Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass finds herself in a difficult situation that few of her predecessors have experienced, all but assuredly failing to top 50 percent of the vote in her bid to hang on to her job.
As of Wednesday morning, she had secured enough votes to get into a runoff but not enough to avoid one.
Not since James Hahn in 2005 and, before that, Sam Yorty in 1973 has an incumbent L.A. mayor had to compete in a runoff. In both cases, the incumbents lost.
As votes continue to be counted Wednesday, it has yet to be determined whether the Nov. 3 election will see Bass facing a reality TV star, Republican Spencer Pratt, on the right or City Council member Nithya Raman, a democratic socialist, on the left.
Either way, the mayor will have suffered the rebuke of having nearly two-thirds of voters casting their ballots for someone else — a sharp turn of fortune from the general election of 2022, when the then-congresswoman captured upward of 43 percent of the vote in a 12-candidate primary and then defeated real estate developer Rick Caruso by close to 10 points.
The voters in the nation’s second-largest city are predominantly Democrat, like Bass. But her struggle to win them over shows that anti-incumbent anger transcends partisanship, especially in cities where rampant homelessness is in clear view.
Her standing was damaged most seriously by a signal event: the devastating January 2025 Palisades Fire. Though the city’s Emergency Management Department had warned her staff of dangerous conditions, the mayor took a diplomatic trip to Ghana and was more than 7,000 miles away when the wind-whipped blaze engulfed the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, destroying thousands of buildings and killing a dozen people.
“It was one of the worst moments of my life to not be here when my city needed me,” Bass said at a mayoral debate last month. But she has also said mishandling by the city’s fire chief, whom she fired, was chiefly to blame.
Where Bass is far from alone among America’s big-city mayors is in facing rising public discontent, which has led restless voters to turn toward unconventional and highly ideological candidates as potential agents of change.
In 2025, New York and Seattle elected self-identified democratic socialists, Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson, both of whom unseated more centrist incumbents.
“The attraction of a socialist mayor is they really talk about where people are at,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “They talk about cost and cost and cost, and they have a story about it. It’s all about billionaires and income disparity.”
In office, Mamdani and Wilson are scaling back some of their promises as they discover their cities lack the resources to deliver. But, Kamarck said, “people may reward them just for understanding their plight.”
Pratt’s startling rise in Los Angeles — and the possibility that the onetime villain on MTV’s “The Hills” may advance to the November election, despite having no background in politics or public policy — also has come about by tapping into voter frustration. The 42-year-old Republican has used the power of celebrity, grievance and viral videos to make the case that the city is badly mismanaged. His home, which he shared with his wife and reality show co-star Heidi Montag, burned in the Palisades fire.
Pratt’s campaign has received financial backing from a host of high-powered entertainment and business figures, including billionaire hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, L.A. Lakers President Jeanie Buss and cryptocurrency titans Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
If Pratt makes the runoff, Bass would be a heavy favorite in deep blue Los Angeles, which has elected only one Republican mayor, Richard Riordan, since the 1950s. But the message of discontent would still have been sent.
While every large city has its own story, there are through lines that explain why the pragmatic center is no longer holding in much of urban America. What a half-century ago were largely White working-class populations have given way to growing numbers of Black and Hispanic residents, as well as left-leaning White professionals.
Governing those cities required building broad, inclusive and often unwieldy coalitions, in which individual factions held enormous power to block initiatives, said Fernando Guerra, a political science professor and founder of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
Those governing structures “have exhausted themselves. They became stagnant, with a lack of innovation,” even as problems with housing, transportation and education have worsened, Guerra said.
Voters in cities across the map are making it increasingly clear they want something different. What they have yet to decide is precisely what that is.
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