LA Mayoral Race Advances to November Runoff as Karen Bass Faces Progressive Challenger

The June 2 primary for Los Angeles mayor produced the matchup many political observers expected — and one that national figures from Donald Trump to Elon Musk have already tried to shape. Incumbent Karen Bass finished first with 34.3% of the vote but fell well short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff [1]. City Council member Nithya Raman, a Harvard- and MIT-educated urban planner who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, secured second place with 28.5%, edging out reality TV star Spencer Pratt's 25.8% after a prolonged ballot count [2].

The November contest will force Los Angeles voters to choose between Bass's record-based pragmatism and Raman's structural critique of how the city spends its money — all against the backdrop of a nearly $1 billion budget deficit, federal funding uncertainty, and an ongoing homelessness crisis that has defined city politics for a decade.

Source: NBC News / LA County Registrar

Data as of Jun 9, 2026CSV

The Primary: How Raman Overtook Pratt

The second-place finish was not assured on election night. Early returns had Pratt leading Raman by roughly 40,000 votes, buoyed by same-day voters in fire-affected areas of the Westside [2]. But as mail-in ballots were tallied over the following days, Raman surged. By the time 92.4% of expected votes were counted, Raman had overtaken Pratt by approximately 3,113 votes, ultimately building her lead as later batches favored her [3].

Turnout in the LA County primary was estimated at 23%, low even by municipal standards [4]. Raman performed strongest in the city's Eastside and central neighborhoods — areas with younger, renter-heavy populations — while Pratt dominated in the Palisades, Brentwood, and San Fernando Valley precincts where the January 2025 fires remained a raw political issue [3]. Bass's support was broadest but shallow, concentrated among older homeowners and Black voters in South LA who delivered her the 2022 general election [4].

Following the Money

The 2026 race has been a fraction of the cost of the 2022 contest, when billionaire Rick Caruso self-funded a $104 million campaign against Bass, spending $338 per vote to her $22 [5]. This cycle, Bass has raised $2.8 million since she began fundraising in 2024, with $2.3 million in cash on hand, though she raised only $494,734 since January 2026 [6]. Raman and Pratt each raised over $530,000 after entering the race in February [6]. Tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who also ran, put $2.5 million of his own money into his campaign and collected $200,000 in donations [6].

Bass drew from Hollywood political action committees, including IATSE and the Motion Picture Association [6]. Raman attracted donations from entertainment industry figures such as filmmakers Ed Zwick and Nick Stoller, and actors Adam Scott and Colin Jost [6]. No major national super PAC has yet made significant independent expenditures in the race, though that could change before November. The absence of a Caruso-style spending blitz has made the contest more dependent on grassroots organizing and earned media — terrain that tends to favor insurgent candidates.

Bass's Homelessness Record: The Numbers

Bass won in 2022 on a central promise: treat homelessness as an emergency. Her signature program, Inside Safe, launched citywide operations to move encampment residents into motel rooms with wraparound services. Through late 2025, Inside Safe had served roughly 5,800 people across more than 100 operations at a cumulative cost exceeding $300 million [7]. Of those participants, approximately 1,243 moved into permanent housing [7].

The city's annual point-in-time homeless count — an imperfect but standardized measure — showed two consecutive years of decline for the first time since counting began in 2005. The total fell from a peak of 46,260 in 2023 to 45,252 in 2024 and 43,699 in 2025 [8]. Unsheltered homelessness dropped 17.5% over two years, and chronic homelessness fell roughly 22% [8].

Source: LAHSA Annual Count

Data as of Jun 1, 2025CSV

Those numbers tell a mixed story. The 2025 count of 43,699 remains higher than the 41,980 recorded in 2022, the year Bass took office [8]. And the per-unit cost of Inside Safe has drawn scrutiny: at an estimated $225 per night ($82,125 annually per bed), it is the city's most expensive temporary housing intervention [9]. A court-ordered audit by Alvarez & Marsal, released in March 2025, examined $2.3 billion in city homelessness spending and found auditors could not determine how much was actually spent, noting that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority failed to verify whether invoiced services were delivered [7]. Human Rights Watch published a 300-page report in 2024 calling Inside Safe "unsustainably expensive" and documenting property destruction during encampment clearances [7].

Raman's Alternative Vision

Raman's homelessness platform represents the sharpest policy contrast in the race. She has proposed scaling back Inside Safe and redirecting its funding toward lower-cost interventions: short-term rental vouchers, shared housing arrangements, and modular units [9]. Her campaign cites a cost of approximately $24,000 per household annually for time-limited subsidy programs, compared to Inside Safe's $82,125 per motel room — a ratio she argues would allow the city to serve three households for the price of one [9].

On policing, Raman proposes scaling unarmed crisis response citywide and integrating it directly into the 911 dispatch system, so that mental health and substance use calls are routed to trained civilians rather than armed officers [10]. She has called for strengthening civilian oversight of the LAPD through the Police Commission and its Office of the Inspector General [10]. Her 2020 council campaign opposed encampment sweeps outright; her 2026 mayoral platform instead calls for "maintaining" the city's "capacity for encampment resolution" — a notable moderation [9].

On housing supply, Raman authored a 2024 motion permitting mid-sized apartment buildings near transit stations in single-family zones, and in November 2025, the council passed her motion capping annual rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments at 4% — the first strengthening of LA's rent stabilization ordinance in 40 years [10].

Neither campaign has submitted its platform to independent budget analysis, and the city controller's office has not published a formal fiscal comparison. This is a significant gap: voters are being asked to choose between two models of governance with no neutral accounting of their costs.

The $1 Billion Question

Whoever wins in November inherits a fiscal crisis. Los Angeles proposed mass layoffs to close a nearly $1 billion deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year [11]. Chief Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo warned that a recession could push the shortfall to $406 million for fiscal year 2026-27 [11]. The city also faces a $200 million deficit specifically for homelessness services, compounded by the expiration of state Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention (HAP) funding that had been a lifeline for interim shelter operations [11].

Los Angeles operates on a $13 billion-plus annual budget, but structural spending growth — driven by pension obligations, rising labor costs from new city employee contracts, and deferred infrastructure maintenance — consistently outpaces revenue growth. The city's credit rating was downgraded, further constraining borrowing capacity [11]. At the county level, a $48.8 billion recommended budget for 2026-27 avoids layoffs for now but warns that collapsing federal support for Medi-Cal and food assistance could force service reductions within two to three years [12].

These constraints are not ideological; they are arithmetic. Raman's proposals to redirect Inside Safe funding toward cheaper interventions could produce savings, but her plans for expanded social services, unarmed crisis response, and housing production all require upfront investment. Bass's approach relies on maintaining existing programs while seeking state and federal dollars that are increasingly uncertain under a hostile Trump administration. Neither candidate has offered a credible plan for closing the structural gap.

Musk, Trump, and the Disinformation Episode

The days following the primary were marked by a disinformation episode that revealed how quickly a local election can become nationalized. After a lag in the Associated Press's vote-reporting system caused news websites to briefly display zero new votes for Spencer Pratt in one ballot update, claims spread on social media that Pratt had been "robbed" [13].

Elon Musk amplified the false claim on X, his social media platform [14]. President Trump used the prolonged vote count to accuse California officials of "cheating" [13]. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — a Trump appointee — reviewed official county records and stated: "The claim is false. Each candidate received votes in every update" [13]. PolitiFact rated the claim that Pratt received zero votes in a 24,000-ballot update as false, attributing the display error to a lag in how the AP's system processed county data [15].

The steelman version of the critics' concern is that LA County's slow vote-counting process — common in California due to its generous mail-ballot acceptance window — creates an information vacuum that breeds suspicion. That is a legitimate procedural critique. But the specific fraud claims made by Musk and Trump were factually wrong and were debunked by the Trump administration's own Justice Department appointee [13].

Bass's critics raise other governance concerns with more substance: the $2.3 billion in homelessness spending that could not be fully accounted for [7]; the city's credit downgrade; the gap between Inside Safe's reach (5,800 people) and the scale of the crisis (43,699 unhoused). These are legitimate performance questions that do not require conspiracy theories to articulate.

Spencer Pratt and the Republican Vacuum

Pratt's 25.8% of the vote — roughly 193,000 ballots — is more than a curiosity [2]. In a city where Republicans hold about 13% of voter registration, a reality TV personality running on fire-recovery populism outperformed the party's structural base by a wide margin [2]. His campaign was built almost entirely on the emotional resonance of having lost his home in the January 2025 Palisades Fire and his prolific social media presence, not on a traditional policy platform.

The argument that Pratt filled a vacuum has some merit. Los Angeles has not had a competitive Republican mayoral candidate since Richard Riordan left office in 2001. Caruso ran as a Democrat in 2022 despite his Republican registration history. With no center-right party infrastructure, culturally conservative or anti-establishment voters have no obvious home in city politics. Pratt's support suggests this constituency exists but lacks institutional representation — a gap that celebrity candidates can temporarily occupy without building durable political capacity.

Whether Pratt's voters migrate to Bass or Raman in November — or stay home — is one of the race's central unknowns. Pratt's base skewed toward fire-affected homeowners angry at Bass's emergency response; that anger could benefit Raman if she frames the contest as accountability for the incumbent, or Bass if those voters see a DSA-affiliated candidate as ideologically alien.

The Progressive-Mayor Playbook: Chicago and New York

Raman's candidacy fits a pattern. In Chicago, Brandon Johnson won the 2023 mayoral race with Chicago Teachers Union and DSA backing, defeating moderate Paul Vallas on a platform of community investment and progressive taxation. Two years in, Johnson's record is mixed: homicides dropped 30%, the city doubled homeless shelter capacity to 6,800 beds, and opioid overdose deaths fell 20% [16]. But his signature revenue proposal — the "Bring Chicago Home" real-estate transfer tax — was defeated by voters in a 2024 referendum, his approval rating sat at 31% in October 2025, and he lost significant support among Black voters on the South and West sides [16].

In New York, DSA assemblyman Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race in November 2025 on a platform of rent freezes, fare-free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and a $30 minimum wage [17]. At 100 days in office, his approval stood at 43%, with his highest marks on childcare (54% approve) and housing affordability (49% approve), though a majority of New Yorkers said the city was on the "wrong track" [18].

The evidence from both cities suggests a consistent pattern: progressive mayors can win, can achieve measurable gains in specific areas (public safety in Chicago, early popularity on affordability in New York), but face severe constraints when their ambitions collide with fiscal reality, voter skepticism about taxation, and the institutional inertia of large municipal bureaucracies. The policy shifts promised on the campaign trail are rarely delivered in full; they are more often diluted by budget math, council politics, and the sheer complexity of governing a major city.

For Raman, the lesson may be that winning is the easier part. The harder question — one that Bass can credibly pose — is whether a first-term council member from a Westside district has the institutional knowledge and political capital to manage a $13 billion bureaucracy through a period of fiscal contraction and federal hostility.

What November Will Decide

The Bass-Raman runoff is not merely a contest between two Democrats or between a moderate and a progressive. It is a test of whether Los Angeles voters believe the city's problems stem from insufficient ambition or from insufficient execution — and whether they trust a known quantity with a contested record or an insurgent with untested ideas at scale.

Bass will run on continuity: declining homeless counts, operational experience, and the argument that her administration's approach is working and needs more time. Raman will run on accountability: the $300 million Inside Safe price tag, the audit failures, the structural deficit, and the case that the city needs a fundamentally different model of governance.

The fiscal constraints are real regardless of who wins. The homelessness crisis, while showing modest improvement, remains far from resolved. And the national political environment — with a hostile federal administration and social media platforms willing to amplify false claims about local elections — will make governing harder for either candidate.

Los Angeles voters will decide in November. The stakes extend beyond the city: if Raman wins, she would be the most prominent DSA-affiliated mayor in the country, governing a city larger than Chicago and New York combined in land area, with an economy that would rank among the world's top 20 nations. If Bass holds on, it will be a test case for whether incumbency and institutional support can withstand a progressive challenge in an era of deep voter frustration with the cost of housing, the visibility of homelessness, and the competence of city government.