Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, whose standing with voters has plummeted after the Palisades fire, was ahead of her two rivals, television host Spencer Pratt and City Council Member Nithya Raman on Tuesday, according to early election reports.
Pratt was in second place, and Raman was in third place, and that return showed. The top two vote-getters from Tuesday's primary will advance to the runoff. 3 November
Polls close at 8 p.m., but 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 his political life, campaigning for re-election amid voter discontent. Although this race is not a partisan one, the Democratic Party has been pushed to all political ends.
Pratt, a Republican, has been winning over conservative voters as he portrays LA's citizens as being threatened by drug-addled homeless “zombies.” He has made crime a central issue in his campaign, promising voters that he will enforce 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.
(Jonathan Alcorn / For The Times)
Raman, a democratic socialist, has been lambasting Bass for giving the police an expensive raise package, saying those labor costs “made the city bankrupt.” He also pledged to increase the production of apartments, including single-family homes, with the aim of lowering rental costs.
Pratt's celebrity, along with his media savvy and message, turned the contest into a national story. Pratt became a cable news star, and his selection also sparked interest from Us Weekly, TMZ and other entertainment outlets.
Also vying for votes were community organizer Rae Huang, a leftist who criticized Raman as too moderate, and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, a centrist Democrat who promised to bring an authoritarian style of administration to City Hall.
It may be days before the outcome of the race is clear. Ballots submitted by mail postmarked Tuesday 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 place. Bass didn't overtake Caruso until a week later, encouraged by a flood of late votes.
Bass launched his campaign for re-election in 2024, at a time when his bid for a second term looked like an easy task. That all changed after the January 2025 Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes in the Pacific Palisades and left 12 people dead.
Mayor Karen Bass greets fans inside Pann's Restaurant in Los Angeles.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Even after that tragedy, the mayoral race was uneventful. But the race took a turn for the worse in February, when Raman, who unseated an incumbent council member in his first run for city office in 2020, launched a surprise bid to unseat Bass.
Raman's entry into the race caught the mayor and many of Raman's allies off guard, reshaping the race and raising the prospect of a generational challenge to the incumbent.
The race took another turn last month when Pratt, best known as the star of MTV's “The Hills,” launched a definitive debate against Bass and Raman. That look, along with his social media skills and the production of his intelligent AI video followers, helped him become a political star.
Pratt blamed Bass for the destruction of his house and promised to clear city streets of homeless people, pushing them as far away as Seattle if necessary. Critics have described those plans as ineffective.
Raman, who was once an ally of Bass, also criticized the mayor's approach to the shortage of people, saying that it is too expensive and fails to produce meaningful results.
Bass has been defending his record, pointing to a 17.5% drop in “unsheltered” homeless people – the number of people living outside or in their cars – over a two-year period. He pointed to a historic drop in the city's homicide rate, the lowest since 1959, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The mayor got a lot of help from the high-ranking police union, which spent more than $1.2 million criticizing Raman's approach to homelessness and police recruitment, at times portraying him as a “flip flopper.”
In recent months, Bass has portrayed himself as a patient reformer at City Hall, who declared a homelessness emergency on his first day in office and fired department heads who failed to move quickly.
Those messages didn't resonate with many Angelenos, according to a recent poll.
Sixty-three percent of likely voters say the city is not on the right track, according to a poll released last week by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and sponsored by The Times. Only 24% of respondents to the poll said the city was headed in the right direction.
Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, center, is shown by homeowners Maggie, left, and Mark Quiroz during a campaign event in Los Angeles.
(Jill Connelly/Associated Press)
In a Berkeley IGS survey, 97% of Pratt's supporters said the city is headed in the wrong direction, compared to 2% who think it's headed in the right direction.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Raman and Pratt – who have traded second and third place in separate polls – have followed each other in anger. Raman highlighted Pratt's half-hearted praise of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, telling voters that Pratt would make the city “more hateful and more stupid.”
Pratt, in an interview with CNN, said he is a “very different person” from the one who appeared on Jones' show nearly two decades ago. He repeatedly attacked Raman for his opposition to a law banning homeless people from coming within 500 meters of schools and childcare centers.
Raman also accused Bass of going easy on Pratt, saying at one point Bass and Pratt worked together to attack him during a televised debate in hopes of pushing him into third place. Bass and Pratt denied the allegations.
The contest even caught the attention of President Trump, who expressed his support for Pratt last month and said he heard the candidate was “a big MAGA person.”
That kind of messaging may not buy in a city where less than 15% of the city's voters are Republican, according to county statistics compiled in April. The number of Democrats is almost four times that number.
Pratt said he is surrounded by Democrats and has repeatedly pointed out that the mayoral race is not one-sided.
However, the Berkeley IGS poll found Raman and Bass to beat Pratt by double digits in the race. That study found that Raman would lead by four percent in the Bass-Raman competition.
