Council, and the county oversees most addiction and mental health services. But Skid Row sits just a few blocks from the seat of city authority, and nobody has more power or responsibility to address the decades-long human catastrophe on Skid Row than the mayor.

Estela Lopez and the merchants deserve better. The people on the street deserve better. Thousands of housed residents deserve better.

Does Bass have a plan other than what’s currently in place? Does Raman have a better one?

If so, I’d like to hear the details, and I’m available.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

JACKSON, Miss. — The former mayor of Mississippi’s capital city and the former City Council president have pleaded guilty in a bribery scheme one week before they were set to face trial.

Former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and former Jackson City Council President Aaron Banks pleaded guilty Monday to one count of conspiracy. Their pleas came after Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens pleaded guilty last week and resigned. All three are Democrats.

Two other people — Angelique Lee, the Democratic former vice president of the Jackson City Council, and Sherik Marve Smith, a businessman and relative of Owens — had already pleaded guilty to bribery charges.

A November 2024 indictment accused Owens of taking at least $115,000 from two FBI agents posing as real estate developers and facilitating more than $80,000 in bribe payments to Banks, Lumumba and Lee in exchange for their help greenlighting a development project.

Lumumba, Banks and Owens could be sentenced to up to five years in prison. Their sentencing hearings are set for Oct. 15.

Lumumba, who previously called the charges a political prosecution, lost his reelection bid last year. His lawyers did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ requests for comment.

Banks’ lawyer declined to comment.

Bates writes for the Associated Press.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon promised Wednesday to provide more opportunities for the younger generation, who are facing severe economic threats, including drastic changes in the job market, as he began his fifth term at the helm of the city government.

Oh was reelected for a fifth term in the June 3 local elections — the first such case in South Korea’s political history. During his inauguration ceremony held at Seoul City Hall, he delivered five pledges, including providing Seoul’s youth with education and housing.

“Today’s youths are facing great pressure to survive more than ever before amid rapid job transformations, technological shifts and high housing prices,” the newly inaugurated mayor said.

Oh said he would ensure that every young citizen can learn and utilize artificial intelligence (AI) so that no one gets isolated from ongoing technological developments.

“I will make a Seoul where people can grow as much as they work and be recognized solely for their skills,” he emphasized.

Oh also promised to supply 310,000 newly built housing units by 2031 and complete urban railway projects to open an era where “a subway station is within a 10-minute walk of every home.”

He further pledged to create a city where residents can find a place to exercise within a 10-minute walk from their homes and vowed to revitalize local commercial districts by providing comprehensive support for small business owners.

“Making Seoul a global top three city is not just about raising its international ranking,” Oh said. “It means transforming it into a city where global citizens want to visit and where our residents want to live for a lifetime.”

Oh previously served his first two terms as the capital’s mayor from 2006 to 2011, when he voluntarily stepped down after losing a municipal referendum on a citywide free lunch program.

Following a decadelong hiatus from public office, Oh made a dramatic comeback by winning the 2021 mayoral by-election, stepping into his third term. After finishing his third term and winning reelection in 2022, he served his full fourth term until this year.

“I will work with the mindset that true achievements are only those felt by the citizens,” Oh said.

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Twenty-four days after the polls closed on election day, Los Angeles County officials have certified the results from the 2,227,461 ballots cast. Despite questions raised about the pace of the vote count, a Times analysis found ballots this June were tallied faster than in previous cycles.

California is known to have a slow vote count, partially because of the state’s grace period for mail-in ballots. This year, counties were required to report most of the ballots by June 15, with some exceptions, including for mail-in ballots received within seven days of election day and ballots requiring additional verification such as signature curing. The process has spurred baseless claims of fraud from President Trump and others, leading the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a case on whether mail-in ballots must be received by election day to count.

The state has reported 9.4 million processed ballots. Officials estimate about 5 ballots remain to be counted and 17,650 are waiting to cure a missing or mismatched signature.

Compared with the last time both governor and Los Angeles mayor were on the ballot, county election officials counted more ballots, and tallied them faster than in 2022, The Times found.

In Los Angeles County, turnout jumped from 28% of eligible voters in the 2022 primary to 38% this June, according to the county registrar. Meanwhile, the share of vote-by-mail ballots dropped about 3 percentage points to 82%, indicating a rise in in-person voting.

Statewide, early results show 41% of registered voters turned up for the June election, up from 33% in 2022, according to the secretary of state. County elections officials must report their final results by July 3, giving state officials a week to certify all election results.

The Los Angeles Times reports election results from the county clerk as well as from the Associated Press. The AP provides ballot counts, a calculation of the expected vote and race calls for statewide and national races.

The expected vote percentage, or EEVP, is an estimate of the total number of votes that will eventually be certified. That number can be adjusted based on new information over time.

“Before counting begins in California, our estimates are primarily informed by turnout in past similar elections plus pre-election data on ballot returns, with projections based on what percentage of ballots had already been received at the same point in past elections,” AP director of election analytics Emily Swanson said in an email.

In the gubernatorial and mayoral races, more than half of the votes were counted by the end of election day, EEVP data show.

Swanson’s team also observed a faster vote count this year than in the 2022 and 2024 primaries.

In January 2024, L.A. County consolidated its election operations into a new ballot processing center in the City of Industry. Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, told The Times earlier this month that the facility, which is open to observers, is designed for transparency, security and efficiency.

“It doesn’t take long to count. The counting process is very fast,” Logan said ahead of election day. “What extends the time period is those options that are provided under California law for voters — to allow everyone the opportunity to vote up until election day, and then allowing us the time to process those with the same level of security and integrity that we did the ballots that were received two weeks before the election.”

Despite the faster count, the Associated Press took longer to call winners, suggesting these races were more competitive. The AP makes such declarations by determining whether there is an opportunity for a trailing candidate to catch up to the race leader. It has been calling races for nearly 180 years.

Both the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral race saw a 30% increase in votes from 2022. The governor’s race received more than 9.2 million votes compared with 7 million in 2022. The Los Angeles mayor’s race received more than 850,000 votes, an increase from nearly 650,000 in 2022.

The vote counting process for California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Alaska may change for the November midterm election, depending on which way the U.S. Supreme Court rules.

Data and graphics assistant editor Sean Greene contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — A chief of staff to former New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with accepting more than $100,000 in bribes to steer a lucrative migrant shelter contract to a Queens hotel, according to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday.

Frank Carone’s arrest Wednesday was the latest in a string of corruption allegations that have rocked the one-term mayor and his inner circle. And it came the same day federal authorities executed search warrants related to a separate bribery investigation involving high-ranking police officials under Adams, the latest sign that prosecutors are continuing to hone in on the previous administration.

In the indictment, returned June 12, prosecutors accused Carone of leveraging his position as Adams’ chief of staff to commit multiple acts of bribery, wire fraud and money laundering. His brother, Anthony Carone, as well as the Queens hotel owner, Yan Po Zhu, and Crystal Chen, an employee of the hotel, were also charged.

They were expected to appear in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon.

Prosecutors said Carone accepted a series of bribes from Zhu and Chen in order to steer a multimillion dollar shelter contract to their hotel, which city officials had said was smaller than two other proposed hotels and could house fewer migrants. The contract was awarded amid an influx of migrants to New York that overwhelmed the city’s homeless shelters.

Frank Carone’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, called the new indictment “not worth the paper upon which it is printed.”

“Today’s indictment is a sad day for our criminal justice system,” Aidala said in a statement. “It epitomizes the government first finding a target and then spending three years and enormous taxpayer resources to find a crime.”

Frank Carone known for link to Sabrina Carpenter church controversy

Carone, a longtime Brooklyn power broker, is widely credited as one of the architects of Adams’ political rise. Among the wider public, he is perhaps most notorious for his role in an episode that led to a Brooklyn pastor being stripped of his duties partly for allowing pop star Sabrina Carpenter to film scenes for a provocative music video at his Roman Catholic church.

The church was later subpoenaed by federal investigators seeking information about business dealings between Monsignor Jamie Gigantiello, who approved the video, and Carone.

Adams himself was indicted on bribery charges in 2024 for allegedly accepting illegal campaign contributions from Turkish officials and others in exchange for political favors. The case was tossed by the Justice Department, which said it was distracting Adams from assisting in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Adams has denied wrongdoing but abandoned his campaign for a second term last year.

The former mayor was not accused of wrongdoing in Carone’s indictment.

A lawyer for Zhu, Stephen Scaring, said the hotel owner “will be entering a plea of not guilty and is anxious to establish his innocence.”

Chen’s lawyer declined to comment. Messages were left for Anthony Carone’s lawyer.

Hotel at center of alleged bribery had been rejected by city

In total, Frank Carone was paid around $120,000 by Zhu and Che for the emergency shelter contract, prosecutors said. The money was passed through a law firm owned by his brother, Anthony Carone, according to the indictment.

The city’s Social Services Department had initially rejected the hotel’s application to house migrants due to growing resistance to the high number of shelters already operating in the neighborhood, the indictment said.

Carone then interceded on the hotel’s behalf, prosecutors allege. In one text exchange in September 2022, Zhu wrote: “Thank you my big guy,” according to the indictment.

The Carones and Zhu socialized frequently and attended gatherings at Zhu’s Long Island home, the indictment said.

In a separate statement, Todd Shapiro, a spokesperson for Adams, said Frank Carone “dedicated decades of his life to public service, the legal profession, and helping countless individuals, businesses, and charitable organizations throughout New York.”

Carone played a key role in Adams’ campaign for mayor in 2021 and served as Adams’ chief of staff in 2022. In 2023, he formed a political consulting firm. He also was a one-time lawyer for the Brooklyn Democratic Party.

Separately Wednesday, federal agents searched the homes of current and former New York Police Department leaders as part of a bribery investigation that grew out of an inquiry into Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department under Adams, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the searches.

As part of that inquiry, the FBI and the NYPD executed warrants on the home of NYPD Chief of Manhattan South James McCarthy and former Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard, according to the person, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Maddrey’s home was also searched by federal agents, the person said.

The searches were not related to the arrest of Frank Carone, according to another person familiar with the matter who also spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the case. There is no public indication of any arrests as part of those searches.

Once the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the department, Maddrey resigned in late 2024 over allegations that he demanded sex from a subordinate in exchange for opportunities to earn extra pay.

An inquiry to his attorney was not immediately returned. Attorney information for Sheppard and McCarthy was not immediately available.

Collins, Offenhartz, Sisak and Richer write for the Associated Press. Collins reported from Hartford, Conn., and Richer reported from Washington.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is once again dealing with blowback for being out of town when a massive fire ignited.

The fire at a cold storage facility in Boyle Heights began burning Wednesday, hours after Bass departed for the dedication of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Since arriving back in Los Angeles around 6 p.m. Thursday, Bass has been to the scene of the fire numerous times, declared a local emergency, hosted five press conferences, met with local leaders and families affected by the fire, and distributed masks and air purifiers.

But her quick return and public appearances have not stopped some from drawing parallels to last year’s Palisades fire. Bass was in Ghana on a diplomatic trip when the deadly inferno spread amid extraordinarily high Santa Ana winds that forecasters had warned about for days.

While the scale of the destruction in Boyle Heights doesn’t compare to the 12 lives and thousands of homes lost in the Palisades fire, Angelenos are having flashbacks as toxic smoke hovers over parts of the region.

Bass, who is running for reelection, said in an interview that she rarely travels and always worries about what could happen when she does — whether it’s a fire or a big car accident. She also said she chose Chief Jaime Moore to lead the Los Angeles Fire Department because she trusts him to handle a crisis like this fire.

“I was in Chicago three hours away, and I was there 24 hours,” Bass said, noting that she was in constant communication with the chief during her brief trip.

Bass’ handling of the Palisades fire, beginning with her absence from the city, has had a long-lasting, negative impact on voters’ opinions of her, with polls repeatedly showing high unfavorability ratings.

A May poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, found that 57% of likely Los Angeles voters had unfavorable views of Bass, while 35% had favorable views.

Bass, who served in Congress for more than a decade, was designated by then-President Biden to be part of his official delegation to attend the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama. She was captured in photos at an embassy cocktail party in Accra as the Palisades fire exploded Jan. 7, 2025.

Last week, there was no warning that anything was amiss when she left the city. But any echoes of the Palisades fire could damage Bass’ image as she campaigns against City Councilmember Nithya Raman in the November runoff election.

“We’re talking about a fire, and she’s out of town, so it completely and totally reinforces that narrative of January 2025, and that’s not helpful,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

Guerra said while Bass can do much of her job from another city for a day, a mayor is often faulted for not being front and center during an emergency.

“With today’s tech and instant communication, is it really that different that she’s in Chicago making calls than at City Hall?” he said. “But it has always been the case for executives that, symbolically, it is their job to be at the point of the crisis to assure those that are impacted directly, and the city as a whole, that they have the situation under control.”

Guerra said it didn’t help that Kevin Marchetti, the owner of the cold storage facility operating in the burning building, contributed the maximum, $1,800, to Bass’ reelection campaign last year.

Raman declined to comment on Bass’ handling of the Boyle Heights fire.

The blaze ignited Wednesday at the nearly 500,000-square-foot cold storage facility run by a company called Lineage, beginning on the roof, which caused a partial collapse and moved the flames into the building, where 85 million pounds of food are stored.

Firefighters have been battling the flames for seven days now, and smoke has made air dangerous to breathe in neighborhoods across the Los Angeles region.

Bass’ absence from the city soon caught the eye of right-wingers, with Spencer Pratt, who ran against her in the nonpartisan primary election, and Steve Hilton, who is running for governor, among those critiquing her.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with Karen Bass that she seems to keep leaving the city every time something happens,” Hilton said at a Monday press conference in Boyle Heights.

Pratt, who lost his house in the Palisades fire and came in third in the primary, drew the comparison directly.

“Karen was sipping cocktails in Chicago when the Boyle Heights Fire erupted, just as she was sipping cocktails in Ghana when our Palisades Fire erupted. I warned you all … what happened to us will happen to all of LA,” he posted on X on Sunday.

As she flew back to L.A. from Ghana, Bass repeatedly reminded her staff that she could make calls from the military flight, her text messages showed. But during one call or Zoom with her staffers, she had technical problems, texting, “I am listening don’t know why you can’t [hear] me.”

During the Palisades fire, then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley publicly accused city leaders of failing to give her department the resources it needed. Bass ultimately removed Crowley from her post over her handling of the fire.

Moore, the new chief, has appeared to be in lockstep with the mayor during the Boyle Heights fire, saying she has been an active partner.

About 30 minutes after the fire began, Moore was on the scene. Ten minutes after he arrived, he was on the phone with Bass, he said.

Over the next day, while Bass was in Chicago, Moore estimated that they spoke six times over the phone.

Moore said her absence was a non-issue.

“Until Mayor Bass goes through our 20-week drill tower, and she learns to fight a fire and she can stand next to me on a hose line, I don’t need her in this city,” Moore told The Times on Tuesday.

“She’s our mayor. She was doing exactly what she needed to do,” he added. “She answered the phone. She provided me exactly what I needed, and that was, ‘Whatever you need to do, you do it.’”

Democratic socialists are looking to extend their power in Los Angeles City Hall this fall with their biggest prizes yet: mayor and city attorney.

Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman and city attorney hopeful Marissa Roy, both members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, are heading into the Nov. 3 general election with strong showings in the June 2 primary as tailwinds.

If she prevails in November, Raman would join the ranks of democratic socialists leading big U.S. cities, including New York’s Zohran Mamdani and Seattle’s Katie Wilson. Washington, D.C., looks to be next: Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic primary for mayor there this month, all but ensuring her a general election win in that deep-blue city.

In Los Angeles, a democratic socialist mayor and city attorney could mean added clout because of an ideological lockstep between the two offices, said Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University. In such a scenario, he said, the city attorney’s office is less likely to be a check against the mayor’s authority to set policy on issues such as land use and public safety.

“It’s incredibly substantive that the city attorney will interpret much of the policy that the mayor may push to be the right policy, and not challenge it,” Guerra said.

The election of Raman and Roy would also underscore the leftward tilt of Los Angeles, which has four City Council members, including Raman, who are DSA members — two of whom were reelected in the primary. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who was recommended (although not formally endorsed) by DSA, was also reelected.

The DSA champions ideas sharply to the left of more establishment Democrats, such as incumbent L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. The L.A. DSA chapter, for example, says its objectives include abolishing prisons and defunding the police.

DSA-L.A. co-chair Sean Wakasa said his organization is thriving in L.A. and across the country because it has destigmatized the concept of socialism.

“Democratic socialism ultimately, at the end of the day, is about making the politics that working-class Americans can see themselves in,” Wakasa said.

In Los Angeles, Wakasa said, a DSA mayor would be expected to build more public transit, strengthen protections for renters, fight for workers’ rights, raise the minimum wage and defend local immigrants from the federal government.

The city attorney, he said, would be expected to defend working-class Angelenos by enforcing renter protections, resolving wage-theft issues and enforcing sanctuary city policies.

Business groups and public safety advocates have voiced concerns over the prospects of DSA members calling the shots at City Hall.

“They would run roughshod over the city,” said Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. He said Raman and Roy “don’t just drink the DSA Kool-Aid, they live it.”

Waldman said he would expect Los Angeles under democratic socialist leadership to adopt overzealous tenant protection policies that would discourage new rental development. He said they would also seek to weaken the police, leading to a “free-for-all for crime.”

“They would run business out,” Waldman said.

Roy, who has promised to turn the city attorney’s office into “the largest public interest law firm in the city,” targeting wage theft, tenant harassment and other issues, disputed Waldman’s assertion.

“Allowing corporate bad actors to violate our laws doesn’t make L.A. safer or more affordable — enforcing protections for renters, workers, and consumers does,” Roy said in a statement.

Raman said in a statement that she shares “DSA’s commitment to fighting for working people and those who have been left behind by a political system that too often serves powerful interests instead of everyday Angelenos.”

But she also said “there is no liberal or conservative way to fill a pothole.”

“I’ve always believed the most progressive thing you can do is actually make government deliver,” Raman said. “Every time City Hall fails to do that— potholes that don’t get fixed, streetlights that stay dark, 911 calls that go unanswered — it erodes people’s faith that government can solve problems at all.”

Rick Cole, a former deputy mayor of L.A., said the DSA label for both candidates doesn’t mean they’ll adhere to the most dramatized versions of what DSA stands for. Neither candidate is an ideologue, he said.

Raman’s membership in DSA “is a signifier she’s going to be more skeptical of current policing,” said Cole, a Pasadena City Council member. “She’s going to be more focused on affordable housing. She’s going to be more focused on a humane approach to getting people off the streets.”

A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies that was co-sponsored by The Times showed that in a head-to-head runoff, Raman was supported by 32% of the registered voters polled, compared with 28% for Bass.

Bass finished first in the primary, ahead of Raman, with former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt finishing in third place.

With Pratt now out, the race is on for both campaigns to appeal to his voters, who are generally considered more conservative. Even so, the Bass campaign said it doesn’t plan to focus on Raman’s DSA affiliation.

“What’s important isn’t labels — it’s what her [Raman’s] record shows, and that’s voting over and over and over to allow encampments near schools and to shrink our police force. It goes against what L.A. needs and what most of L.A. believes,” Bass campaign spokesperson Alex Stack said in a statement.

Raman, who was twice elected to the City Council with DSA support, has voted against additional police hiring and spending and creating new anti-encampment zones around the city.

One irony is that the three other members of the DSA on the City Council — Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martínez — have all endorsed Bass, citing the mayor’s fierce resistance to the Trump administration’s immigration raids last year, among other factors.

In the primary, DSA’s L.A. chapter recommended Raman but didn’t endorse her, with the distinction being that an endorsement comes with active canvassing and support from DSA members. DSA-LA co-chair Leslie Chang said it wasn’t yet clear whether her group would endorse Raman in the runoff.

A DSA endorsement for Raman now might be a mixed blessing, given that Pratt’s support came from more conservative parts of the city, said Christian Grose, a political science professor at USC.

“Karen Bass is not popular with Pratt voters, and the DSA is not popular with Pratt voters, but that’s who will decide the mayor’s election,” he said.

Roy, a deputy state attorney general, finished first in the city attorney primary by a wide margin and will compete against John McKinney, a deputy district attorney, in the runoff.

McKinney said electing Roy to the city attorney’s office would be like “going back in time” to when George Gascón was the top prosecutor in Los Angeles County, which police and prosecutors said was a disaster for public safety.

In the recent City Council primaries, DSA-endorsed incumbents Hernandez and Soto-Martinez both won reelection easily, while DSA-endorsed Faizah Malik failed to push incumbent Traci Park into a runoff in her Westside district.

In the Council District 9 race, DSA-endorsed community organizer Estuardo Mazariegos will be in a runoff with Jose Ugarte, a former aide to termed-out incumbent Curren Price.

DSA leaders are pleased overall with how their candidates have performed.

“DSA has really claimed a foothold for ourselves in L.A. County politics,” Chang said.

June 20 (UPI) — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Saturday issued a declaration of local emergency as the city continues to fight a major fire at a cold-storage warehouse in the city’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.

The fire erupted on June 17 and has since caused smoke to blanket the surrounding area as the warehouse continues to smolder, leading the city to open 24-hour-per-day smoke relief centers for resident who cannot shelter-in-place.

The fire, which was described by Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jamie Moore as “a very unique challenge,” started around 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the 500,000-square-foot building, ABC7 and The Los Angeles Times reported.

Fire officials said that hazardous materials, including ammonia, have been removed from the building, but foam insulation inside of the building’s walls, among other things, continues to burn.

“While the LAFD continues making progress, this is a major, multi-jurisdictional incident,” Bass said in a statement announcing the declaration.

“The City and County have opened spaces for families seeking relief from the smoke, and we will continue working around the clock and doing everything possible to put this fire out completely,” Bass said.

The ammonia at the warehouse has been pumped out and transported elsewhere, Lineage Logistics, which operates the facility, said in a statement.

The company also said that it believes the fire started when a neighboring business tested a solar array on Wednesday.

Aside from the insulation, city officials said that they also concerned about the rooftop solar array and lithium-ion batteries at the warehouse catching fire, as well as eventually clearing out roughly 85 million pounds of decaying — if not also burnt — food products, most of which is meat.

The LAFD has worked since Wednesday to ventilate the building so that firefighters can more safely enter the building to suppress the fire, department spokesperson Lyndsey Lantz said in a series of updates posted on its website this week.

which carried with it warnings for residents in the surrounding area to avoid smoke inhalation.

Although much of the smoke from ventilating the building had started to clear by mid-day on Friday, an anticipated change in the wind on Friday after, which caused the fire to also flare up, made smoke more visible than it had been since Thursday.

“LAFD crews continue to work diligently on the warehouse fire in Boyle Heights,” Lantz said in an update at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday.

“The smell of smoke has reached most of the city, and we encourage everyone to limit exposure as much as possible.”

WASHINGTON — As Janeese Lewis George paves a path to the mayor’s office in Washington, D.C., she’s told voters they could have it all.

Her unapologetically expansive, left-wing agenda includes subsidized or even free childcare, increased down payment assistance for homebuyers and community resources to reduce crime, plus a promise to aggressively confront President Trump’s attempts to reshape the nation’s capital.

“People are tired of hearing what government can’t do. They want to hear what government can do,” Lewis George said in an interview before the city’s primary, where she defeated her Democratic opponents and positioned herself to win the general election in November in a city dominated by Democrats.

Lewis George’s victory signals a break with a quarter-century of centrist governance in Washington, and it puts her in the vanguard of democratic socialists who have ascended in urban politics over the last year. Zohran Mamdani toppled Andrew Cuomo, the scion of a political dynasty, on his way to becoming New York City mayor. Katie Wilson won an upset victory to lead Seattle last fall. And this month, Nithya Raman clinched a spot in the November runoff against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

All of them are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. The political organization has seen its membership ranks swell from a few thousand to more than 100,000 nationwide over the last decade after an influx of younger Americans joined following the presidential bids of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, also a self-described democratic socialist.

There’s little sign of national coordination among the candidates, and it’s unclear whether voters are gravitating toward their promises of improved government services, their vows to fight the Trump administration or their critiques of capitalism.

But from coast to coast, confrontational progressives are advancing in mayoral races. City leaders can draw outsized attention for their successes and failures, and democratic socialists will be under pressure from residents to deliver on their vows for a new kind of governance. Whether that translates to national politics is a next test for their movement.

“They are all channeling a displeasure with a status quo and a serious desire for economic populism that the establishment Democratic Party hasn’t been preaching,” said Eric Stern, a Democratic strategist with Fight Agency, a political consulting firm that strategized Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.

Stern added that Democratic voters appeared more willing to support the most progressive candidate in mayoral races rather than in contests for the U.S. House. Candidates like Mamdani and Raman, Stern said, are “daring voters to dream and fall in love not just with the individual candidates but also the political process as a whole.”

A rising left navigates America’s urban challenges

The trend of progressives surging in urban areas may have limits for its broader impact on Democratic politics. Democratic mayors in cities including Atlanta, Houston, Miami and San Francisco won on relatively moderate platforms in recent years.

Progressive have also faced noteworthy challenges. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was endorsed by the city’s DSA chapter during his 2023 mayoral run but has since faced criticism from both moderate and liberal local leaders on issues such as immigration, the local budget and public safety. Recalls and public pressure ousted progressives elected to district attorney offices in multiple jurisdictions over the last five years, when criminal justice reform efforts ran into dissatisfaction over public disorder following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump’s hardline immigration and law enforcement tactics have also become a challenge for liberal cities. The president’s agenda poses an especially serious threat to Washington, D.C., because of its status as a federal territory.

“Maybe we take back Washington and run it on a federal basis,” Trump told reporters this month when asked about the potential election of a democratic socialist as the district’s mayor. “We won’t put up with it.”

But progressives hope the current wave of anti-Trump furor in deep blue cities across the country will help buoy the chances of those on the hard left.

“It’s not folks looking for the leftmost option so much as looking for a candidate who’s gonna be on their side,” said Ravi Mangla, speaking for the left-wing Working Families Party. The party often endorses the same candidates as the DSA and is readying to target more mayoral offices in the country’s biggest metropolises this fall and in 2028.

“It’s less about whether you are on the right or on the left so much as whether you are willing to punch up at the powerful,” he added.

Mamdani and Lewis George are both self-described “sewer socialists” who emphasize the need for responsive government services rather than critiques of market economics. The phrase recalls the socialist Gilded Age mayors whom critics derided as too preoccupied with managing public works projects.

The term’s revival is partly a strategic move to align leftist ideas with concerns over affordability and the economy, voters’ top concern in the midterm elections, and shift the public perception of democratic socialists from firebrands who support radical policies to independent-minded public servants.

“This is absolutely a change election and I’m excited to bring the change that people want, which is really putting people first in the city and having the moral clarity and courage to stand up to Trump,” Lewis George said.

For voters the ‘socialist’ label did not seem to matter

While conservatives have used the “socialist” label to attack Democrats as extreme or incompetent, some D.C. voters appeared ambivalent before Tuesday’s primary.

Several lifelong residents said they believed Lewis George was a “fighter” but didn’t think she’d have much of an impact on the local economy, given the city’s status as a federal district.

“I go back and forth on my own labels and whether I am supportive of that movement or not, but I am supportive of making D.C. more affordable,” Owen Fitzgerald, a University of Maryland graduate student, said of his support for democratic socialism.

Fitzgerald voted for Lewis George because she would stand up to Trump and said he’d first learned of her campaign from friends in his neighborhood. But he didn’t know she was a democratic socialist until he saw news reports describing her with the label.

“It sends a cultural message to this administration that the people who are surrounding them in the capital are opposed to their platform, opposed to their political agenda, and I think that it will send a message, both nationally and internationally,” Fitzgerald said.

Brown writes for the Associated Press.

The Democratic Socialist has vowed aggressive response to Trump, who has said he could ‘take back’ DC if she wins.

Washington, DC – Janeese Lewis George, a Democratic Socialist who has promised an aggressive approach to United States President Donald Trump, is on track to become the next mayor of Washington, DC.

Lewis George already had a commanding lead after Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Her top competitor, Kenyan McDuffie, conceded on Thursday, all but assuring her victory.

Washington, DC, trends heavily Democratic, with the primary winner likely to win the general election in November. There is no Republican challenger for the post, although independent and third-party candidates can mount challenges.

Lewis George, a council member and former prosecutor, had garnered labour groups’ support as she vowed to set clear boundaries with the Trump administration, including ending cooperation between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Her victory would make her the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to which NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also belong, to lead Washington, DC.

Her competitor, McDuffie, a former councilmember, had gained support among DC’s business community and pitched himself as a moderate. His style hewed close to that of current Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has walked a careful line between criticism and cooperation with Trump.

For his part, the US president has made his preference clear, floating that he might “take back Washington and run it on the federal basis” if Lewis George became mayor.

Washington, DC, is a federal district, giving the White House and Congress outsized influence. However, under a 1973 law, the district has so-called “home-rule”, allowing residents to elect the mayor, council members and neighbourhood commissioners to run daily affairs.

Advocates have long called for the district, with a population of more than 700,000, to become a state. Both Lewis George and McDuffie support DC statehood.

Since taking office in January of last year, Trump has repeatedly threatened to assert more control over the district.

He briefly federalised the city’s police department in August of last year, claiming a crime emergency, surged federal immigration enforcement in the district, and deployed the National Guard as part of a “beautification” project.

Responding to Trump’s threats ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Lewis George said a strong response was needed.

“We are not going to get ICE off our streets or protect Home Rule by fearing this President,” she said.

“Threatening DC because you do not like how our residents vote is an attack on democracy itself. The people of DC elect the Mayor of DC. And they want someone who will stand up to Trump,” she said.

Adrian Vestea nominated as prime minister after previous choice, Eugen Tomac, withdraws.

Romanian President Nicusor Dan has nominated Adrian Vestea, a National Liberal Party member and former mayor, as prime minister to form a new government after the previous choice for the post withdrew.

“Eugen Tomac withdrew his mandate this morning and as such ‌I nominate Adrian Vestea as prime minister,” Dan, a centrist, said in a post on X on Sunday.

Vestea, 52, ⁠is the county council president of the central Romanian county of Brasov. Eugen Tomac had ⁠been seeking to lead a government of technocrats but lacked support from the parties in parliament.

Vestea, who served as a development minister from 2023 to 2024, said in a statement that he wants a “political government that will undertake real reforms and keep Romania on a pro-Western path”.

“We are the sixth largest country in Europe, and we need to put a major emphasis on development. Which I will do from day one,” he said.

Dan’s two nominations for the prime ministerial role this month come after a no-confidence vote toppled former Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan in May. A general election is not scheduled until 2028.

Dan said Vestea was suitable for the role because he had “gone through all the administrative stages” throughout his political career.

“He was a successful mayor, a successful county council president, a successful minister, and he attracted European funds, being focused on development, for example the Brasov airport, which is a success,” Dan said.

Parliamentary parties have previously said a minority government, whose members do not hold a ⁠majority of the seats in parliament, would be better ⁠than a government of technocrats.

Vestea will ⁠have 10 days to form ⁠a government and must win a parliamentary vote of confidence to take up his new post.

Romania has one of the highest budget deficits in the European Union and suffers from rampant inflation and a technical recession.

When a coalition government came to power in June 2025, it made reducing the budget deficit a priority. Bolojan was sworn in with the aim of ending one of Romania’s worst political crises in its post-communist history, but his government lasted less than a year.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has vowed to prioritize elevating Seoul into a “global top three city” during his new term following his victory in the June 3 local elections.

Oh made the pledge in an interview with Yonhap News Agency on Tuesday after winning last week’s local election against ruling Democratic Party rival Chong Won-o, his third consecutive and fifth non-consecutive election as Seoul mayor.

“A global top three city is not merely a slogan to raise the ranking but a goal to increase quality of life,” Oh said at his office. “(I) will concentrate the new city government’s capabilities to create a warmer and healthier Seoul.”

Seoul ranked sixth in the Japan-based Mori Memorial Foundation’s Global Power City Index 2025. London topped the list followed by Tokyo, New York, Paris and Singapore.

The index evaluates cities based on six major indicators — economy, research and development, cultural interaction, livability, environment and accessibility.

Oh said he plans to establish a committee to achieve the “global top three city” goal, noting that it will serve to set the direction of the city government for the next four years.

“If (we) continuously work on areas that the city can be good at and can handle, Seoul can rise to a global top three city rivaling London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Singapore,” he said.

Meanwhile, Oh said he has no plans set up for the presidency, even after his victory cemented his place as a political heavyweight with his party suffering a rout in last week’s elections, winning only four out of 16 key mayoral and gubernatorial seats up for grabs.

“There is no plan for the presidency,” he said, pledging to focus on elevating the city’s status. “(I) don’t think politics works out just by making plans.”

Copyright (c) Yonhap News Agency prohibits its content from being redistributed or reprinted without consent, and forbids the content from being learned and used by artificial intelligence systems.

Since its creation more than a century ago, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has been in the lamppost business and little else.

But in recent months, the little-known city agency has found itself pulled into a fierce debate over L.A.’s relationship with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that has been criticized for supplying data used to enable the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

In L.A., Flock operates dozens of automated license plate readers, which allow authorities to scan for vehicles that have been reported stolen or are registered to known fugitives, tracking their movements throughout the city.

The devices are often mounted on municipal light poles, which makes the Bureau of Street Lighting responsible for their installation.

Reports that Flock has shared license plate data with federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have prompted dozens of mostly smaller cities across the country to end their relationship with the company. But in L.A. it still has found willing customers, including the LAPD.

Hundreds of emails obtained by The Times through public records requests reveal how LAPD boosters, homeowner associations and elected officials have engaged in a months-long campaign to pressure the Bureau of Street Lighting to speed up installations of the plate readers.

Flock, headquartered in Atlanta, said that it contracts with roughly 5,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies nationwide, and that its technology complies with a California law that limits what information can be shared with federal authorities. A company spokesperson said that Flock’s technology is “built around transparency, accountability, and local control.”

“Our customers own and control their data, which is deleted after 30 days by default,” the spokesperson, MoMo Zhou, said in a statement to The Times. “Our platform includes safeguards like audit trails to help ensure accountability at every step. Every day, Flock supports communities across the country in addressing crime and locating missing people.”

The Bureau of Street Lighting, with 177 employees and a relatively modest budget of $49.4 million, would seem an unlikely player in the broader debate over police surveillance. It is primarily tasked with repairing and fortifying the city’s more than 210,000 streetlamps — a frequent target of copper wire thieves — and maintaining its network of electrical vehicle charging stations.

The push to put up more plate readers has come amid calls for greater transparency around the Los Angeles Police Department’s dealings with Flock. In March, the Police Commission asked the department to report back on what information the company’s scanners collect and share. In recent months, the commission declined to approve donations of Flock cameras.

Members of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition held a news conference to express opposition to Flock Safety, a license plate reader, ahead of a Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners meeting on March 3, 2026.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The commission ordered its inspector general to conduct an audit of the LAPD’s use of license plate reader technology, with the findings expected to be released in the summer.

Recently, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion urging the commission to “refrain from entering into any new Memoranda of Understanding, Contracts, or other Agreements, or implement any pilot programs with Flock Safety or its affiliates.” LAPD officials said last month that the city attorney’s office has been working on drawing up a formal contract with Flock.

Behind the scenes, though, the pressure to work with Flock has been ratcheting up from other council offices and community groups.

When a representative from Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky’s office emailed the streetlighting bureau urging speed, she received a response that said the installation process shouldn’t be rushed because some city light poles can’t support the weight of a Flock reader, which is normally powered by a solar panel.

“The last thing we need is to have a pole fall onto someone or something if there are high winds,” the bureau’s Clinton Tsurui wrote in the June 4, 2025, email.

In another exchange, Tsurui expressed frustration with a colleague who had offered what he thought was an overly optimistic timetable for installing new plate readers.

He wrote: “smh, promising things we can’t do is going to catch up with us one day.”

The Los Angeles Police Foundation, a nonprofit group that has long bankrolled equipment for the LAPD and offered other support, has criticized delays in installing the Flock devices. Last year, the foundation facilitated the donation of dozens of Flock cameras, most of which ended up in affluent neighborhoods on the city’s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.

Records show that in May 2025, Dana Katz, the foundation’s executive director, reached out to the mayor’s office with a request to waive permit and rental fees associated with installing the new readers. Katz wrote in an email that the extra expense of around $2,000 per device were “cost prohibitive and detrimental to public safety.”

Katz also pointed out that in some places, there are no city-owned poles on which to mount the devices — but offered a possible solution.

“Flock has its own pole that has been accepted by the County of Los Angeles for these situations, and we would like the City to accept the use of them, too,” she wrote to Robert Clark, the city’s then-deputy mayor of public safety.

A few of L.A.’s historic streetlights stand outside the Bureau of Street Lighting’s office near Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Katz wrote Clark again on Aug. 6 to ask why officials were estimating a six-to-12-month wait for approval of new Flock readers on public property in the neighborhoods of Cheviot Hills and Brentwood Park, where there were no existing city poles to mount them. She noted that the county’s engineering department had already approved the company’s poles, and asked Clark whether there was a way for the city to “piggyback on these other entities’ approvals in order to speed this up so that these neighborhoods don’t have to wait so long for help in preventing these home invasions?”

In the following weeks, Katz’s emails took on an increasingly urgent tone. In one of her last messages, email records show, she told an aide she expected more help than the mayor’s office was offering.

“With all due respect, the answers you have provided are completely generic and do not provide any guidance and direction as to how we can expedite this process,” she wrote.

She added: “I’ve said it before, and I will say it again — these delays are harmful to public safety.”

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told The Times that ultimately neither Clark nor the aide intervened on the Los Angeles Police Foundation’s behalf.

Email records show Flock’s courtship of the bureau dates at least to spring 2024, when the company agreed to donate two of its plate readers to help combat copper thefts.

Tsurui emailed LAPD Capt. Celina Robles to say that the company’s executives had requested an in-person meeting with the bureau and the LAPD “to discuss the benefits of this product and how it can benefit the city moving forward.”

On June 24, 2024, a lobbyist from the D.C. firm Modern Fortis emailed Bureau of Street Lighting Executive Director Miguel Sangalang seeking to “explore a public-private partnership” between Flock and the city. Sangalang took another meeting to discuss Flock a few months later with former City Councilmember Joe Buscaino, who after leaving City Hall had gone to work for Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based lobbying firm.

In January 2025, after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas, Flock stepped in again. The company agreed to donate more than 50 plate readers, free of charge for six months, to the wealthy Palisades area, where residents and law enforcement officials were on high alert about potential theft.

A Flock Safety automated license plate reader in Costa Mesa.

(Courtesy of the city of Costa Mesa)

In the days and weeks that followed, city and police officials continued to pepper the bureau about speeding up the approval process.

On Jan. 21, 2025, records show, Cmdr. Randall “Randy” Goddard of the LAPD’s Information Technology Bureau wrote streetlighting officials to say that the Palisades community “could use a big favor from your department.”

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell “fully supports this and has been working with the City Attorney’s office to finalize the terms,” Goddard wrote.

When Nithya Raman stepped up to a podium on the night of L.A.’s mayoral primary election, she thanked her supporters for standing up to the “powerful interests” who spent millions of dollars trying to “preserve this city’s broken and unjust status quo.”

“At a time when so many people have written Los Angeles off or have lost hope in the future of this incredible city,” the democratic socialist L.A. mayoral hopeful said, “you are proof that Angelenos are hungry for change.”

But as election results rolled in, the movement for change was underwhelming, or at least divided. Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was in the lead, advancing to the November runoff. That left Raman locked in a battle for a second spot with Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt.

Bass is one of several high-profile establishment Democrats to emerge on top. In California’s gubernatorial race, centrist Xavier Becerra, a veteran of the Biden Cabinet, advanced to the runoff after being challenged from the left by billionaire green activist Tom Steyer and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter. Steyer is now behind Steve Hilton, a Republican, and battling to make the runoff.

Still reeling from the rise of Donald Trump, Democrats in California and beyond are struggling to figure out the future direction of the party.

Some progressives, inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory, saw 2026 as an opportunity to move the city further left. But the results have been mixed in key races, with veteran Democrats like Bass and Becerra eking out leads even as polls show dissatisfaction with status quo politics in California.

“This was supposed to be a change revolution, but voters clearly said no to the revolution,” said Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College. “Voters want change,” she noted, “but it doesn’t appear right now that there has been an appetite for a major shift in the ideology of the city or the state.”

Xavier Becerra speaks during an election night event in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Becerra emerged as the Democratic favorite late in the election and won support from many establishment party leaders. Pundits said after a wild primary that included the implosion of Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign amid sex assault allegations, Becerra emerged as a “safe” choice.

Some opponents attacked his moderate views and his willingness to accept campaign donations from big oil companies like Chevron. But that did not stop his rise.

Bass was also beset with challenges, being an incumbent in a city beset with problems.

For her, election night marked a “victory with an asterisk,” Sadhwani said, noting that Bass is first incumbent L.A. mayor in more than two decades to face a runoff. “It would be wrong for Karen Bass to think that this victory … is a ringing endorsement of the work she is currently doing.”

The results underscore Bass’ unpopularity as an incumbent, garnering just 35% of the vote so far. If Raman can catch up and eventually surpass Pratt in the vote count, she could pose a considerable challenge to Bass as more young voters come to the polls in November.

Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member who leads the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said if Bass exceeded expectations it was because they were very low.

“Coming in first in a runoff isn’t a huge victory for an incumbent mayor,” he said. “Two-thirds of the city did not vote for her. That’s not a position of strength.”

James Adams, a political science professor at UC Davis, said that Becerra and Bass coming through indicates the centrist Democratic candidates were in a stronger short-term position than their rivals. But problems loom ahead, he said, as the longtime Democratic establishment that’s been governing California for the last 15 years failed to make notable progress in solving problems with affordable housing, homelessness, public transportation and education.

“I think the Democrats’ prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans’ dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,” Adams said. “But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they’re setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state’s problems while getting reelected anyway.”

Democrats in California, he said, were suffering from being in power too long.

“Whenever one party gets into a long-term, dominant position, usually because the other party is just in the midst of self-destructing … the whole thing ends in tears, because the party that is in a dominant position, they don’t have to be that good.”

As the vote count continues in the mayor’s race, democratic socialists in Los Angeles already have some wins down-ballot.

“We are gaining momentum,” said Leslie Chang, a co-chair of the 5,000-member L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, a decentralized anti-capitalist group that advocates for rental protections and defunding the police. Over the last six years, Angelenos have elected four DSA-backed City Council members and a DSA-recommended city controller.

The DSA did not officially endorse Raman, because she entered the race after the group had issued endorsements and another DSA candidate was also running for mayor. However, three of the six DSA-backed candidates for citywide office were projected to win outright.

DSA Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez were reelected by such large margins they avoided runoffs. In the city attorney’s race, DSA-endorsed Marissa Roy was in the lead and the mainstream Democratic incumbent became the first city attorney ousted in a primary in nearly a century. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, a progressive anti-establishment candidate who is not a DSA member but an ally of the group, led by nearly 20 percentage points.

When Chang knocked on doors, she said, some voters asked: “Well, what’s the difference between Nithya and Karen Bass?”

A few voters told her that after reviewing Bass’ and Raman’s websites, they found their platforms similar. Chang was surprised. She thought Raman articulated a clear and novel strategy for how to get L.A. out of the housing crisis, but she said some on the left took issue with her working with housing developers to reduce red tape.

Neel Sannappa, chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, said Raman was stymied by getting into the race late and having only a few months to campaign. It also didn’t help that a more left-wing challenger, Rae Huang, already had some momentum — not enough to win, but enough to split the left.

“Nithya does represent something real and growing in Los Angeles,” Sannappa said. “There is a hunger for more progressive, left-leaning candidates that want to make sure that we’re investing in people and not so much investing in just police … and being able to build things that are new and innovative.”

Supporters watch election results come in on their phones during Nithya Raman’s election night party at Boomtown Brewery on Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Some have criticized Raman’s coalition-building, noting she was not endorsed by her fellow DSA-backed City Council members. Others said the MIT and Harvard graduate, who has been a councilmember for six years, performed tepidly in a May televised debate and suffered from Pratt’s attempts to tie her to the establishment.

“If you’re a part of the institution, which she is,” Sadhwani said, “then you can’t exactly claim that you’re going to bring massive change.”

Sadhwani said that California’s left, in contrast to New York’s, appears to have a charisma deficit. While Pratt and Hilton had an advantage with their television backgrounds, they also spoke “in plain terms about the real problems that the state faces.”

Part of Bass’ success can also be attributed to assembling a coalition that included the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the L.A. police officers union, the L.A. County Democratic Party and immigrant rights groups.

In the mayoral race, Sadhwani said, “the dominant political coalition still has power, money, the organization.”

“If you can garner the support of the unions, then having a broader message, maybe it’s less important,” she said. “You don’t have to work quite so hard, because the unions have the base machine.”

People attend Mayor Bass’ election party for the California 2026 primaries at the LINE Hotel on Tuesday.

(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)

Yusef Robb, a longtime Democratic strategist who is an advisor to Bass, attributed the mayor’s lead to her campaign’s success in building a broad coalition and communicating across the political spectrum. Most voters, he said, tend to think less about ideology — and whether a Democrat was mainstream or DSA-supported — than candidates’ positions on bread and butter issues.

“Mayor’s races are first and foremost about what people see outside of their front doors, when they walk their kids to school, when they drive to work,” he said. “At the end of the day, the voters look at the field and say, ‘OK, who do I trust to keep my kids from having to skip around a tent on the way to school?’ ‘Who can I trust to hire more officers?’ … and ‘Who can I trust to fight back against ICE in court through executive action and even in the streets?’ And that’s Karen Bass.”

For Democrats in this robustly blue state, part of the challenge in figuring a path forward is that every candidate — even those already in power — pitches themselves as a bona fide progressive against the status quo.

“We have led a grassroots campaign because we want to bring change to our city,” Bass said on election night. “And that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”

Raman also tried to tout herself as a change candidate. Articulating her platform in broad strokes rather than bread-and-butter detail, Raman said she wanted L.A. to be a place “where government actually functions and delivers every day on this city’s beautiful bighearted values, where we stand up against ICE, where we show up for our gay and trans siblings.”

But as she talked of neighborhoods “full of trees and shade … and people and good food,” she seemed low-key and equivocal. Her message was a far cry from the pressing one U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put forward in his presidential campaigns, highlighting the millions of Americans working for “starvation wages” and a young single mother in Nevada struggling on $10.45 an hour.

Ultimately, the fight between Bass and Raman, as a struggle between mainstream and progressive Democrats, is complicated by the fact that Bass came up through the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, founding the grassroots Community Coalition in South L.A. in the 1990s.

Campaign worker Khai Dombroe prepares balloons before Nithya Raman’s election night party.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

And even though Raman is a DSA member, she has tacked to the center during the campaign, distancing herself from past calls to defund the police by saying she did not want the LAPD to lose more officers.

While Raman and Bass have much in common, the most significant difference between them is on homelessness, Sannappa said. Even though Bass comes from a political tradition of not wanting to criminalize the unhoused, he said, she understood her voters include people wanting to move homeless people off the streets.

“Brass tacks is that we need people that are going to be willing to fight for mental health services,” Sannappa said.

“I think Nithya more so represents the direction where the Democratic Party is going to have to go.”

As L.A. becomes less affordable and homeownership becomes out of reach for many Angelenos, young renters have become a rising political constituency — a shift that many say will likely propel the city leftward.

Bonin said he expected the next new rising Democratic coalition in L.A. to be a labor-renter coalition. He cited Councilmember Soto-Martinez, a renter and union organizer, as probably the best avatar of that.

But as the middle-class splinters along generational lines, other political experts warn that many ordinary Angelenos feel increasingly shut out of L.A. politics.

“Once upon a time the Democratic Party was the party of the working class, and today it has become the party of the educated elites,” Sadhwani said. “Perhaps one of the gifts that Donald Trump has given to Democrats is to force them to contend with the everyday issues of voters, which they seem to have distanced themselves from.”

As many Angelenos feel worse off now than four years ago, Chang said Bass was not directly responsible for every problem. Still, she said, she could have done more to move the city in the right direction.

Delaying the wage boost tied to the 2028 Olympics, she said, was a move that failed working people at a time when many are struggling to make ends meet.

“My fear, of course, is people pivot away from corporate Democrats and they choose the MAGA Republican, because that is the most visible fight,” Chang said. “Or because they think, ‘Oh, well, a democratic socialist running on the Democratic Party line, this is just more of the same status quo.’ ”

In the race for Los Angeles mayor, incumbent Karen Bass secured a place on the November ballot. But who will challenge her is yet to be determined, as votes are still being tallied.

With 62% of the expected vote counted, reality television personality Spencer Pratt sits in second place and City Councilmember Nithya Raman trails in third. Although Pratt has declared victory, the Associated Press, which estimates the expected votes in, has not called the race.

This story is based on a snapshot of precinct-level results provided by the L.A. County registrar on Wednesday. The Times analyzed the 525,326 votes processed so far. This story will be updated when winners are finalized in early July by the secretary of state.

This map shows the margin and density of votes by precinct. Areas where a candidate leads by a wide margin, such as Brentwood for Pratt, appear darker on the map. More densely populated neighborhoods — such as Bass strongholds in Baldwin Hills and Hyde Park — appear in brighter colors. As of Wednesday, an estimated 710,000 ballots were yet to be counted, according to L.A. County officials.

The preliminary results show narrow margins among precincts on the Eastside, with some precincts showing an almost 30% split across the top 3 candidates.

Bass retained a strong lead in precincts across South L.A. compared with her 2022 race against Rick Caruso. Pratt has garnered heavy support from his neighbors in Pacific Palisades, as well as precincts in Bel-Air and Shadow Hills.

Raman, who represents Los Feliz, Hollywood Hills, Sherman Oaks and Encino on the city council, has so far underperformed in her home 4th District. She led in 12 of the 66 precincts, particularly in parts of Los Feliz. A few precincts in East Hollywood swung heavily for Pratt; but Bass led much of CD-4.

To win the race outright, Bass needs to secure at least 50% of the vote. She currently holds 35% of the vote and a five-point lead over Pratt. A Berkeley IGS poll released last week found that Bass and Raman would likely defeat Pratt by double digits in the event of a runoff.

Mail-in ballots with a June 2 postmark will be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass made what sounded like a victory speech Tuesday night.

Councilmember Nithya Raman made what sounded almost like a concession speech.

And former reality TV star Spencer Pratt relayed a message from the heavens.

“Well, obviously God wanted five more months of me exposing all the failures of our mayor, so it’s gonna be a fun ride,” Pratt said. “I hope she’s ready.”

Assuming Pratt holds on to one of the two spots in the Nov. 3 general election as the final votes are tallied in the next few days, the smart money will be on Bass, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment.

But the supreme being and patron of all pontiffs has to be considered a wild card. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that an incumbent mayor in the City of Angels would be running against a challenger whose campaign manager is God Almighty.

So here we go. We could be in for one of the more remarkable electoral adventures in city history, with a complete novice and MAGA conservative going up against a liberal career politician in a deep-blue city and state full of people who are tired of hearing excuses from Democrats. (If Raman ends up ousting Pratt, my apologies for jumping to conclusions. But it’s not my fault. The devil made me do it.)

If you intend to follow closely, as of course you should, maybe you can help me count the number of times Pratt plays the faith card. I went to St. Peter Martyr School and attended the church by the same name, and I don’t recall ever hearing a nun or a priest drop God’s name as often as Pratt does.

In fact, I just watched a clip of Pratt talking to Fox News TV host and Donald Trump disciple Kayleigh McEnany, and over the course of 1 minute and 52 seconds, he mentioned God or Jesus 10 times.

“Thankfully, I married an angel who was very connected with Jesus and has brought me to the light,” Pratt said of his wife and former reality TV co-star Heidi Montag. “It’s been very empowering to just pray and just be on his path and just say, ‘God, if you want me to save these animals, save these humans and protect my city, just keep putting me in the place where I can do that.’”

Is he running for mayor or cardinal?

Look, I totally respect your average true believer. But I’m not entirely comfortable with a mayor who might be sitting around City Hall waiting for signs and smoke signals rather than knowing what to do on his own.

God has a lot on his plate. He might be busy multiplying fishes and loaves so people don’t go hungry thanks to the president’s tariffs and warmongering. Is he going to rush to answer a prayer for guidance about underfunded parks or broken sidewalks in Los Angeles?

How did we get here, you ask?

Well, Pratt is an AI creation, in a way. A composite of sorts. You combine the forces of social media, political rebellion, second-rate celebrity obsession and the Peter Principle, and here’s a little Trump puppet walking around L.A. like he’s the chosen one.

Add to that the very real essence of his appeal to some voters:

Los Angeles has problems. Big problems that don’t get fixed quickly enough or at all, and Pratt represents the angry voter who wants to know why City Hall can’t do better and where all the money went. He’s absolutely right when he says we shouldn’t have people living on the streets, using drugs on the streets and dying on the streets.

But if Pratt is in the general election rather than Raman, we’re in for a national media circus rather than a summit on solutions. Raman is well-versed on matters of relevance and could have pushed back against Bass in substantive, detailed ways. On the other hand, as Pratt has fairly argued, Raman headed City Council’s homelessness committee, so isn’t she partly to blame for the failures she tried to pin on Bass?

As for Pratt’s policy chops, he has not responded to my offers of a get-together. Absent that, and given his careful avoidance of local reporters who know their stuff, I read his platform on his campaign website and I can tell you that while he touches on many of the right issues — public safety, fiscal integrity, homelessness — attention to detail and depth of knowledge are not God-given strengths.

Maybe Pratt can actually deliver on his promise of a “treatment-led recovery model that addresses mental illness and addiction as the primary drivers of chronic homelessness.” But that would require an act of God (which I suppose is possible given their relationship), because those matters are primarily under the direction of the county, not the city.

This is the main problem here. Bass was beatable, and could have been pushed by a serious challenger to do better.

In the last election, Rick Caruso gave her a scare. That was partly because he had some depth on the issues, he was a successful businessman and philanthropist, he had served on the police commission and the water and power board, he had built relationships across the city and, along with his family, he had poured time and millions of dollars into underserved communities.

In this election, it looks as though Bass could get lucky and face off against a guy who lost his house in the Palisades fire, saw a few homeless encampments through his car window, and decided he wanted to be mayor. Some might have questioned his hubris, but only before learning that he was on a mission from God.

If you’re keeping count, that’s nine mentions of God so far in this column.

One more for the tie, with an eye toward five more months of campaign fodder.

Thank you, God.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

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.”

Elections in the city of Los Angeles include mayor, City Council, three ballot measures and Los Angeles Unified School District board seats and, if you live in the city, you’ve maybe seen an ad about them.

The high-profile competition between incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, City Councilmember Nithya Raman and conservative reality star Spencer Pratt has been tumultuous. And that is to say nothing of Rae Huang, Adam Miller and the nine others contenders.

With leaked files, millions in campaign fundraising donated by a candidate’s mother, and a multi-campaign effort by L.A.’s chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, the race for mayor isn’t the only one making headlines this primary.

A candidate can win by getting a majority of the vote. If no one receives 50% + 1 vote, the top two advance to the November election.

Mayor

The Associated Press, which surveys the numbers posted by local election officials and projects the winner using vote returns and other data, will call a winner (or a runoff) for L.A. mayor.

City Council

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Officers

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Ballot measures

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Los Angeles Unified School District

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As the voters deliver their ballots to neighborhood drop-off sites and others wait to vote in person Tuesday, Times reporters fanned out across the city to ask residents whom they planned to support for mayor.

Here is a sample of what voters said about their preferred candidate.

‘The other choices were not worth my vote’

Steven Travers
57
Glassell Park
Self-employed

Voter Steven Travers told The Times that he didn’t feel like there were many options for him in the mayoral election this year, except for the incumbent Karen Bass.

Shopping at Vons in Echo Park, Travers said, “Just what I’ve seen of her, and you know, the way she speaks, she seems to be OK.”

“I guess she’s done an OK job since she’s been the mayor,” Travers said. “The people she’s running against, I mean, there’s really nobody else that I think I would want to be in that position.”

This decision to vote for Bass, despite the wide field of options, came down to how she had handled homelessness in the city and Travers’ neighborhood of Glassell Park, where there had been homelessness issues “for a period of time.”

The issue, Travers said, has been lessened and “certain areas things are getting a little bit cleaned up. And I’m assuming that she’s, you know, part of that whole thing.”

Travers also said that “anybody involved in politics in Los Angeles” seems to always talk about homelessness “more than anything else” and that Bass “seems to be trying to maybe do something about it.”

Simply put, “The other choices were not worth my vote,” Travers said.

Looking for a more humane L.A.

Zorah Archie-Winston
22
View Park
Recent USC graduate

Zorah Archie-Winston said that she’s probably voting for Nithya Raman for mayor.

“If I had to choose, like, right now, I think I’m leaning more towards Raman,” Archie-Winston said.

One of the main reasons for that, she said, is Raman’s personality and the humanity she brings to the table.

The 22-year-old View Park resident said that the unhoused population is something she feels very passionately about, and she believes Raman shares that.

“We could have, like, a lot more of a compassionate view on the unhoused population and those adjacent,” Archie-Winston said.

She said she’s been following along with Raman’s journey on the L.A. City Council and looks forward to seeing what the candidate could do as mayor, especially for tenancy rights.

“I think there are a lot of resources and things that are really inaccessible to those who are struggling to live in L.A. for one reason or another, and I think that’s something Raman will be able to help with,” Archie-Winston said.

‘He might be our only saving grace’

Ann Raljevich
66
Westchester
Medical biller

Ann Raljevich, a 66-year-old medical biller, says Spencer Pratt could be the city’s hero in the mayoral race.

“I think he might be our only saving grace,” said Raljevich, of Westchester.

Under the city’s current leadership, Raljevich tells The Times, she said she hasn’t seen change in the city. She said she still sees the same unkempt streets, drug addicts around town and high sales taxes.

“Being in the medical field — the drugs bring on the schizophrenia and bring on all the other things, and I mean, I see it when I drive in and out of town,” Raljevich said. “I see it everywhere.”

Raljevich said she also admired that Pratt was from Southern California and graduated from USC.

She said the fact that he hasn’t directly declared a political party affiliation shows that he doesn’t care what people think and is just here to do the job.

“He never really came out to say whether he’s a Republican or a Democrat,” Raljevich said. “He’s just for the people.”

The June 2026 election has been dominated by a down-to-the-wire governor’s race that has been filled with drama, scandal and much national attention.

A large group of Democrats are vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in this very blue state. But the candidates have — until recently — struggled to generate wide excitement, and it’s far from clear who will win. On the Republican side, commentator Steve Hilton has benefited from the divided Democrats (and a Trump endorsement) to remain near the top of the pack in polls.

But the governor’s race is far from the only vital decision voters will make.

Los Angeles residents will vote for mayor in a race that is far from certain. And there are numerous state, county, local and judicial candidates to choose from.

Here is a breakdown:

When is the election?

The election is Tuesday, but early voting has already been already under way.

You can find your polling place here or by calling (800) 345-8683. All polling locations are open on election day from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Once it’s cast, you can track your ballot here.

(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas / Los Angeles Times; Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

What are the big statewide races?

Let’s start with the race for governor, of course. With Newsom term-limited, Democrats and Republicans are competing for California’s open gubernatorial seat in what could reshape the state’s political landscape. Democrats went in hoping for easy sailing, but a wide field and no superstar name has left the race something of a tossup, though Xavier Becerra has been rising in recent polls. On the Republican side, Hilton continues to poll strongly.

There is a possibility California could make history: The state has never has elected a woman as governor, and only once has a person of color held the office.

But there are many down-ballot statewide races as well,

(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas / Los Angeles Times; Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

What are the big L.A. races?

The L.A. mayor’s race is grabbing all the attention. Polls show the leading candidates are Mayor Karen Bass, City Councilmember Nithya Raman and community activist and former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt. Those same polls show Bass has struggled in the aftermath of the 2025 firestorms, a big issue for Pratt. Another major topic is affordability, which Raman has taken up.

But there are several other competitive races plus ballot measures.

What are the big L.A. County races?

These contests don’t get the attention of the mayor’s and governor’s races, but L.A. County voters have a lot of choices to make.

What’s left?