raman

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser and Noah Goldberg, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles voters have finally gotten some closure on the outstanding contests in the June 2 primary election, with City Councilmember Nithya Raman qualifying for the runoff against Mayor Karen Bass, and Measure ER, the countywide sales tax hike, prevailing after a week of ballot counting.

With nearly all the votes counted, Angelenos are now getting a more granular understanding of the strongholds built up by each of the top three mayoral candidates.

Districts that went big for Bass, Raman and Pratt

Early on in the vote-counting process, it looked like Raman might not win her Hollywood Hills-based district, which stretches from Silver Lake to Reseda. In the end, she pulled out a first-place finish, securing nearly 34% of the vote compared to Bass’ 31%, according to Paul Mitchell, vice president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc, who aggregated county precinct data into council districts. Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV personality, trailed at 27%.

Still, Raman’s strongest support came from three districts on the eastern end of the city.

Mitchell’s analysis showed Raman with 45% of the vote in Council District 13, which includes all or parts of Echo Park, Hollywood and Atwater Village. She got nearly 40% in Council District 1, which takes in parts of Highland Park, Mt. Washington and Angeleno Heights. And she scored nearly 38% of the vote in Council District 14, which includes downtown, Boyle Heights and El Sereno.

Those districts are represented by Hugo Soto–Martínez, Eunisses Hernandez and Ysabel Jurado, respectively — all members of Democratic Socialists of America, who all endorsed Bass instead of Raman, a DSA member herself. Raman placed first in all three.

Bass found her greatest strength in the three districts that cover South L.A., coming in first in all three. Her best performance was in District 8, represented by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, where she led with nearly 62% of the vote.

The mayor received 45% of the vote in Council District 10, which stretches from Koreatown to the Crenshaw Corridor, and 42% in Council District 9, which stretches from the southern edge of downtown south to 95th Street.

Pratt performed the strongest in the west San Fernando Valley. He was the top vote-getter in District 12, which is represented by Councilmember John Lee and includes Chatsworth, Granada Hills and Porter Ranch. In that district, he received 39% of the vote, Mitchell’s assessment showed.

Pratt got nearly 37% of the vote in District 3, which is represented by Councilmember Bob Blumenfield and includes Woodland Hills, Warner Center and Canoga Park.

Pratt also led the pack in the 5th District, which takes up much of the Westside and is represented by Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky. He had 30.7% of the vote, compared to Raman’s 30.6%, according to Mitchell’s analysis.

Nithya Raman attacks the L.A. ‘political machine’

It was one of tougher attacks of the mayoral primary: Raman accused Bass of engaging in “pay to play” — making decisions that benefited certain interest groups, who then spent big on her reeelection.

At her first post-election press conference Wednesday, Raman revisited that line of attack, criticizing Bass over her push to upgrade the city’s Convention Center. That $2.6 billion project was approved in the middle of the city’s financial crisis, when the council was contemplating major job cuts, Raman said.

“Downtown business groups then spent over a million dollars supporting her in her reelection. Meanwhile, the city went back to voters asking them to pay more to fix their streetlights. That is the political machine at work,” she said.

Pay to play was a potent issue in the 2005 election, when Mayor James Hahn was defeated by Councilmember Antonio Villaraigosa. At the time, federal agencies had opened corruption investigations into decisions at the city’s harbor and airports, as well as the Department of Water and Power. That year, the phrase “pay to play” was synonymous with criminal wrongdoing.

In a video acknowledging his primary defeat, Pratt said he got into the mayor’s race to “expose this corrupt machine.”

Raman stopped short of such a framing.

“It’s not corruption,” Raman told reporters at Vista Hermosa Park. “But it is evidence that the system, and how it works, particularly the influence of money in politics, has led to some very broken priorities here in the city.”

Last year, policy analysts warned the Convention Center project would be a financial drag from the moment it opens, consuming more than $100 million per year throughout the 2030s. Business groups and labor organizations pushed back, saying the project would help revitalize downtown while creating much needed construction jobs.

The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group that supported the Convention Center upgrade, spent about $1.6 million on efforts to reelect Bass.

“Nithya Raman doesn’t think we need more jobs or visitors to our hotels and restaurants that produce the tax revenues downtown generates for the entire city, so it’s hard to support her,” said Central City Assn. President and Chief Executive Officer Nella McOsker in a statement.

Bass spokesperson Alex Stack also pushed back on Raman’s criticism, saying the mayor has been with “every group and industry to deliver results for Angelenos.”

“Nithya Raman can’t get anything done and then attacks the same groups she sought to endorse her campaign,” he said.

Pratt trailed Trump among L.A. voters

As a mayoral candidate, Pratt was dogged by questions about whether he was MAGA — shorthand for the movement that first powered President Trump into office in 2016. The Republican had received fulsome praise from Trump-aligned figures, including podcast host Joe Rogan and Greg Gutfield of Fox News.

Pratt downplayed his GOP ties. Still, there’s one area where he definitely had some similarity with Trump: His performance with L.A. voters.

Trump and Pratt both picked up roughly one out of every four votes in L.A. during their respective campaigns.

Pratt, former star of MTV’s “The Hills,” had 25.5% of the vote in L.A., according to results posted Friday. In November 2024, Trump did a little better, receiving 26.5%, county election results show.

Trump had 369,319 votes in L.A. two years ago, compared to 976,781 for then-Vice President Kamala Harris. By Friday, Pratt had 217,638 votes, compared to 247,242 for Raman and 292,115 for Bass.

It might not be fair to compare Pratt and Trump, given that there were key differences between the elections. Pratt was competing in a primary campaign, while Trump was in a general election. The candidate pool was different as well.

Trump was running in a six-way contest where Harris was his main rival. Pratt, on the other hand, was in a race featuring 13 other candidates.

Although two-thirds of those candidates were complete unknowns, four of Pratt’s rivals ran serious campaigns, amassing endorsements and spending significant amounts of money.

State of play

— TRUMP VS. LAHSA: The Trump Administration moved Thursday to block the embattled Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from receiving federal funds, saying the agency was badly managed and engaged in fraud. Elected officials across the city denounced the move, while nonprofit groups also voiced alarm. “This is intended to create chaos,” said Jerry Jones, the head of the Greater LA Coalition on Homelessness, which represents groups that serve the region’s unhoused.

— PAYOUT PROBE: Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said Wednesday that he believes four out of every five claims in the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history — one that resulted in a $4 billion payout by Los Angeles County— may be fake. Hochman has asked a judge to pause the sex abuse payments while he continues his criminal investigation into the plaintiffs, lawyers and therapists involved in filing the claims.

— GET READY TO RUMBLE: The showdown between Bass and Raman is going to get ugly, political experts said this week, in part because they agree on a number of big-picture political issues. Both will need to court at least some of the disaffected voters who picked Pratt in the primary.

— A SCATHING SENDOFF: As we mentioned higher up, Pratt released a video Friday that was both an acknowledgment of his primary election defeat and a vitriolic screed against Bass and Raman, his former rivals. Pratt called them “morons,” “commie animals” and “corrupt communists,” and made clear he intends to ramp up his attacks in the coming months. “I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war,” he said.

— WOOING LATINOS: Bass carried far more Latino-majority neighborhoods than her rivals in last week’s primary, a Times analysis found. She carried 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods, including Boyle Heights, Pacoima and Historic South-Central. That was a 46% increase from 2022, when she won 24 Latino-majority neighborhoods in her primary against Rick Caruso and Kevin de León, the analysis found.

— EKING OUT A WIN: The countywide sales tax hike known as Measure ER prevailed this week, with late-arriving ballots pushing the number of ‘yes’ votes just above 50%. “It’s a lifesaver to carry us through the storm we’re all in,” said County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who led the push among her colleagues to get the measure on the ballot.

— AN EXPENSIVE FEE-FA: Bass was set to attend the U.S. opening game of the World Cup Friday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood after being invited by FIFA, her office said. Still, Bass wasn’t exempt from the high ticket prices she criticized earlier this year. She paid $2,735 out of pocket for her ticket, a spokesperson said. On a related note, the mayor announced more than 100 “Kick it in the Park” events where Angelenos can watch World Cup games for free.

— MORE OF THE SAME: In a break with recent history, every council member who ran for reelection this year won their race. “People see what we’re doing, and they want us to keep fighting for them,” said Councilmember Tim McOsker, who won nearly three out of every four votes in his San Pedro-to-Watts district.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to the area around 54th Street and Western Avenue, in the South L.A. district represented by Harris-Dawson.
• On the docket next week: The City Council meets Wednesday to take up a sprawling package of charter reform proposals, including a move to ranked-choice voting and a larger number of council members. Will the council send those ideas to voters or punt them for another two years? Stay tuned!

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m going to miss Spencer Pratt.

I had never heard of the former reality TV star before he said God wanted him to be mayor of Los Angeles. And now that he’s out of the race, he’s still serving up lazy fastballs down the middle of the plate, calling the top two vote-getters — Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman — dummies and morons.

Quick question for Pratt: If you’re on record claiming that 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, and you run for office in a deep blue city with President Trump’s backing but not much of a plan or even a clue as to what a mayor can or can’t do, should you be calling other people morons?

And yet the pouting Pratt pulled more than 200,000 votes. So sore loser or not, he tapped into a lack of faith in elected officials and simmering frustration with City Hall, which happen to be the essence of today’s column.

I have five questions for Bass and Raman. They’re somewhat inter-related and have to do with matters I hear about regularly from readers:

Infrastructure (sidewalks, streets, etc).

Homelessness (billions of dollars spent, and a long way to go).

Parks (L.A.’s national ranking for quality and accessibility just dropped again).

Trash and blight (no explanation needed, right?).

And focus. (Do the candidates have a clear set of goals and a plan for achieving them?)

We’ve got five months to visit and revisit these topics, and today I’m going to focus on the first, so here we go.

Infrastructure:

A few days ago, I met with Earl Ofari Hutchinson of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. Hutchinson is a longtime community activist and commentator, and he had just launched a torpedo in the direction of City Hall.

“There are hundreds of busted, dangerous sidewalks in South L A that have gone unrepaired for years,” he wrote to his network of followers. “They cause hundreds of injuries, and have resulted in massive numbers of claims and payouts in settlements. LA City Officials must act now to jumpstart a crash program to fix these sidewalks.”

On my way to meet Hutchinson, I traveled west along Florence Avenue and saw dozens of typical rough patches on the street and sidewalks. But if there were a contest to identify the all-time worst sidewalks in Los Angeles, Hutchinson’s discovery of the one at 71st Street and 11th Avenue would be a Hall of Fame contender.

For starters, it’s got the classic uplift, and the villain is the usual suspect — ficus tree roots. A 20-foot slab of sidewalk is pitched sharply, as if designed by trip-and-fall lawsuit lawyers. Way back in 2014, in my early days on sidewalk patrol, I was able to crawl under a similarly ruptured sidewalk in West L.A., and I could’ve done the same at 71st and 11th.

But I thought better of it after Hutchinson peered into the opening and said it looked like a comfy home for rats and other vermin.

The homeowner, Sharon Kelly, can’t use her front gate because of the lopsided sidewalk. She let me borrow her tape measure, which revealed a 16-inch rise in the pavement.

“It keeps rising,” Kelly said. “But it was already lifted when we came here.”

That was in 1997. I asked if she’s called the city for help.

“Several times,” she said, and the only response was a slapdash temporary asphalt patch.

Hutchinson said residents have responded in force to his call for emergency sidewalks repairs, just as they did when he crusaded for a crackdown on widespread illegal dumping.

“Dozens of residents have come out of the woodwork, and here’s what they all say: ‘We have called our city council person and various city departments repeatedly, over and over again.’”

And the response?

“Nothing,” Hutchinson said.

While we were talking, two people with walkers steered clear of the worst spot near Kelly’s property. Charles McQuarn, 77, said traversing the neighborhood means zigzagging around all the hazards.

“I gotta come out into the streets, too,” he said.

When he was a teenager, McQuarn said, he worked for a community group that fixed sidewalks. I mentioned that Councilmember Monica Rodriguez has been using Conservation Corps youths to do the same, but it’s time to scale up that program and come up with other remedies to speed the process.

The city is fixing about 600 sidewalks each year, the backlog of requested repairs stands at about 30,000 and if you get onto the waiting list, you’re looking at about 10 years before help arrives.

When we were done on 71st Street, Hutchinson led me over to a nearby stretch of Florence where, for blocks and blocks, it appears as if there have been volcanic eruptions around the trees. Large chunks of cracked sidewalk form mounds, one after another. The Hutchinson Himalayas are a site to behold — a mile-long museum of municipal neglect.

And it’s been like this, Hutchinson said, “for years.”

The question for Bass and Raman: What will you do to speed the repairs?

Homelessness:

Voters have been generous when it comes to repeatedly taxing themselves more, and more, to address homelessness. There’s been Measure H, Measure A, Measure ULA and Proposition HHH.

Yet although billions of dollars have been spent and tens of thousands of people have been helped and housed, more than 40,000 people are homeless in the city and roughly 70,000 in the county. In her primary victory speech, Bass said families shouldn’t have to step around encampments, and Raman has said greater urgency is needed.

Questions for Bass and Raman: Why haven’t taxpayers gotten more for their money with the two of you at the helm, what are you going to do to speed progress and create more accountability, and what distinguishes you from each other?

Parks:

In the annual rankings by the National Trust for Public Lands, Los Angeles has dropped from 90th to a tie for 93rd in park investment and accessibility among the nation’s 100 most populous cities.

The City Council is about to consider a motion to increase park funding through charter reform (with dozens of community groups in support), and progress is ridiculously slow on an agreement to use schools as after-hours playgrounds.

Question for Bass and Raman: Do you support the charter reform, and what else are you going to do to address the sad state of the city’s parks?

Trash and blight:

In downtown L.A., vandalism, shuttered storefronts and post-COVID abandonment have crippled what was a vibrant, revenue-generating economy that benefited the whole city.

In Hollywood, a resident hired her housekeeper to help report illegal dumping of goods that are often used to construct more homeless encampments, leading to all sorts of problems.

On the south lawn of City Hall, a graffiti-tagged monument and fountain have been out of commission for most of the last six decades.

Question for Bass and Raman: At the very least, can you fix the fountain?

Focus:

Like any big city with great assets and unlimited challenges, many residents have a love-hate relationship with L.A. But years ago, someone told me he loves Los Angeles because it’s a messy, multi-cultural work in progress, set on a dramatic landscape between mountain and sea, trying to figure out what it wants to be.

Question for Bass and Raman: Whether in the realm of basic services or grand visions, what three or four primary objectives do you have over the next four years?

In other words, what do you want L.A. to be?

steve.lopez@latimes.com

When Republican Spencer Pratt burst into Los Angeles politics, venting a torrent of online fury against Mayor Karen Bass’ handling of the Palisades fire, he pitched his mayoral campaign as a full-bore challenge to L.A.’s political status quo.

The former reality TV star, who lost his home in the blaze, started as a long shot but emerged as a national story, with the ability to harvest social media attention, rally a base and dominate the news cycle.

But in a city overwhelmingly Democratic, where Republicans make up just 15% of registered voters, even some of his supporters wondered how far he could rise. In the end, voters selected Bass, a Democratic centrist, and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who ran to Bass’ left, to face off in the runoff.

Still, for many of the 200,000 Angelenos who voted for Pratt, his brash, social media-fueled campaign was not just a long exercise in trolling. Pratt gave voice to their discontent with the system of one-party rule and said things they too often felt uncomfortable saying.

And now, they face a difficult choice of who to support in November.

“I know a lot of people who are disappointed,” said Meghan Daum, an L.A. writer and podcaster and former Los Angeles Times columnist who endorsed Pratt. “They are saying, ‘OK, now what? What can we do?”’

While Pratt did not make the runoff, political experts said his candidacy tapped into Angelenos’ dissatisfaction with the Democratic establishment and resonated with a sizable number of Angelenos who are rarely represented in L.A. politics.

“He identified a previously invisible level of anger and frustration,” said Dan Schnur, a longtime politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine University, of Pratt. “The question going forward is whether he, or someone else, can shape that raw emotion into a movement.”

Pratt has yet to put out a statement conceding the race or contesting the results. As a stream of Republicans, including President Trump, made unfounded allegations of election fraud in California, the campaign’s most online candidate was conspicuously absent on X and Instagram.

Some Democrats in L.A. urged Pratt to make good on his promise to leave the city if Bass or Raman were elected. Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent Democrat, told Pratt he had rented him a U-Haul.

Despite the snark from Democrats, political observers say Pratt changed the terms of L.A.’s mayoral debate.

“He forced the more conventional candidates to talk about the issues in a way that would not have been the case if he weren’t in the race,” Schnur said.

“For the first time in years, there is a critical mass of citizens who are done pretending that what they see before their eyes isn’t really there,” Daum wrote on her Substack. “The people in charge will have to answer to those citizens.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Pratt became ubiquitous in the national media. There were profiles in high-end publications, podcast interviews and regular reports from Fox News. But the results show he fell short of persuading enough Angelenos to make the runoff.

“It doesn’t appear that he’s impacted the political underpinnings of a deep blue city like Los Angeles,” Schnur said. “His impact was less ideological than attitudinal. He wasn’t convincing the voters to become more conservative, he was convincing them that it was OK for them to vent their anger in an unconventional way.”

Dissatisfaction is building in L.A. as the city’s cost of living mounts and a new generation of young Angelenos are unable to buy homes. Many are concerned about the lack of visible progress on street homelessness. Some are angry at what they see as city leaders’ poor preparation and response to the Palisades fire.

Ultimately, the momentum for change in Los Angeles was divided. As Pratt challenged Bass from the right, Raman tacked to the left of Bass on homelessness and policing and made affordability a key plank of her campaign.

Whatever their concerns about the status quo in L.A., many Angelenos were unwilling to vote for a Republican.

During the course of the campaign, Daum said she had numerous conversations with Angelenos who said: “I can’t associate with anybody who voted for Trump. I can’t have them in my house. I can’t have a conversation with them. I want nothing to do with them.”

A 42-year-old millennial who became famous on “The Hills” and owns a business selling “healing” crystals, Pratt had no political experience when he entered the mayoral race. He didn’t even appear to have a campaign manager.

“The system in Los Angeles isn’t struggling, it’s fundamentally broken,” Pratt said as he launched his campaign on Jan. 7, the anniversary of the fire. “It is a machine designed to protect the people at the top and the friends they exchange favors with while the rest of us drown in toxic smoke and ash.”

Bombastic and full of braggadocio, Pratt critiqued what he saw as Bass’ failure to prepare for and respond to the wildfires. He berated city leaders for not doing enough to get unhoused people off the streets. He railed against the city’s challenges with public safety, potholes, and the abuse of dogs on Skid Row. He even seized on a comment Bass made on the campaign trail about using taxpayer money to fund dental care for meth users.

As Pratt talked about homelessness, his message resonated with Marissa Comstock, 36, a stay-at-home mom and former software engineer in Eagle Rock.

“It’s totally obvious to me,” she said. “We need to get these people off the street.”

Last year, Comstock said she and her husband had a negative encounter at Griffith Park as they pushed their daughters around in strollers. Just a few minutes into their hike, she said, they were accosted by an unhoused person who screamed at them and threatened to cut off their daughters’ legs.

Since that incident, Comstock said, she takes her daughters only to places like the Huntington or Descanso Gardens that require membership to be admitted.

“I don’t feel comfortable even being on regular streets,” she said. “If there’s some crazy homeless person, what am I supposed to do?”

Pratt did extraordinarily well in capturing attention and developing a message, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the Sacramento-based bipartisan firm Political Data Inc. Many Angelenos, he noted, had a better sense of Pratt’s viewpoint than they did of much more deeply funded California gubernatorial candidates, like Matt Mahan or Xavier Becerra.

During his campaign, Pratt did not express support for Trump or the Make America Great Again movement. He insisted he was a nonpartisan candidate running on local issues.

“I’m going to show everybody that I’m their mayor,” Pratt said on election night.

But even if Pratt was not explicitly MAGA, his reality TV theatrics mixed with antiestablishment populism were so MAGA-coded that he struggled to persuade disaffected liberal Angelenos. He referred to the homeless as “fentanyl zombies.” He railed against California’s “socialism.” He called Bass “Basura,” Spanish for trash.

When Trump spoke of Pratt, telling reporters “I heard he’s a big MAGA person,” Raman was quick to share Trump’s remarks on social media, warning Angelenos that Pratt was wildly out of step with their views.

While Pratt impressed some political observers with his performance in a May 6 televised debate with Bass and Raman, others said he alienated a significant portion of Angelenos with some of his social media antics.

“He could have talked about the drug use and the risks and the filth and the fire risks and all that,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP political strategist, of Pratt’s zombie rhetoric, “but then paired that with, ‘My God, these liberals are leaving these people out here to die,’ and expressed some humanity towards the population that’s on the streets.”

Ultimately, Daum said Pratt was a “terrible candidate.”

“He did a million things wrong,” she said. “The whole time, I was yelling on Twitter about how he’s got to stop it: the AI videos are gonna hurt him, the Basura stuff, the zombie stuff. Like, stop it! Stop it!”

As Pratt’s campaign came to an end, Stutzman said, it is not clear that he represents any kind of lasting political movement.

“The question remains: Did he create a political movement or did he exploit the opportunity to run for mayor to restoke his diminishing fame?” Stutzman said. “He’s in the mold of a Kardashian: He’s just found ways to be famous without ever really doing anything important. I suspect that this was more about him acting out as to what he is as a reality celebrity versus becoming a leader of a political movement in L.A. We’ll see.”

When Angelenos go to the polls in November, there are several paths for Pratt voters.

Some, Mitchell said, will probably sit the election out entirely.

“You’ll get some Republicans who vote for Raman because they’re like, ‘Well, she’s a socialist and I can’t stand her, but I’m just voting no on Bass.’ And then you’ll have a lot of Republicans who are like, ‘OK, Raman’s a socialist.’”

After Raman made it to the runoff, Bass’ campaign slammed the city council member for voting against hiring more police and blocking efforts to keep homeless encampments away from schools. Meanwhile, Raman positioned herself as the anti-status quo candidate.

In a statement celebrating her advance to the general election, Raman did not mention Pratt or his supporters, but railed against “powerful interests” in City Hall.

“Working people pay the price in higher rents, depleted services, and a city that has stopped working for them,” she said. “If you’re as frustrated by the broken status quo as I am, I hope you’ll join our movement to build a city that works for everyone.”

Even as Daum felt depressed that Pratt’s campaign was not continuing, she said she felt more engaged in L.A. politics than she had ever been. She planned to vote in November and would be watching both Bass and Raman to see how they responded to Angelenos’ concerns about street homelessness.

“If Karen Bass said, ‘OK, I get it, “housing first” is not the panacea that I’ve been thinking it is. Seriously, I’m gonna put together a task force of people who are going to actually think this through.’ … I would be following that. I would be very curious,” Daum said. “Same if Nithya said that, too. I’m open to either of them, I guess.”

Comstock said she would probably vote for Bass in the runoff.

“Nithya Raman is just way too far on the socialist scale for me and will likely do more damage, rather than Karen Bass’ ineffectualness,” she said. “I don’t want to go any farther left.”

Spencer Pratt had a few things going for him when he launched an insurgent campaign to become Los Angeles’ next mayor.

He had a heart-tugging origin story that saw him transform from a has-been television star into one of the thousands of residents who lost their home in last year’s Palisades fire. He faced an unpopular incumbent in Mayor Karen Bass. He was powered by a vigorous social media presence and an angry electorate thirsty for change.

He was able to capitalize on those conditions to outraise his main rivals, Bass and city council member Nithya Raman, and transform his candidacy from an afterthought into a national story. Running as a Republican in a super-blue city like L.A. put him at an automatic disadvantage — one that might have been extremely difficult to overcome in the end. But the Pratt posse started to feel like a bona fide movement the more it thundered on, the type of revolt against the old guard that in previous eras led to the passage of Proposition 13 and the recall of Gov. Gray Davis — the type of movements that forever alter California politics.

Pratt, however, faced an apparently insurmountable obstacle.

Pratt.

With almost all votes counted, he’s going to finish in third place with about 26% of the electorate — the same slice Donald Trump received in 2024 — while Bass and Raman proceed to face each other in November. Political strategists will teach his failed attempt to their clients as a cautionary tale of how a candidate blew every advantage they had when they couldn’t afford to lose one.

Pratt’s first mistake was thinking that Angelenos wanted a campaign of wanton rage. Yes, many residents are furious at the state of the city. Yes, they want change. Yes, the angry Angeleno archetype is a real phenomenon that flares up in local elections to smack back at the powers that be.

But L.A. is not MAGAlandia — running from the right on apocalyptic, whiny messaging will only get you the few Republicans that remain in the city and some disaffected liberals. Pratt didn’t run as a MAGA candidate, but it’s hard to say he didn’t run like one — even as he swore he was running for everyone.

He took every opportunity to ridicule progressives in a city where four democratic socialists sit on the city council, one of them — Raman — has a good chance of becoming the next mayor, and five of the six candidates endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or are moving on to the general election.

Instead of making overtures to that side of the populist coin, Pratt recorded videos obsessing over Bass’ trip to communist Cuba in the 1970s, a well-known fact he treated as revelatory and which made Pratt sound like he was stuck in a John Birch Society meeting circa 1965. His dismissal of Raman as “stupid” and the mayor as “Basura” — trash — came off as facile juvenilia at a time when we already have the Big Juvenile Delinquent running things in the White House. Ridiculing homeless people as “zombies,” “vagrants” and “bums” only riled up the worst elements of the city and turned off anyone with a heart.

Keith Casey of Casey’s Family BBQ serves up food as L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt hosts a campaign “block party” event on 10th Avenue in Los Angeles on May 20.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Pratt undoubtedly attracted votes from a good amount of non-MAGA people fed up with various problems afflicting L.A. But many of the supporters who brayed the loudest on his behalf were the same people already doing daily propaganda on social media for a failed, hate-filled president and his baleful cronies.

Pratt acted like he believed the AI-generated videos created by fans that cast him as a comic-book hero was real life instead of forgetting that he was a novice trying to take on two experienced politicians. While Bass and Raman trekked across the city during the primary, Pratt limited his public appearances mostly to the Westside and random encounters with supporters he posted on social media. The few times he appeared outside those safe spaces came off as safari expeditions in a mysterious city the 42-year-old lifelong Angeleno obviously didn’t know.

Take the South L.A. block party he hosted last month. Instead of having something thoughtful to say about the state of Black L.A. or how its political leaders continue to neglect the region, all Pratt seemed to take away from that afternoon was that it was in the territory of the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, a detail he shared ad nauseum on social media and to the press — as if kicking it with gang members would fix L.A. or gain him any votes or grant some kind of street cred.

That self-centered cluelessness ended up torpedoing Pratt’s best campaign moment. In the one debate he participated in, Pratt put Bass on the defensive, turned Raman into a tongue-tied mess, kept his answers sharp and relatable, and even earned the praise of the moderators. He should’ve demanded more gatherings like that to flex his mastery of television cameras, make his case to as many Angelenos as possible and showcase the self-proclaimed Pratt Daddy as someone willing to take on hard questions anytime, anyplace, from anyone.

Instead, Pratt declined an invite to their only other scheduled debate and never bothered with the forums civic groups across the city held in order for their members to hear from candidates. Instead, Pratt flew out to New York the week before election day to appear on Fox News.

Sticking to largely sycophantic media who lobbed softball questions hardened his ceiling. Pratt needed to proselytize — not preach to the choir.

The thing is, Pratt made some strong points about the inefficiencies of L.A.’s political status quo and the outrage that is having tens of thousands of people live on our streets. And there’s something appealing about an outsider crashing City Hall, which is way too beholden to sclerotic lifers who can be as clueless about what the city needs as Pratt turned out to be.

Instead, he platformed people who saw L.A. as a hellhole — or “shithole,” as Trump likes to call certain places. It was hard to see what some of Pratt’s loudest and most strident supporters actually thought was worth preserving in the city — but not why they felt he was their man.

In the wake of his loss, Pratt sure hasn’t push back against unfounded claims by too many of his followers and Trump, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson that Democrats somehow rigged the election against him. Quite the contrary, Pratt has insinuated on social media that they’re onto something.

That last point reinforces the ultimate reason Pratt could never become L.A.’s next mayor: He really doesn’t believe in L.A.

Angelenos don’t mind haters — it’s the type of city that frustrates residents even on its best days. But one insult residents won’t brook is someone who doesn’t have confidence in better days ahead for the city no matter how dire things may be.

Angelenos can spot a phony from far away — and Spencer, you’re turning out to be phonier than the fake drama on any of the television shows you ever appeared in.

You vowed to leave L.A. if you didn’t win the race for mayor. Maybe you should stay and try to righteously pressure Bass and Raman to make much needed changes. If you do, urge your followers to do the same instead of them pouting and sitting out the mayor’s race.

But if you don’t, well, maybe you never really loved L.A. as much as the City of Angels, warts and all, deserves. And you kind of need to really love L.A. to really fix what ails it.

Step up, or step outta town.

June 8 (UPI) — Nithya Raman will advance to a Los Angeles mayoral runoff in November, besting Spencer Pratt for second place in last week’s primary vote, sources including CNN and NBC News said Monday evening.

Raman, a City Council member, will run against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass; both are Democrats. Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is considered a progressive challenger.

Raman emerged second Monday over Republican Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star. Pratt was in second place as of primary day, but late-counted votes swung the tally toward Raman. They were part of a14-candidate field in the primary.

“Right now, we have a city that feels rudderless,” Raman told CNN before the primary. “So many positions that haven’t been filled, places where Angelenos feel abandoned on some of the most important issues facing this city. I will bring that urgency, I will bring that accountability, I will bring that focus that Los Angeles needs and that Angelenos need.”

Raman and Bass had close political ties before Raman entered the election late. Pratt campaigned on criticism of Bass’ response to the 2025 wildfires — he lost his house in last year’s Palisades fires — and homelessness.

NBC News reported that while President Donald Trump did not officially endorse a candidate in the election, he praised Pratt’s bid before the primary, saying, “I’d like to see him do well. He’s a character.”

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.’ ”

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman cut deeper into the lead of reality television personality Spencer Pratt on Saturday, as his lead slimmed to just a single percentage point.

Pratt fell to just over 27% of the vote while Raman jumped up to slightly over 26%, according to the results from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder. Pratt now leads Raman by just 7,494 votes.

“We’ve seen Nithya Raman catching up on every update and the last two in particular she’s accelerated,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the bipartisan voter data firm Political Data Inc. “She’s continued to gain at a rate that means she will eventually catch up unless Pratt starts getting some ballots coming in that are either geographically or demographically better for him.”

Democratic consultant Michael Trujillo, who doesn’t represent anyone in the mayoral race, said the results suggest Raman will surpass Pratt as more votes are counted.

“I think it’s over,” Trujillo said. “It appears Nithya will be in the runoff. Pratt doesn’t appear to be growing much more.”

The second-place finisher in the mayoral primary will face Mayor Karen Bass in a Nov. 3 runoff. On election night Tuesday, the Associated Press determined that Bass had secured enough votes to qualify for the runoff.

Pratt has been in second place since then, but Raman has gradually eroded his lead as mail-in ballots have been counted. The updated vote tally released Thursday showed Pratt with 29% of the vote and Raman with 23%.

With Friday’s update, Raman’s share had risen to 25% and Pratt’s shrank to 28%, for a 3 percentage point gap.

In the most recent batch of mail-in ballots counted, Raman received 23,514 votes, while Pratt gained 10,336.

Election analysts expected Raman to gain ground as the mail-in ballots were tallied, reasoning that many left-of-center voters — Raman’s base — held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates. They also say younger, more progressive voters tend to hold onto their ballots longer generally.

Although the mayor’s race is nonpartisan, Pratt is a Republican in a city that is overwhelmingly dominated by Democratic voters and elected officials.

A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, had Pratt running in third place behind Bass and Raman.

The poll of 1,351 likely voters conducted May 19-24 had Bass with 26% support, Raman with 25% support and Pratt with 22% support, with a 3% margin of error.

Los Angeles voters have become accustomed to seeing election results change as late-arriving ballots are tabulated. In the 2022 mayoral primary, real estate developer Rick Caruso led the pack for about a week before Bass pulled ahead.

Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for Caruso, according to a Times analysis of precinct-level returns provided by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder on Wednesday, when an estimated 62% of the projected vote had been counted. Raman, by comparison, made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.

Pratt, whose Pacific Palisades fire home burned in the January 2025 fire, was strong there and on the Westside, as well as in the San Fernando Valley communities of Encino, Woodland Hills, Chatsworth and Sunland-Tujunga.

Raman dominated precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park, including her home base of Silver Lake.

Mail-in ballots with an election day postmark will continue to be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

Mayor Karen Bass ran the table in South Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt found strong support from his Westside base, and Nithya Raman racked up votes in Echo Park and other neighborhoods with a concentration of renters, according to a Times analysis of partial precinct-level results from this week’s primary election.

The Times analysis, based on an estimated 62% of the ballots counted so far, found that Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for mayoral candidate Rick Caruso in 2022, while Raman made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.

Bass found support in neighborhoods along much of the Harbor and Santa Monica freeway corridors, along with central San Fernando Valley communities from Van Nuys to Arleta.

With much of the vote left to be counted, a map prepared by The Times showing how neighborhoods voted represents a snapshot of an election still very much underway. Bass garnered enough votes on election night to qualify for a Nov. 3 runoff, the Associated Press determined, but votes are still being tallied and it’s not yet clear if she will face Pratt or Raman.

Early returns show Pratt with a significant lead over Raman, but some analysts expect the remaining ballots to lean Democratic, as many left-of-center voters held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates.

Not surprisingly, Pratt did well in the Pacific Palisades, where his home burned down in the 2025 fire, garnering 60% in one precinct. The next closest candidate there was Adam Miller at 14%.

A registered Republican, Pratt also led in many of the more conservative neighborhoods that were dominated in the 2022 mayoral primary by Caruso, a former Republican who switched to being a Democrat before running for mayor. Pratt was ahead in much of the Westside and the West Valley, the analysis found, including much of Woodland Hills, Encino, West Hills and Chatsworth — just like Caruso four years ago.

“The Pratt vote mirrors a tremendous amount of the Rick Caruso vote: geographically, demographically and ideologically,” said Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant and co-founder of J&Z Strategies.

Certain Valley neighborhoods that supported Caruso didn’t go to Pratt, though, as Bass made inroads in areas including Northridge and North Hills, extending her support farther west into the Valley than she did in her last primary.

At the same time, Pratt appeared poised to win some neighborhoods that Bass carried in 2022. He was leading in Studio City and Hancock Park, according to the preliminary returns in areas where Bass led Caruso after the primary.

Bass’ stronghold in South L.A.

Bass’ support eroded to some extent since 2022, when she secured 43% of the vote in the primary against Caruso, then-Councilmember Kevin de Leon and leftist Gina Viola, the analysis based on partial returns shows. Even so, Bass outperformed her 2022 primary results in many areas south of the Santa Monica Freeway, though the precincts are slightly different than they were four years ago, making direct comparisons difficult.

In one precinct in Gramercy Park, Bass picked up 82% of the vote so far — up from a similar precinct where she won about 75% of the vote in 2022. Part of Bass’ dominance in the area could have to do with the fact that Pratt and Raman didn’t perform as well as Caruso did in many of these South L.A. neighborhoods.

Still, in some parts of the neighborhood, Bass underperformed 2022, though she still won more than half the vote.

In a Baldwin Hills neighborhood precinct where she won 77% of the vote last time, Bass was down to about 64% this year so far, as Raman took 20% of the precinct and Pratt had 9%. In 2022, Caruso won less than 13% of the area.

Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic consultant, said it was unsurprising to see Bass’ support continue to be strong in South L.A.

“She’s been in the community there, lived there a long time and represented them in various capacities,” he said. “She’s a pretty well-known figure. She’s tied into all the networks.”

The Raman factor

The partial election returns show Raman leading the pack in precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park.

Every neighborhood that Raman won was taken by Bass during the primary in 2022, though Viola, a leftist candidate that year, also did well in these precincts compared with other parts of the city.

On the Westside, Raman found few spots to lead, taking Sawtelle and Palms by fairly narrow margins, although those margins could possibly increase as more votes are counted.

She also dominated the Westwood precinct that includes UCLA, winning 56% of the vote in one precinct, compared with Bass’ 19% and Pratt’s 10%. And in a Los Feliz precinct in her council district, Raman so far has 58% of the vote, far ahead of Bass and Pratt.

Still, as of Wednesday, Raman was trailing in 54 of the 66 precincts in her own council district.

Zachary Donnini, a data expert with the nonpartisan group VoteHub, said he expects to see Raman’s numbers rise as the county continues to count late-arriving mail-in ballots, which he says tend to skew younger and more Democratic — which is Raman’s base.

“All the areas that are good for Pratt are going to become less good for him, and all areas that look less good for Raman are going to look better for her,” Donnini said.

Too close to call

Across the city, certain battleground precincts were so tight that no single candidate had a lead as of Wednesday’s count, on which The Times’ analysis was based.

In two adjacent Koreatown precincts, Bass and Raman were tied, with 117 votes in one and 187 votes in another, with Pratt trailing not far behind in both.

Bass and Raman also split a downtown Los Angeles precinct with 199 votes each, though Raman carried much of the rest of downtown, which Bass won in 2022.

In the Valley, it was Bass and Pratt who split precincts. In one Sun Valley precinct, the two each took 151 votes compared with Raman’s 80. They also tied in an Encino precinct.

Since election night in California, a single theory of election fraud has taken root like no other — not just among online conspiracy theorists or bot accounts, but among major conservative influencers and people close to President Trump.

Late on election night, an update of vote counts in the Los Angeles mayor’s race appeared on election results pages of various media outlets including the Los Angeles Times.

It showed leading Democrats Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman receiving tens of thousands of new votes, and leading Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt receiving no new votes.

Close observers of the vote tally immediately took screenshots, with some shouting fraud. Others ran statistical analyses that showed it would be impossible for a candidate such as Pratt — running second in the race — to receive zero votes in such a large batch of ballots.

• Share via Close extra sharing options

“They’re not even trying to hide the fraud anymore,” wrote Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one-time member of Trump’s inner circle.

The claim fit into the broader narrative being pushed relentlessly by Trump and other Republicans in recent days, that California Democrats were cheating.

But the discrepancy in the Tuesday vote count in the mayor’s race was not fraud.

What attracted far less attention than the update with zero Pratt votes was another update one minute later that showed tens of thousands of votes for Pratt, and none for Bass or Raman.

There was no batch of votes that included zero votes for any candidate, as Los Angeles County’s own data show plainly.

But voting data pushed out by the Associated Press came as two separate updates one minute apart, with Bass’ and Raman’s votes in the first and Pratt’s in the second.

“The AP vote count receives updates as provided by election officials and adds them to our vote count. What happened in this case is that there was a lag in an automated update such that some candidates’ votes were added in one update and the other candidates followed about a minute later,” the Associated Press said in a statement to The Times.

“Specifically, an electronic update from the Los Angeles County website pulled in votes for only one group of candidates, including Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. Exactly one minute later, the electronic update picked up the votes for another group of candidates including Spencer Pratt. Taken together, the updates included 21,870 votes for Pratt, 12,850 votes for Bass and 9,521 votes for Raman, along with votes for other candidates.”

The Times’ election results page relies on the AP’s data feed, and checks for updates once a minute.

According to a Times review of election night results data, The Times pulled data from the AP’s feed at approximately 8:35 p.m. that included 0 new votes for Pratt and eight other candidates. When The Times’ system next checked for new numbers a minute later, there was an update with votes for Pratt but no new votes for Raman, Bass and others.

Michael Sanchez, a spokesperson for Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, said he could not speak for how news outlets report county data, but that he could confirm there were no batches of votes that included zero votes for Pratt.

“It is false,” he said of that narrative. “In every single result update that we released on election night and since election night, he has received votes,” Sanchez said.

Justin Grimmer, a political science professor at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who researches and evaluates claims of election fraud, conducted his own data analysis of the vote updates, and came to the same conclusion.

He said there was an initial update with no Pratt votes, but a second one 41 seconds later with no votes for Bass or Raman — leading him to believe the single batch of ballots was just reported in two back-to-back updates rather than one.

“Because they came so close together, it looks like it was just a sequence of updates,” he said.

Grimmer said news outlets are “thinking about speed” and the best way to get people the most accurate information as quickly as possible, but “haven’t quite adjusted to being in this world where there’s this group of people who monitor these data feeds as if they are official government reports.”

“It leads to these horrible tweets about there being evidence of fraud,” he said.

Grimmer said he operates under the “mantra” that such fraud claims can’t be dismissed “by mere assertion” that the fraud didn’t happen, but must be looked into — which is why he dived into the data in the first place. This claim, he said, was similar to claims about odd-seeming vote tallies that were made during and after the 2020 election of Joe Biden over Trump, so he was familiar with how to look into the data.

“You can just go to the source code for the page, and then you can find where the sort of feed is, and that’s all I did — just found the feed, downloaded it, and then just saw what the updates were,” he said.

Grimmer said it was not surprising to him that people were watching the data feeds come in closely enough to notice an apparent discrepancy in the data that lasted less than a minute.

“There is a group of individuals who are convinced that there’s lots of fraud going on in U.S. elections, and for whatever reason, this group is convinced that they’re gonna uncover this by careful monitoring of these data feeds and the data that is being reported,” he said.

Grimmer said he would not presume to tell news outlets how to do their job of delivering election results quickly in the future, but does hope they balance the need to move quickly with “this reality that their feeds are now being monitored by individuals who think that they’re able to discover instances of fraud from what’s happening in the feeds.”

Sanchez reiterated that the county’s own official results of votes have been accurate — saying that “at no point” did the county office “report an official results update in which Pratt received zero votes.”

After the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral primary, developer Rick Caruso looked to have a surprising, and sizable, lead over then-U.S. Rep. Karen Bass.

The morning after the polls closed, Caruso was ahead by 5 percentage points — 42% to Bass’ 37% — and the former Republican called the early results “a victory story.”

But that lead did not last as the vote count continued. By the time all votes were tabulated two weeks after election day, Bass had come out on top, with 43% of the vote compared with Caruso’s 36%.

Welcome to the postelection vote-count slog in California, where tight races are often impossible to call even when the initial results seem clear-cut.

The California governor’s race still has not been called even though Republican Steve Hilton has been the top voter-getter and Democrat Xavier Becerra has been in second place since election night. The same is true in the battle over who will face Bass in the mayoral election: reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, who is now in second place, or L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is in third place.

At this point in the vote tally, “everybody has an opinion and very few facts” about what the results will be, said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist.

“Nobody in politics wants to be patient,” Murphy said, adding that California has “adopted a system that’s slow and deliberate.”

It’s not just the L.A. mayor’s race where mail-in ballots have swung election outcomes. Other contests, including those for highly competitive Orange County congressional districts and L.A. City Council seats, have come down to extremely narrow margins that have shifted long after election day.

On election night in November 2024, just over 1,000 votes separated Democrat Dave Min and Republican Scott Baugh in their bid for the 47th Congressional District, with Baugh enjoying a slight lead.

But, ultimately, as more ballots were counted, Min pulled ahead. He ended up winning by about 10,000 votes.

Similarly, in the race between Democrat Derek Tran and then-incumbent Michelle Steel to represent Congressional District 45, it took until Nov. 27 to determine that Tran had won the contest by just over 650 votes.

In 2022, the race between then-incumbent Gil Cedillo and community activist Eunisses Hernandez for L.A. City Council was similarly unsettled. On election day, Cedillo had a comfortable lead with 56% of the vote. But two weeks later, Hernandez ended up in the lead with 54% of the vote to Cedillo’s 46%.

Experts say confirming the final spot in the mayor’s race could still take several more days, depending on how close the contest becomes and how many ballots still need to be counted. Only an estimated 62% of ballots from the city of Los Angeles had been counted as of Thursday morning.

“Of the 40% remaining, or outstanding, there could still be a chance that there would be a significant return of more left-leaning votes, which would certainly benefit Raman,” said Pete Peterson, dean of the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

Late results tend to favor Democrats — as seen in the 2022 Bass-Caruso contest — as Democrats tend to be more likely to vote by mail, a system that accepts ballots up to seven days after election day as long as they are postmarked by that Tuesday. And this year, Democratic voters held on to their ballots longer amid an unsettled governor’s race, which could further boost that phenomenon.

“The major difference between ’26 and ‘22, you had two candidates versus three,” Peterson said. “Mathematically, it’s a different situation.”

Three experts The Times interviewed said Raman still had a chance to pass Pratt, but it seemed more likely at this point that Pratt would survive and challenge Bass in November.

The remaining ballots to count, even if they are overwhelmingly left-leaning, will probably be split between Raman and Bass, which means Raman needs to outperform not just Pratt but Bass to make such a comeback possible, Peterson said.

He called her chances of ousting Pratt “dastardly remote … but it’s not impossible.”

In L.A. County, the registrar of voters reported late Wednesday that officials estimate they still have about 713,000 ballots to process and count, which primarily includes vote-by-mail ballots postmarked by election day but not yet received, as well as ballots returned to drop boxes and vote centers on election day. The registrar only made countywide estimations, which includes a much larger pool than L.A. city voters who will decide the mayor’s race.

Kamy Akhavan, the managing director at the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, said there’s a theory circulating among pundits that ballots submitted later are going to break more progressive, meaning they’ll be more friendly to Raman.

“Whether there is enough of them to tilt the outcome in favor of Raman taking a second place position, right now, it seems unlikely,” he said.

Pratt is pulling from the same electorate in Los Angeles that voted for President Trump and could snag a few more voters who are angry about the state of the city. But his lead very well could shrink a bit as more Democrats’ ballots are counted, Murphy said.

“Nithya, she’ll probably go up because there’s going to be a fair amount of Democratic votes and she’ll get her chunk, but will she catch Pratt? You can extrapolate it either way,” Murphy said.

A similar left-leaning shift also occurred as more ballots were counted in November 2022 when Bass and Caruso faced off in the general election. Results on election night wavered between the two candidates, but by the following morning Caruso had a thin lead with 51.25% of the counted votes. Bass sat at 48.75%.

Caruso remained in the lead — though it continued to shrink — as the week dragged on, but by Saturday, Bass had pulled ahead with 50.78% of the counted vote. Caruso had fallen to 49.22%.

Her momentum continued to grow as more ballots were processed. Eight days after polls closed the following week, the Associated Press called the race for Bass. At that point, she led Caruso by six points with 53% of the vote.

The final tally would have her winning almost 55% of the vote.

California officials have worked to dispel rumors and falsehoods about slow election results — explaining that it’s part of the process to accurately count and confirm ballots, especially those mailed in — though there has been a growing push to expedite results to build voter trust.

The process has been particularly slow in L.A. County, though experts say that is mostly a result of the county’s massive voter base. Mail-in ballots are also heavily scrutinized with workers verifying signatures and giving voters a chance to remedy the situation if their signature doesn’t match, a process that takes time.

“They’re using that level of care because they’re supposed to — that’s their protocol — and also because it could make a big difference,” Akhavan said. “We’ve seen some elections in Southern California decided by single digits. And that just means this is going to take time. That can be very frustrating, even annoying, to Angelenos.”

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.

A huge, waning moon glimmered over Los Angeles on election night, a metaphor for a trend that emerged in early returns.

The city’s political establishment seemed to be on the retreat in favor of populist insurgents from both the left and the right.

Mayor Karen Bass held a cushy lead in her bid for a second term, and the Associated Press declared that she had made it into the November runoff election. But the underwhelming amount of support she got thus far showed that many voters in a super-blue city didn’t have enough confidence in a Democratic stalwart to return her to office. Instead, many chose self-proclaimed upstarts from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Raman launched her campaign at the last moment, just weeks after endorsing her longtime ally Bass, figuring that enough Angelenos were tired of the incumbent and would join her message of change from inside City Hall.

Raman’s instincts were half right. Voters did want change. But they didn’t view her as a challenge to the status quo — to many, she is the status quo.

The mayoral hopeful didn’t articulate a platform that radically departed from Bass’, and voter antipathy to her muddled messaging showed: she ended the night in third place. If the current results hold, Bass would face Pratt in the runoff.

At Raman’s election-night party at Boomtown Brewery on the outskirts of Little Tokyo, I saw why her chances of becoming L.A.’s next mayor were slim from the start. The gathering felt like happy hour at a Silver Lake bar: far whiter than the city overall, with few Latinos. Her address to a packed house was a grab bag of platitudes mixed with a broadside against MAGA, which is a political nothing in L.A. politics. It was an uninspiring cri de coeur and reflective of a campaign that wasn’t apocalyptic enough for those, such as Pratt’s people, who want radical change, while offering nothing new for Bass supporters.

Yet Raman still insisted she had unlocked something transformative.

“Together, we built something extraordinary,” she said to cheers. “And it gives me so much inspiration to be a part of it, a movement powered not by cynicism or political insiders, but by ordinary people who still believe Los Angeles is worth fighting for.”

Raman then went on the dance floor to greet well-wishers, pumping her fist while a DJ blasted Daft Punk’s “Lose Yourself to Dance.”

A billboard for L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt near MacArthur Park on June 2, 2026.

(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)

Across town in West Los Angeles, Pratt reveled in his second-place position, enjoying a Mexican dinner with friends and family. It was a peaceful conclusion to a spring of fulminations against Bass (“Karen Basura”), nonprofits, homeless people (“zombies”) and anything that reeked of Democratic pieties, even as the Republican swore he was campaigning for all ideologies in a nonpartisan race.

Long dismissed as a has-been joke, Pratt correctly judged that Angelenos are angry and don’t want to be polite about it anymore. He and his supporters will take his unlikely rise as a mandate to double down against liberal L.A.

But if Pratt, who lost his house in the Palisades fire, does move on to the general election and is serious about winning, he needs to learn from the political revolution successfully pursued by his polar opposites, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Six years ago this spring, L.A.’s political establishment wrote off DSA-LA as wokoso upstarts in their long-shot quest to get a political novice named Nithya Raman elected to the city council. Even as Raman and three other DSA members joined the council, skeptics dismissed them and their progressive policies as anomalies that didn’t reflect how Angelenos actually wanted the city to work.

Tuesday night, four of the six DSA-endorsed candidates in L.A. city elections were in first place by large margins and another was comfortably in second, reflecting DSA’s multicultural, citywide reach. In a telling sign of its newfound king-making status, the local chapter declined to endorse Raman or any other mayoral candidate. Without that powerful backing, their trailblazer, along with DSA member Rae Huang, withered on their L.A. revolutionary vine.

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez and L.A. Unified school board member Rocío Rivas looked to be coasting to outright victories. Marissa Roy was on her way to a runoff that would exclude the incumbent city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto, who was a distant third in the early returns. In District 9, where Curren Price is terming out, Estuardo Mazariegos stood comfortably in second place and looked to headed to a runoff against a fellow Latino candidate in a race that will see South Los Angeles elect its first non-Black council member in 63 years.

The most surprising outcome involved Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who became a punching bag, along with Bass, for people who thought L.A. had transformed into a hellhole. So-called dark money groups, which don’t have to reveal where their funding comes from, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into negative mailers. Opponents vying for her seat cast federal raids against drug dealers and gangs in the MacArthur Park area as an indictment of her leadership, berating her during debates and on social media.

Even Hernandez’s supporters were fretting about what might happen on election night. But by the time I arrived at her raucous soirée in Highland Park, early returns showed her way ahead of the field and perhaps avoiding a runoff.

“It’s reassuring to see [DSA’s success],” she said as jubilant supporters lined up beside her to get tattoos — real ink, not temporary — of hummingbirds, her campaign’s logo. “That means people see us. That means people want more.”

Hernandez pointed to her fellow DSA member, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“What happened with DSA over there didn’t happen overnight,” she said. “In L.A., we’re getting there.”

A table filled with campaign buttons for Council Memer Hugo Soto-Martinez, who ran for reelection this year and is expected to win outright.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

L.A. hasn’t suddenly become a land of Trumpers and closet commies, of course. Two incumbent council members who are centrist Democrats are also on their way to easy victories, while Councilmember Monica Rodriguez walked into a third term because no one ran against her. Centrists Timothy Gaspar and Barri Worth Girvan have a huge lead over their rivals for the San Fernando Valley council seat that Bob Blumenfield is leaving due to term limits.

But anyone who wants to win in Los Angeles needs to realize that antiestablishment sentiment is in the air.

At the same time, I would remind the victorious populists to look up in the sky and remember their Shakespeare.

“O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon / That monthly changes in her circle orb / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable,” Juliet warned Romeo.

Politics, like la luna, waxes and wanes whether we like it or not, and anyone who bets on a permanent transformation at City Hall will probably lose.

Angelenos have declared that they want dramatic change. But how will they feel in November?

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

The most important thing political junkies might need this week is patience.

With so many key races expected to be tight, officials are warning it could takes days — perhaps even more than a week — to know the outcome of Tuesday’s primary election.

Here are some important things to watch as the results roll in:

From left; Steve Hilton at the California Republican Convention in San Diego; Tom Steyer campaigning in downtown Santa Ana; and Xavier Becerra in San Diego.

(Los Angeles Times)

1. The fight for the second top spot

Most polls and pundits say Democrat Xavier Becerra is likely to be the top voter-getter in the primary to replace Gavin Newsom as California governor.

Until recently, it was assumed that Republican Fox News host Steve Hilton would also advance, especially after he was endorsed by President Trump.

But a new poll suggested Hilton was in a tight race for second place with Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, who is spending heavily from his own fortune. If he is successful, California could see a competitive Democrat-versus-Democrat general election come November.

Under California’s election rules, the top two vote-getters move on to the general election regardless of party preference.

Hilton is urging Republicans to unite around him to avoid being shut out. His main GOP opponent is Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

A few months ago, Hilton and Bianco led some polls amid a crowded Democratic field, prompting fears that Democrats might be locked out of November’s general election. But those concerns have subsided somewhat with Becerra’s rise in the polls.

More to read:

Left to right: Karen Bass on Friday, April 8, 2022; Spencer Pratt on April 16, 2025; Nithya Raman on March 3, 2026.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times; Jordan Strauss / Invision/AP; Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

2. Is the mayor’s race really a tossup?

It’s rare for the Los Angeles mayor’s race to become a national story. But that has happened this year thanks to a showdown few would have predicted.

Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt is a big reason for all the attention, running from the right in a very liberal city. Embattled Mayor Karen Bass is the incumbent, with City Councilwoman Nithya Raman running from the left.

A UC Berkeley-L.A. Times poll released last week found a close race with Bass at 26%, Raman at 25% and Pratt at 22% among likely voters. Other polls have shown Pratt doing better.

Pratt had overshadowed his opponents when it came to social media (and old media) attention. But is that enough to get him into the runoff? Bass has big labor on her side, and we’ll see whether that helps her get out the vote. But Bass is also unpopular, according to polls. Does that give Raman an opening among Democrats who are looking for an alternative?

More to read:

Dan Egelhoff plays with his dog at a “Barbecue, Beer and Ballots” event at Rep. Ken Calvert’s office.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

3. The fallout from California redistricting

When it comes to congressional elections, this should be a good night for Democrats, by design. That’s because California voters last year approved Proposition 50, which redrew congressional districts to favor Democrats.

It was part of a national battle by both red and blue states designed to help their respective parties secure control of Congress. The new California maps give Democrats an advantage in some areas, but it’s still unclear how sweeping the victories will be. There are some notable intra-party battles in “safe” districts as well.

The Times’ data and graphics team has identified a few races to watch:

• Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) lost his seat in redistricting and is now challenging incumbent Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) in the 40th District.
• In San Francisco, several factions of the Democratic Party are vying to replace former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 11th District.
• California’s 48th Congressional District in San Diego and Riverside counties has traditionally been red. But the sudden retirement of longtime Republican incumbent Darrell Issa and redistricting puts it in play.
• Veteran Rep. Brad Sherman is facing a strong challenge from fellow Democrat Jake Levine in the 32nd District.

More reading:

Want more information about the ballot-counting process? Times reporter Grace Toohey breaks it down, including how to track your mail-in ballot, how races get called and why it takes so long.

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.”

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 leading candidates for mayor fanned out across Los Angeles this weekend to make their final cases to voters ahead of Tuesday’s hotly contested primary election.

An energized Mayor Karen Bass galvanized crowds of labor union workers sporting union merch Saturday. “Four more years!” crowds chanted as a slew of local and state Democratic heavyweights joined the incumbent.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman spent the day dashing between local restaurants and bars in an old-school yellow Scout convertible to meet with business owners and her supporters.

Meanwhile, former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt hosted a block party in Baldwin Village with barbecue food, free merch and American-flag lawn chairs — although he spent much of the event off to the side, listening to the concerns of Black residents.

Recent polls have placed Pratt and Raman within striking distance of Bass, who had enjoyed a comfortable lead for much of the campaign. A recent survey, co-sponsored by The Times, had Bass at 26%, Raman at 25% and Pratt at 22% — with a roughly 3% margin of error in either direction and 10% of voters undecided.

The top two candidates in Tuesday’s jungle primary will advance to a November runoff, unless one candidate manages to garner over 50% of the vote.

Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt speaks with Diane Waterhouse, a caregiver and Westchester native, about homelessness and drug addiction at a campaign event Saturday in Baldwin Village. “We just talk about it like, ‘oh it’s Skid Row, that’s just where the drug addicts are.’ No, there’s communities, there’s kids, there’s people that work there, businesses,” Pratt said.

(Noah Haggerty / Los Angeles Times)

“I believe God moves mountains; I believe that you can get that 51% on that Tuesday,” Diane Waterhouse, a 60-year-old caregiver, told Pratt at his Baldwin Village event.

On the lawn of Jim Gilliam Park on Saturday, supporters from across the city chanted Pratt’s name, took selfies in front of black campaign vans with his hummingbird logo and ate cookies decorated with his face as kids raced around on scooters and played with the handful of dogs attending.

But Pratt — who had spent the morning at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter speaking with animal welfare advocates — headed toward the nearby recreation center to talk with residents away from the cameras.

“Most people that come here and want our vote — we give y’all our vote; we’re still living like this. Nothing changes,” Erica Helon, a 40-year-old bus driver, told Pratt in one of the most tense moments of the event.

Pratt, wearing a beige suit and a hat with his name stylized like the L.A. Lakers logo, emphasized he was in South Los Angeles to listen and wasn’t even asking residents for their votes. He pulled Helon aside and gave her his personal phone number so they could talk more.

“I’m here because I want to be a voice for the community,” he said at one point. “I’m here because I don’t know what I don’t know.”

Helon, who is still undecided, left the event open-minded on Pratt.

“I would love to see what he’s going to do for this city,” she said.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman joins a group photograph during a campaign stop Sunday with SevaSphere volunteers after preparing meals for people experiencing homelessness at Oaks Kitchens.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Raman, who has made publishing detailed policy plans a staple of her campaign, spent Saturday meeting with local restaurant owners after recently dropping a policy plan for small businesses.

Around sunset, the yellow convertible pulled up to Lowboy Bar, an Echo Park staple. Raman, sporting a Japanese Dodgers hat and a rainbow City Council fanny pack, joined campaign staff for drinks at tables covered in “Nithya Raman for Mayor” pins.

A few young Angelenos, starting out their nights in trendy getups, recognized Raman and stopped by to chat and take pictures.

“I’ve lived in L.A. for 12 years. It’s a very, very important city to me,” said Ryan Bergeron, a 35-year-old who works in marketing and does art on the side.

Bergeron, who is on the Echo Park neighborhood council, hopes Los Angeles can serve as a “beacon in an otherwise scary time in the country” as it tackles affordability, the housing crisis and sustainability issues.

As for Raman, “I’ve seen her as a councilmember and been really proud of that,” Bergeron said. When she announced her candidacy for mayor, “It felt like everything really clicked.”

Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Monica Rodriguez attend the Los Angeles Democratic Party and Avance Democratic Club Carne Asada Tour, a community event held Saturday at the Yosemite Recreation Center. Avanceis one of the country’s largest Latino Democratic clubs.

(Karla Gachet / For The Times)

Bass, conversely, wound down after a day of union rallies by eating tacos at the Yosemite Recreation Center’s picnic tables in Eagle Rock with several local politicians, including Councilmember Monica Rodriguez and county Democratic Party Chair Mark Ramos.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna had joined Bass earlier in the day. Although Luna missed out on the picnic, he still enjoyed several tacos in his car.

Come Sunday, Raman, wearing jeans and a chartreuse cardigan, was greeting bike riders at a Sawtelle coffee shop and speaking to a phone bank group at UCLA.

“It is absolutely essential to making sure that our little campaign, without all the political machine behind us, without MAGA millions behind us, that our vision of Los Angeles still manages to get out to the people, and your work today is an essential part of that,” Raman told a group of United Auto Workers-represented graduate students from multiple nearby universities.

She had several other appearances scheduled for the rest of the day, including lunch with a group of Korean American Democrats in Koreatown, Encinofest, a block party in Silver Lake and a visit to Boyle Heights.

“There seems to be increasing awareness about the race and excitement about the issues,” Raman told The Times. “It’s been really exciting to see people engaging and feeling positive about the city’s future.”

About two dozen students spoke to potential voters associated with UAW and urged them to mark Raman’s name on their ballots by Tuesday.

Stephanie Wert, a 30-year-old psychology graduate student at UCLA and head steward for UAW, said the phone bank could determine whether Raman’s campaign would survive the week.

“This vote is going to be decided on the margins, and so I think we could really make the difference that pushes her to the runoff,” Wert said.

Bass peeked around the back doors of a supporter’s Venice home Sunday afternoon to cheers from several dozen supporters at an intimate event. Speaking over small snack plates and beverages, many said they saw real improvements in the homeless populations around their neighborhood during Bass’ tenure as mayor.

Tatiana Barhar, a Venice resident for over 30 years, said she saw in real-time an “extreme” homelessness problem get better during Bass’ term, thanks to her Inside Safe program. “I want to support her,” she said. “I think there’s a lot more she can do.”

Bass spoke of 1960s-level crime rates, thousands of unhoused people pulled off the street into housing and efforts to build up Hollywood during her time as mayor. “We got a lot to do,” Bass said. “We have such a bright future in the nation’s second-largest city, and I hope that you will continue to be there with me as we win.”

Pratt’s moves on Sunday remained more elusive. His campaign emphasized he was hoping to have intimate moments with L.A. communities, instead of a media and influencer frenzy like some of his previous, more widely publicized events.

One of those more intimate moments was a community event in a Latino neighborhood near downtown L.A. on Sunday morning. Pratt had spent Thursday in New York for some national media interviews to “get the message to as many people as possible.”

Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Spencer Pratt are locked in a tight battle for Los Angeles mayor, according to a poll released Thursday, with incumbent Bass holding what pollsters called a statistically insignificant lead ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

Bass had 26% support from likely voters, followed by City Councilmember Raman with 25% support, according to the poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times.

Pratt, the former reality TV personality making his first bid for elected office, had support from 22% of the likely voters surveyed.

Up until this latest poll, Bass had enjoyed a substantial lead over her challengers, with analysts predicting she would garner enough votes to make a Nov. 3 runoff with either Raman or Pratt. The latest survey suggests any of the three could advance.

“You’ve got three very different candidates, each with very different constituencies, all within the margin of error. It’s going to boil down to turnout,” said Mark DiCamillo, the director of Berkeley IGS polls.

The poll also showed that in a head-to-head runoff between Bass and Raman, the councilmember would lead, 32% to 28%, among the city’s registered voters, but in this scenario, a quarter of likely voters say they would choose neither or would not vote, and 15% were undecided.

The survey of 1,913 registered voters — 1,351 of whom are considered likely voters — is the largest sample of any public poll released in advance of the election. It was conducted between May 19 and 24. The poll has a margin of error of around 3% in either direction.

Just 10% of voters were still undecided, the poll found, down from 26% when the last survey by Berkeley IGS was conducted March 9-15.

Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt at a campaign block party in South Los Angeles last week.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Since then, Pratt and Raman have made steady gains while support for Bass has nearly flatlined.

The March poll had Bass with support from 25% of likely voters, followed by Raman with 17% and Pratt with 14%. Since then, Bass has gained just 1 percentage point, while support for Raman and Pratt jumped by 8 percentage points each.

There are 14 candidates running for mayor in Tuesday’s primary and all were listed in the Berkeley IGS poll, but Bass, Raman and Pratt have consistently led in polling. They’ve also raised the most money in campaign contributions. The latest campaign finance reports, filed last week, showed Pratt with $3.26 million in contributions through May 16, followed by Bass with $3.13 million.

Raman reported a total of more than $931,000 through the May 16 filing period, of which $60,000 came in the form of a loan from Raman to her own campaign. She also received the maximum amount of matching funds available in the race, $1.25 million.

Leftist candidate Rae Huang was favored by 9% of the likely voters surveyed, up 1 percentage point from March, while tech entrepreneur Adam Miller dropped from 6% to 5%, despite infusing his campaign with $4 million of his own money after the first poll.

The major issues in the race have included the city’s approach to homelessness, housing affordability and public safety.

Pratt, whose home burned in the Palisades fire, has blamed Bass for failing to prepare for the conflagration and for her postfire response. Raman has criticized Bass’ Inside Safe program for the unhoused, saying its high cost isn’t sustainable.

Bass has deemed Raman an ineffective City Council member who struggles to build alliances on the legislative body, and has said Pratt does not have a clue about how to run a city like Los Angeles.

Although Pratt now appears to have a chance at making the runoff, the poll showed he would face a steeper climb in potential November runoff scenarios with Bass or Raman. Pratt, a Republican who has been labeled “Trumpian” by Raman, is competing in a city where GOP registration is less than 15%.

“Pratt is an unusual candidate and is generating a lot of enthusiasm in the primary, but he trails by double digits to Raman and Bass in a runoff,” DiCamillo said.

In a showdown between Bass and Pratt, the incumbent mayor was ahead, 47% to 29%, among the city’s registered voters, with 12% undecided and 12% choosing neither or saying they would not vote.

Raman also led Pratt in a potential runoff, 45% to 28%, with 16% undecided and 11% choosing neither or saying they would not vote.

Pratt has repeatedly pointed out that the mayor’s race is nonpartisan. Even so, President Trump said last week that he hopes Pratt does well and that he heard Pratt was “a big MAGA person.”

Trump’s unpopularity in Los Angeles could lessen Pratt’s appeal to Democrats, according to a poll by Cygnal, a national polling group that has worked for Republican candidates.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman walks down Olvera Street alongside Olvera Street business owners on May 19 in Los Angeles.

(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)

There’s been just one debate featuring all three of the leading candidates, during which Raman asserted that Bass and Pratt were working to ensure that she would be knocked out in the primary, which Bass and Pratt disputed.

The debate was followed by a huge influx of campaign contributions to Pratt, who also was polling in second in an Emerson College poll earlier this month.

Raman’s strong showing in Thursday’s poll shows she is very much in the race despite assertions by Bass’ campaign and Pratt’s campaign that she is faltering after a lackluster debate performance.

The poll shows Bass and Pratt with high unfavorability ratings. Bass was considered unfavorably by 57% of likely voters, up 1 percentage point from the March survey. Pratt’s unfavorable rating in the current poll was also 57% — up dramatically from the 28% unfavorable rating in the previous poll, although in that poll, 55% of likely voters had no opinion of him.

In the May poll, Pratt was rated favorably by 25% of likely voters, and Bass by 35%.

The poll found that 40% of likely voters rated Raman favorably, with 35% viewing her unfavorably.

With little more than a week left until primary voters winnow the candidates for Los Angeles mayor, California governor and Congress, there remains a palpable sense of political uncertainty among the electorate — attributable to a lack of clear front-runners, redrawn political maps, messy party infighting and competing voter frustration with both President Trump and the state’s Democratic establishment.

In a state where Democrats hold a substantial advantage among registered voters and Trump lost in 2024 by more than 20 percentage points, MAGA-aligned Republicans are nonetheless competing on a message of ineptitude from longtime liberal leaders to address the state’s most intractable problems. Even some Democrats have railed against the status quo.

With Trump’s grip on the Republican base intact despite abysmal overall approval ratings, many Republican candidates have courted his approval — and been hammered for it by their Democratic opponents.

But those same Democrats have found it harder to explain why their own party should continue to lead the state despite allowing its affordability, housing and homelessness crises to take root and persist — taking little responsibility while swiping at each other for having failed to find solutions sooner.

All that party infighting — present before every primary, but at a fever pitch now — comes against a backdrop of broader voter unease about the war in Iran, volatile oil and gas prices, and the burgeoning threat of AI to the American workforce.

Republican voters are being warned of a blue wave in November giving Democrats control of Congress and grinding Trump’s agenda to a halt. Democratic voters are being warned of Trump administration efforts to undermine local and state elections, and of control of Congress unfairly slipping from reach thanks to further Republican redistricting following a U.S. Supreme Court decision undermining the Voting Rights Act and its protections for majority-Black districts across the South.

Many California voters — some already shaken or burned by former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropping from the gubernatorial race amid sexual assault and rape allegations last month — appear hesitant to cast ballots early, despite warnings that the Trump administration may try to discount those mailed at the last minute.

“Voters don’t want to make a mistake. They’re not absolutely certain,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant in California. “It’s just not real clear where to land.”

James Adams, a political science professor at UC Davis who studies elections and public opinion, said California Democrats this cycle “have a candidate problem and they have a message problem,” in that they are trying to convince voters to back them “not because they offer exciting ideas or inspiring leadership, but because their Republican opponents are even worse.”

And that message — offered as they gerrymander California in a race to the bottom with Republicans nationally — isn’t cutting it, Adams said.

“People are alienated from our current politics not because Americans are cynical, but because people recognize that they deserve better.”

Outsider shakes up L.A. mayor’s race

Amid entrenched homelessness, affordability concerns and lingering anger over the bungled response to last year’s wildfires, the L.A. mayor’s race was “supposed to be a referendum” on embattled Mayor Karen Bass, Stutzman said.

And yet, Bass remains in the lead, and many voters remain confused about which way to turn away from her — if at all.

Bass has won the endorsement of three council members who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, despite City Councilmember Nithya Raman, an ally who’d previously endorsed Bass and is a member of the DSA herself, entering the race to her left.

Unable to consolidate support from the city’s progressive flank, Raman is now running neck and neck for a second-place finish and a chance to face Bass in the November runoff with former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, who has remained in contention in ultra-liberal L.A. despite pushing a MAGA-aligned message to Bass’ right.

Pratt, who did not respond to a request for comment, lost his Pacific Palisades home in the fires and has won over many frustrated city residents with his anti-establishment message and cheeky AI videos — including one casting him as Batman, taking on a corrupt Democratic bourgeoisie.

Pratt, a registered Republican, has tried to dance around politics in the race, calling his campaign a “nonpartisan” one and comparing himself to President Obama politically. But he is backed by many Republicans, has echoed Trump’s rhetoric around restoring “common sense” and a “Golden Age” to L.A., and recently responded to Trump saying that he’d heard Pratt “is a big MAGA person” — and Raman posting the quote to X — with a meme of himself shrugging.

Fernando Guerra, founding director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said he’s glad city voters have choices this race, because they clearly aren’t happy. He said Angelenos are less optimistic today than ever before and are deeply frustrated with “this same liberal Democratic regime from Bradley to Bass over 50 years” — a reference to former Mayor Tom Bradley, who first took office in 1973.

Voters are clearly tired of that regime, which has succumbed to “policy paralysis” in the name of “inclusion” and trying to please everyone, Guerra said — but not so much that they will consider going MAGA for Pratt.

“People say, ‘Yeah, Democrats have really f—d it up, but there’s no way we’re going to [back] Republicans. Look what they’ve done to the nation.’”

Others aren’t so sure. In its voter guide, the progressive group LA Forward wrote that the “most important thing” in the June 2 primary is to block Pratt — whom it called a “right-wing reality TV buffoon” — from advancing, and the best way to do so is to vote for Raman.

“We would much rather see a Bass/Raman runoff, with no chance of Pratt becoming mayor, than a Pratt/Bass runoff where a Pratt win would be a real possibility — plunging LA into a Trumpian mayoral nightmare,” the group wrote.

An unsettled gubernatorial contest

In the gubernatorial race, none of the many Democratic candidates has been able to consolidate a sizable lead, creating a lingering apprehension that Republicans could somehow eke out a stunning upset in the biggest of blue states.

That’s in part thanks to leading Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra, the former California attorney general and U.S. Health secretary under President Biden, being dogged by insinuations, including from fellow Democrats, that he was somehow complicit in a scheme by underlings to steal from his campaign coffers, despite prosecutors in the case — which resulted in his former chief of staff pleading guilty — never alleging wrongdoing on his part.

It’s also thanks in part to the fact that the leading progressive, Tom Steyer, is a billionaire who has bought his way into contention with nearly $200 million of his own money — in an election cycle in which progressive voters nationwide are decrying billionaires as the clearest symbol of all that is wrong with the nation’s lopsided economy.

“This kind of weird self-loathing rationale of why he’s the right guy to take on billionaires because he is one? You can’t build a Mamdani movement around that,” said Stutzman, referring to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who shot to power on a democratic socialist platform last year.

The Democrats have also struggled to combat the criticism — leveraged time and again by their Republican competitors — that their party has failed for years to solve California’s most substantial problems, and deserves to be ousted from power.

Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra speak during a break in the April 28 gubernatorial debate.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton has hammered that message in ads and on the debate stage, lambasting the Democratic establishment for pushing so much unnecessary regulation that it has chased out business and investment and made everything from gas to housing to groceries more expensive for average residents.

He has blamed Democrats for California’s high rates of poverty and unemployment, its high cost of living and high taxes, its record homelessness and its poor public school results.

In an interview, Hilton said he understands that California voters may not like Trump — who endorsed him — and may have conflicting beliefs about federal and international policy, but that California’s biggest problems have “nothing to do with President Trump.”

“Voters need to decide on what direction they want to take in terms of the policies that affect their daily lives in California,” he said, and those are “devised and enacted within California by our politicians here in Sacramento.”

He also said it’s no surprise that some of his Democratic rivals have also acknowledged that the Democratic establishment has been a failure, because “if you pretend otherwise, you show that you’re just completely out of touch with public opinion.”

Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party, said “every campaign is entitled to run the race that they believe matches their story,” even if that means questioning the party’s past performance. But he also said polling hasn’t shown that message to be an effective one, and he’s confident that voters will show their ongoing trust in the party at the polls.

Redistricting, sniping and name-calling

The decision by California voters last November to pass Proposition 50 and allow the state’s Democratic leaders to redraw the state’s congressional maps to favor Democratic candidates in a handful of additional districts — part of a wider redistricting war sparked by Trump — has intensified the primary races in those areas.

As an example, longtime incumbent Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) and Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) are now competing to represent the same redrawn swath of Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and have bitterly attacked one another. Kim has called Calvert a “swampy,” “sleazy” and “corrupt” politician guilty of “sabotaging President Trump’s agenda.” Calvert has called Kim a “RINO,” or Republican In Name Only, and a “Trump-hating liberal.”

Democrats have also sniped at each other, including in the race to replace retiring Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) in his redrawn district in San Diego and Riverside counties — where Trump also holds an outsize presence.

Rep. Young Kim and Rep. Ken Calvert are opponents in a heated race in a newly redrawn congressional district.

(Associated Press)

Stutzman said it will be interesting to see how those primaries play out, but also how Democrats there and in other races perform in November — when Democrats are expected to perform well nationally given Trump’s lousy ratings, but Democrats in California could underperform thanks to statewide frustration with affordability, housing and homelessness here.

“People are like, ‘Eh, you know, yeah, Trump — but there’s some problems here,’” Stutzman said.

Hicks said he expects California voters to not only elect another Democratic governor, but to “push back on a Trump administration and congressional Republicans and Republicans around the country that have sought to rig the game in their favor,” including by “ensuring that we fulfill the promise of Proposition 50 by winning congressional seats and retaking the House of Representatives.”

He said the current political moment “can feel like a pressure cooker,” but Californians will “continue to adapt and overcome and be resilient, just as they always have been.”

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who serves the 4th District, makes her way across an empty, unnamed backlot, presenting her case to be the city’s next mayor.

“Studio lots like this one used to be filled with people, costumers, electricians, set medics, caterers, thousands of Angelenos making a living,” she says in the video posted on social media. “Now these lots are quiet. Since 2018, shooting days in the city have fallen by half.”

After telling voters this issue is “personal” (her husband is a TV writer and producer), criticizing Mayor Karen Bass’ leadership on the matter and outlining her own plans, Raman proclaims, “I’m running for mayor to make sure Los Angeles stays the film and TV capital of the world.”

Placing the concerns of the entertainment industry at the center of the city’s mayoral race would have been unthinkable even in the last election cycle. But the production crisis, which has rocked Hollywood and pummeled its workforce, has reached a critical juncture. The state of L.A.’s signature industry is now a political flashpoint alongside affordability, crime and homelessness in the upcoming election.

A person films an interaction between mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt and another person on his cellphone during a “Community Meet and Greet” event out of a house for sale on Long Ridge Avenue in a residential neighborhood of Sherman Oaks on Saturday.

(Etienne Laurent/For The Times)

In campaign ads, interviews and the recent televised debate, the top three contenders: incumbent Mayor Bass, former reality TV villain Spencer Pratt and Raman, have made the ongoing production slump a pivotal topic, highlighting their plans to revitalize the industry while deploying the issue to undercut one another.

For decades, elected officials have not had to focus on the film and TV business, let alone turn it into a campaign issue. It was simply a given that local production would continue to play a dominant role in the city’s economy as it has for more than a century.

But the cumulative effects of consolidation, runaway production to tax-friendly states and countries and the end of the streaming boom has caused Los Angeles to lose billions in economic activity, shed some 57,000 jobs over the last four years and led to the closing of more than 80 film and television production service businesses across the city since 2022.

“For us, ‘save Hollywood’ is more than a slogan and more than headline. It is what needs to be done,” said Pamala Buzick Kim, one of the co-founders of Stay in LA, a grassroots campaign aimed at increasing film and television production in Los Angeles.

To be sure, the biggest driver of where studios and producers film are state and federal tax credits, over which the city has no control.

But Buzick Kim and others argue that “there is lots the mayor can do, hand-in-hand with the City Council.”

Mayor Karen Bass, center, walks with Avance Democratic Club President Nilza Serrano, to the right of Bass, during Avance’s politics and tacos event at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park in Los Angeles on Saturday.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

For starters, say filmmakers and advocates, much can be done to tackle the city’s sclerotic bureaucracy, onerous regulations and a slow and costly permitting process that has pushed filmmakers to flee to friendlier and cheaper locales.

While steps have been put in place recently, including a pilot program offering reduced-cost filming permits for shoots that demonstrate a “low impact” to the surrounding community, many complain such steps have come too little and too late.

Scott Niner, president and owner of Dangling Carrot Creative, checks on woodwork being produced at his shop in North Hollywood.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“The industry is in collapse and people have been talking about fixing things for years, but all we get are incremental little changes,” said Ed Lippman, a location manager of 34 years who lives in Sherman Oaks and has worked on such shows as “ER” and “The X-Files” and movies including “Galaxy Quest.” “And if the city is not being business-friendly, the business will go elsewhere.”

Compounding the problem, the Los Angeles area has more than 100 jurisdictions, many of which have their own set of rules and regulations regarding filming.

“There needs to be universal standards,” said Travis Beck, a location manager for commercials, small films and music videos. “Burbank is different from Glendale, which is different from Pasadena.”

The recent kerfuffle over filming “Baywatch,” the lifeguard reboot at Venice Beach, underscored both the efforts to bring production back to L.A. — enticed by a $21-million tax credit — and the complex, baffling red tape required to film here.

When shooting began in March, the production encountered a number of hiccups, including that it needed nearly double the parking space it had received a permit for, which was not part of the original approvals.

An anonymous crew member claimed on Facebook that government restrictions had forced production to relocate from Venice Beach. Production staff denied they had relocated. However, the incident prompted a backlash, becoming a rallying cry over L.A.’s burdensome filming bureaucracy.

The “Baywatch” team quickly met with city and county officials and resolved the issue, securing an agreement for a 20% parking discount from the city, and the mayoral candidates used it as an opportunity to score political points.

Pratt slammed the city’s permitting problems.

“LA turned its back on Hollywood — now the golden goose needs CPR,” he wrote on his Substack.

Bass highlighted her administration’s leadership on the matter.

“The City of Los Angeles will always clear bureaucratic barriers, making it easier and more affordable to film in the entertainment capital of the world,” she wrote on X last month.

On April 21, the mayor unveiled programs to offer productions 20% discounts on city-owned parking lots and other equipment, reduced filming fees at places like the Griffith Observatory and reopened the Central Library for filming. Last August, she appointed Steve Kang, president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, as the city’s film liaison.

Raman has pledged her support for expanding the state’s $750-million tax incentive program, streamlining permitting and lowering fees and eliminating those for small productions. She has also said she will establish a dedicated city film office with a liaison who understands production.

Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman speaks to a crowd at the “Families for Nithya” event at Vineyard Recreation Center in Los Angeles on Saturday.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

“Los Angeles is losing Hollywood,” Raman said in a statement. “Not because productions want to leave, but because we’ve made it too hard for them to stay.”

On his Substack and various podcast interviews, Pratt has promised to slash location fees in half, speed up permit approvals, reduce on-set city staff for the majority of productions and waive all fees for shoots with budgets under $2 million.

All three candidates have attacked one another over their approach to Hollywood.

Pratt and Raman have said Bass moved too slowly to address spiraling production and retain film jobs, saying she enacted measures only recently as the mayoral race was heating up.

Speaking on the Monks & Merrill podcast, Pratt criticized Bass’ moves to cut costs to film at the Griffith Observatory, saying, “Who needs that shot right now with the homeless poop all around it?”

The incumbent mayor has defended her administration’s record with the entertainment industry.

Bass and Pratt have taken Raman to task, calling her out for what they say is her lack of advocacy during her time on the City Council.

“She feels very strongly about it. But never offered one motion on the industry, and when motions came up on the industry she either recused herself, or got up and walked out,” said Bass during a debate this month.

Citing a potential conflict of interest over her husband’s work in television, Raman refrained from voting on several motions related to Hollywood.

Many working in the industry would like to see full-throttled support coming from the mayor’s office that will get results. They note how New York City has successfully promoted itself as a leading film destination over the years. (Kang, the city’s chief film liaison, said the city is working on a similar marketing campaign to promote filming that will launch by early fall.)

“For all the talk about, ‘We need to support and bring back filming,’ if they just did basics like lowering the fees and simplifying the process … that would actually help people and get things produced,” said Chris Fuentes, 66, who worked for 30 years as a location manager until he retired last year.

“We’ve heard a lot of great things, but not all things are possible in the mayor’s remit,” said Buzick Kim, noting that tax incentives are a state and federal issue.

Still, she said, “the mayor must understand that Hollywood needs to be made a priority and to find and create inspired thinking to make things easier and cheaper.”

Kang agrees, but says there are limits to what the mayor can achieve.

“We definitely can do a lot to really open up the entertainment industry, but at the same time, we recognize the larger impact needs to come from Sacramento and Washington, D.C., because L.A. just does not have the resources to compete with other jurisdictions in providing millions of dollars in tax incentives,” he said.

For most working in the industry, they just want city leadership that will execute on more than just talking points.

“This is the birthplace of cinema,” Beck said. “It shouldn’t be so hard to film here.”

The roster of campaign contributors to Los Angeles mayoral candidates has something in common with the courtside seats at Lakers games: Both are sprinkled with the rich and famous.

There’s Colin Jost, “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update host, popping up as a donor to Councilmember Nithya Raman. Mayor Karen Bass, meanwhile, counts former Major League Baseball star Dave Winfield among her contributors.

Lakers governor and part-owner Jeanie Buss is there too, as a donor to reality TV personality Spencer Pratt. All three gave the maximum $1,800 contributions to their chosen candidates.

With Los Angeles at the center of the entertainment industry, big names like Jost, Winfield and Buss (none of whom responded to requests for comment) are par for the course in local elections. There might have been even more celebrity contributions were it not for the late-breaking entries of Pratt and Raman in the race, said political consultant Mike Trujillo.

“It’s a very short timeline that is not usual for a mayor’s race where you’re challenging an incumbent,” said Trujillo, who isn’t affiliated with any of the mayoral campaigns. “It takes a while to get these celebrities.”

Trujillo said he expects more big names will contribute if no candidate wins a majority in the June 2 primary, which would trigger a runoff in the Nov. 3 general election.

In 2022, “E.T.” director Steven Spielberg gave $1,500 to Bass’ first campaign for mayor as well as $125,000 to the independent expenditure group “Communities United for Bass for LA Mayor 2022.” J.J. Abrams, the director of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” also gave $125,000 to the group.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, gave nearly $2 million to the pro-Bass group.

Winfield and Buss weren’t the only names associated with the sports world to wade into the mayoral maelstrom.

Brian McCourt, son of former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, contributed the maximum $1,800 to Bass’ reelection campaign. He is the president of the McCourt Foundation, which runs the Los Angeles Marathon.

Magic Johnson’s son, Andre Johnson, who now runs Magic Johnson Enterprises, also gave the maximum to Bass.

Bass also collected donations from “Grey’s Anatomy” actor James Pickens Jr. and from Pauletta Washington, Denzel Washington’s wife. In 2025, Bass received $1,800 from Edythe Broad, the widow of billionaire developer Eli Broad and co-founder of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

Raman received dozens of contributions from successful Hollywood writers, producers and directors. She is married to Vali Chandrasekaran, a writer for hit TV shows including “30 Rock” and “Modern Family.” She took in maximum contributions from stand-up comedian Adam Conover as well as musician Joanna Newsom, the wife of Andy Samberg.

The most recent campaign contribution reports showed Pratt raising nearly $540,000 since Jan. 1, more than any other candidate. About $131,000 of his contributions were in so-called un-itemized contributions of under $100, significantly more than any other candidate.

Among the itemized contributions, Pratt reported getting $1,800 from Rick Salomon, the professional poker player who is known for a 2004 sex tape with Paris Hilton. Salomon’s daughter Tyson Salomon, a social media influencer, gave $1,250 to Pratt.

Two other mayoral candidates, tech entrepreneur Adam Miller and community organizer Rae Huang, also raised more than $200,000 each, though there were fewer household names in their contributions

Miller loaned his own campaign $2.5 million.