Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will face City Council member Nithya Raman in a November 3 runoff after no candidate secured a majority in the June 2 primary election, eliminating reality-TV star Spencer Pratt from the race for the nation’s second-largest city.
Bass, the Democratic incumbent seeking a second term, finished first in the primary, while Raman, a progressive councilmember, narrowly edged out Pratt to claim the second spot. The runoff marks the first time an incumbent Los Angeles mayor has been forced into a general election since 2005.
Both candidates are Democrats and self-described progressives who share common ground on major city issues. According to the Los Angeles Times, they both support diverting some 911 calls away from the police department to unarmed responders, moving homeless people into housing, and rewriting Measure ULA, the city’s tax on high-end property sales, to spur apartment construction. Yet experts predict the November campaign will turn bitter, focused on attacking each other’s records rather than policy differences.
“It’s going to be a knife fight,” said Michael Schneider, chief executive of the advocacy group Streets For All and a Raman supporter, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Bass has already launched sharp attacks on Raman’s record. In a statement released after the primary results, the mayor criticized Raman for voting against police hiring and for opposing a law that keeps homeless encampments at least 500 feet from schools. “This November, voters will have a clear choice between myself and Nithya Raman, a difference that is made crystal clear because we have been changing L.A., while some people including the councilwoman … fought to take L.A. backwards,” Bass said at her campaign kickoff event on Tuesday.
Raman has countered by accusing Bass of “pay to play” politics, saying special interests—the police union, business groups, and Airbnb—spent heavily on the mayor’s reelection because they benefited from her decisions. “For too long, City Hall has prioritized giving political advantage to powerful interests that fund elections,” Raman said in a statement. “Meanwhile, working people pay the price in higher rents, depleted services, and a city that has stopped working for them.”
Bass enters the runoff facing political headwinds from the January 2025 Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and killed 12 people. She was out of the country when the fire broke out and has faced sustained criticism over her handling of recovery efforts. A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies released last month showed Raman leading Bass 32% to 28% in a head-to-head matchup, with 25% saying they would choose neither candidate and 15% undecided.
Raman, whose district stretches from Silver Lake to Reseda, was until recently a Bass ally and had endorsed the mayor’s reelection. Bass, in turn, pushed for the Los Angeles County Democratic Party to endorse Raman and appeared in her campaign materials during a tough 2024 reelection fight. The shift reflects broader political changes in Los Angeles, where the Democratic Socialists of America—a group that endorsed Raman’s first two council campaigns—is gaining influence. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, another DSA-backed candidate, won reelection easily, and two DSA-endorsed council members won decisive victories in the primary.
The race will test whether voters in the heavily Democratic city want to move further to the political left. Raman, who declared “defund the police” during her first winning campaign in 2020, has been moderating her views, saying the Los Angeles Police Department should not shrink any further and pledging not to stand in the way of council members creating new no-camping zones. Still, a Raman victory would represent a significant shift, putting the city’s first DSA member in the mayor’s office.
Sources
- Los Angeles Times — Primary results, runoff confirmation, policy alignment, campaign statements from Bass and Raman, expert analysis on campaign strategy, political background on both candidates, and DSA influence in city politics
- NBC News — Runoff projection and incumbent Bass’s challenges
- The New York Times — Runoff confirmation and historical context on incumbent mayors in runoffs
- PBS NewsHour — Raman’s progressive positioning and the race as a test of leftward movement
- ABC News — Raman’s advancement and runoff setup
- The Guardian — Pratt’s elimination and Raman’s advancement
