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As the Los Angeles mayoral election returns piled up, the tide steadily turned against Spencer Pratt, driving him out of the runoff and delivering the No. 2 slot to City Councilwoman Nithya Raman. On Monday, the Associated Press called it. The 44-year-old progressive, not Pratt, will face Mayor Karen Bass in November.
That outraged Pratt supporters, some of whom turned to conspiracy theories and outright stupidity to ignore the obvious: Pratt, a Republican who had the support of President Donald Trump, was destined to lose this race. It was just a question of when.
There is no need for conspiracies. A city that is roughly 15% Republican makes for inhospitable terrain. In Pratt’s case, his woeful credentials, inane memoir and ridiculous stabs at policy ideas made him a bad candidate with a bad message in an unfriendly electorate.
To those who imagine that Pratt was robbed, it is important to recognize that those truths are not evidence of fraud but proof of politics.
Pratt campaigned on the idea that he would bring together Angelenos united in their anger at City Hall. Instead, he ended up with the same level of support that Trump received in 2024 — in a city that detests the president. To paraphrase the great George Carlin, City Hall will brush off Spencer Pratt like a bad case of fleas.
Nor is the city’s slow count evidence of chicanery. California allows any ballot postmarked by Election Day to be included in the final tally. Some take days to arrive. That creates long counts, but it does not mean that those ballots are in any way suspect. They just arrived late, and since late voters in this cycle tended to be younger and more liberal than the overall electorate, the late ballots helped Raman more than Pratt.
Admittedly, I was surprised that they broke more heavily for Raman than Bass, but that’s why we have elections rather than just predictions. The results sometimes surprise, and in this case, several issues likely boosted the late, liberal vote: younger people waiting until Election Day to cast ballots; liberals watching polls in the governor’s race before voting; a president who denigrates mail-in voting and whose supporters instead vote in person, meaning that in-person voters are more conservative than those who mail in their ballots.
Bass will have to answer her for record
So now we turn to Raman vs. Bass, precisely the race that Bass has dreaded — a challenge from her left by a candidate with genuine credentials (as opposed to one from her right by a crystal salesman). That’s not to say the jig is up for the mayor. Maps of the vote in this election show that she has wide swaths of the city in her political column, and her early reactions to Raman’s second-place finish telegraph the approach she will take.
The initial vote counts show Bass did best in the city’s gut, the concentration of Black and brown voters through South and Central Los Angeles. That’s unsurprising. Those areas are proud of their support for the first Black woman to serve as mayor of Los Angeles, and they also have benefited from progress in recent decades, as crime has declined and neighborhoods have become vastly safer.
The residents of Brentwood or Bel-Air may not feel those changes — homicides and homelessness were never big problems there — but the working people of Central Los Angeles have known violence and despair, and they know what it’s like to be relieved of those fears, too.
But that’s not to say that Bass has an easy road ahead. Nearly two-thirds of voters last week cast ballots against an incumbent mayor, and Raman represents a new kind of challenge to the former legislator and congresswoman. Raman is young, smart and more progressive. She’s capable of igniting great enthusiasm around her campaign, and she is in tune with a city electorate that has moved steadily to the left in recent decades.
Her strength in last week’s election showed up in the Silver Lake, Hollywood, Echo Park and Glassel Park neighborhoods — diverse communities with lots of young people and renters. That gives her a base.
Raman will now turn the debate to the issues where she has the most to say: affordability, including the very high cost of housing; restlessness for change; and alternative strategies for managing the city’s police and public safety.
Raman’s success at making the runoff — and the genuine challenge she poses — means that Bass will need to address those issues. Does the LAPD soak up too much city spending, and are there better, more humane ways to police Los Angeles? Does the city, in its zeal to protect neighborhoods, stand in the way of more rapid housing construction? Should homeless encampments be broken up if some of the denizens of those squalid quarters have nowhere else to go?
Those questions sit at the hinge between Democratic Party politics and democratic socialist ideals, which capture the city’s evolving sense of itself — and challenge Democrats, as a whole, as the party considers its future.
Bass’s record in those areas is mixed. Crime is down and so is street homelessness, but many neighborhoods are anxious. Even where there has been progress, it has often felt painfully slow. For her part, Raman talks about urgency but runs with the dual challenge of proving that she has new ideas and energy while also having served as a member of the city council since 2020.
The good news for Los Angeles, then, is that these are exactly the issues that the city should be talking about, as opposed to the angry, vapid dialogue that a Pratt runoff portended. His candidacy offered jabs and bromides. Raman’s presents the opportunity for a genuine city discussion about leadership and priorities.
But before we leave Pratt in history’s dustbin, one last question faces the two surviving candidates in this race: What happens to the 25% of voters who backed him?
It is safe to say that most Pratt supporters face an unhappy choice in the runoff. Those voters — not all of them, but certainly most — trend conservative and came together out of anger toward Bass and City Hall. Do they now vote for the mayor they hold responsible for the Palisades fire? Or do they back a candidate who identifies as a democratic socialist and who Pratt personally denigrated at every turn?
Some will stay home, of course. To those who are determined not to sulk, Bass offers something closer to their politics. The outcome may turn, at least in part, on what these voters do.
The mayor’s first statement after Raman made the runoff was to call the council member someone who “allows encampments near schools and cuts the police force.” That’s the first step in Bass reminding the city that she’s now the conservative in this race. Only in Los Angeles.
