Mayor Karen Bass attempted to fend off challenges from Councilmember Nithya Raman and reality TV personality Spencer Pratt in the most wide-open L.A. mayor's race in a generation.
Mayor Karen Bass faces the toughest test of her career as Angelenos choose which two candidates will advance from Tuesday’s primary to a November runoff.
Bass is squeezed between Republican reality-TV star Pratt, who promises crackdowns on crime and encampments, and democratic socialist Nithya Raman, who blasts police raises and backs aggressive apartment construction. The race has drawn national media attention, in large part because of the strong showing by Pratt on television and social media.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, whose standing with voters took a huge hit in the wake of the Palisades fire, was pulling ahead of her two main challengers, reality TV personality Spencer Pratt and City Councilmember Nithya Raman on Tuesday, according to early election returns. Pratt was in second place, while Raman was in third, those returns showed. The top two vote-getters from Tuesday’s primary will advance to a Nov. 3 runoff.
Polls closed at 8 p.m., but ballot counting is expected to take several weeks, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office. Bass, a former legislator who served in Sacramento and Washington, is in the biggest fight of her political career, campaigning for reelection amid widespread voter discontent. Although the race is nonpartisan, the pro-labor, establishment Democrat has been squeezed from each end of the political spectrum.
Pratt, a Republican, has been winning over conservative voters as he depicts L.A. ’s citizenry as under threat from drug-addicted homeless “zombies. ” He made crime a central issue in his campaign, promising voters he would enforce more of the city’s laws. Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman listens to Elizabeth Soyeon Ahn during a campaign stop at Borit Gogae Korean restaurant in Los Angeles.
Raman, a democratic socialist, has been railing at Bass for giving police officers an expensive package of raises, saying those personnel costs have “bankrupted the city. ” She also promised to ramp up the production of apartments, including in single-family neighborhoods, in a bid to bring down rental costs. Follow live updates, analysis and highlights from 2026 election day’s key races, such as California governor, Los Angeles mayor, L.A. city council and more.
Pratt’s celebrity, along with his media savvy and message, transformed the contest into a national story. Pratt became a fixture on cable news, and his candidacy also fueled interest from Us Weekly, TMZ and other entertainment outlets. Also competing for votes were community organizer Rae Huang, a leftist who denounced Raman as too moderate, and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, a centrist Democrat who promised to bring a more muscular management style to City Hall.
It could be days before the outcome of the race is clear. Mail-in ballots with a Tuesday postmark will be accepted by county election officials for another week. On election night in 2022, real estate developer Rick Caruso was in first place, with Bass in second. Bass did not overtake Caruso until a week later, buoyed by a flood of late-arriving mail-in ballots.in 2024, at a time when her bid for a second term looked like an easy task.
All that changed in the wake of the January 2025 Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades and left 12 people dead. Even in the wake of that disaster, the mayor’s race remained largely uneventful. But the contest received a jolt in February, when Raman, who ousted an incumbent council member during her first run for city office in 2020, launched a surprise bid to unseat Bass.
Raman’s entry into the race caught the mayor and even many of Raman’s own allies off guard, reshaping the contest and raising the prospect of a generational challenge to the incumbent. The race took another turn last month when Pratt, who is best known as a star of MTV’s “The Hills,” delivered an assured debate performance against Bass and Raman.
That appearance, along with his own social media skills and his supporters’ production of slick AI videos, helped him become a breakout political star. Pratt blamed Bass for the destruction of his home and promised to clear the city’s streets of homeless encampments, pushing them as far away as Seattle if necessary. Critics have described those plans as unworkable.
Raman, a onetime Bass ally, also blasted the mayor’s approach to homelessness, saying it was too expensive and failing to yield meaningful results. Bass has been defending her record, pointing to a 17.5% decrease in “unsheltered” homelessness — the number of people living outside or in their vehicles — over a two-year stretch. She pointed to a historic drop in the city’s homicide rate, which has fallen to its lowest point since 1959, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The mayor received a major assist from the rank-and-file police officers’ union, which spent more than $1.2 million criticizing Raman’s approach to homelessness and police hiring, at times portraying her as a “flip flopper. ” In recent months, Bass portrayed herself as an impatient agent of change at City Hall, who declared a state of emergency on homelessness on her first day in office and ousted department heads who failed to move with urgency.
Sixty-three percent of likely voters said the city is not on the right track, according to a poll released last week by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times. Only 24% of poll respondents said the city was headed in the right direction. Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, center, is shown around the neighborhood by homeowners Maggie, left, and Mark Quiroz during a campaign event in Los Angeles.
In the Berkeley IGS poll, 97% of Pratt supporters said the city is headed in the wrong direction, compared with 2% who think it is moving in the right direction. In the campaign’s final weeks, Raman and Pratt — who have traded second and third place in various polls — went after each other with fury.
Raman highlighted Pratt’s effusive praise for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, telling voters that Pratt would make the city “a lot more hateful and a lot more stupid. ” Pratt, in an interview with CNN, said he is a “very different person” from the one who appeared on Jones’ program nearly two decades ago. He repeatedly attacked Raman over her opposition to a law that prohibits homeless encampments from coming within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers.
Raman also accused Bass of going easy on Pratt, alleging at one point that Bass and Pratt were working together to attack her during a televised debate in hopes of pushing her into third place. Bass and Pratt denied the allegation. The contest even garnered the attention of President Trump, who signaled his support for Pratt last month and said he’d heard that the candidate is a “big MAGA person.
” That type of messaging might not sell in a city where fewer than 15% of the city’s voters are Republican, according to county figures compiled in April. The number of Democrats is nearly four times that amount. Still, the Berkeley IGS poll found that Raman and Bass would defeat Pratt by double digits in a runoff. That same survey found that Raman would lead by four percentage points in a Bass-Raman showdown.
Noah Goldberg covers Los Angeles City Hall for the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked on its breaking news team and has also written an array of offbeat enterprise stories. Before joining The Times in 2022, Goldberg worked in New York City as the Brooklyn courts reporter for the New York Daily News and as the criminal justice reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. He graduated from Vassar College.
Rebuilding L.A. : Game Theory: Is L.A. Rebuilding For Survivors - Or For The Olympics? Author and CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti attempts to answer some questions about rebuilding communities in his new book about the Palisades Fire — and names a motive for a quick rebuild: the Olympic games coming to Los Angeles in 2028.
Today we discuss one of the pivotal events of the 1960s: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Though the gunman was caught at the scene, confessed at trial, and even bragged about the shooting, his motives have largely been forgotten. From the Los Angeles Times and Sonoro comes the De Los Podcast — a weekly conversation where music, pop culture and Latinidad collide. Hosted by De Los editors Fidel Martínez and Suzy Exposito.
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