Nithya Raman, a progressive Democrat who has drawn comparisons to New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will face Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles in a two-person race in November, The Associated Press determined on Monday.
Ms. Raman, 44, a City Council member and former Bass ally, was behind in the initial vote count but came back in later returns to edge out Spencer Pratt, a Republican reality TV star who lost his home in the 2025 wildfires that devastated Pacific Palisades, a wealthy coastal enclave.
Mr. Pratt had jumped out to an early lead in a field of more than a dozen contenders, in part because Republicans, who make up about 15 percent of the city’s electorate, had coalesced behind him. But his margin shrank as ballots from thousands of liberals who voted closer to Election Day were processed.
Because Californians vote by mail in large numbers, counts are often slow, and it can take days or weeks to determine winners.
“Spencer Pratt had an exciting campaign that captured national attention,” said Paul Mitchell, a political data expert.
He added that Mr. Pratt was “undone by the voters who were holding their ballots, waiting for the last shoe to drop on the Democratic side of the governor’s race.”
After Los Angeles County updated its vote totals on Monday, Ms. Bass led overall with 34.3 percent of the vote, while Ms. Raman had 28.5 percent. Mr. Pratt, who had slipped to third place on Sunday, fell further back to 25.8 percent.
Ms. Bass could have won outright in this nonpartisan election had she received a majority of the vote. Instead, the November runoff will be the first for an incumbent Los Angeles mayor since 2005, a stinging rebuke for Ms. Bass, a former Democratic congresswoman who was on the vice-presidential short list in 2020.
The race between Ms. Raman and Ms. Bass, 72, sets up a generational contest between the center-left Democratic establishment that has shaped the city for years, and the young, restive progressives who have charged that baby boomers’ housing policies have systematically priced them out of Los Angeles.
Political experts pointed out that the general election turnout will be significantly larger and more progressive compared with the primary electorate, an advantage for Ms. Raman. Polls show that she has captured the imagination of a younger and more progressive generation of constituents, and that she will pose a formidable challenge to Ms. Bass in a one-on-one matchup.
“Bass will have to hold on to the liberal part of her base, and she must attract moderates and even conservatives, who did not vote for her last Tuesday,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a longtime civic leader who directs the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“It’ll be a challenging race for both candidates,” he added, “and one that will answer the question of how progressive Los Angeles really is.”
Mr. Pratt, 42, declared his candidacy on the anniversary of the fire in the Pacific Palisades, channeling the rage of his neighbors. The race quickly took on national overtones as he launched bombastic, social media-fueled broadsides against California’s Democratic leadership.
Mr. Pratt had generated a surge of social media attention and millions of dollars in campaign contributions, but paid a price for his Republican registration in an overwhelmingly liberal city. Among other mixed political blessings that he received, he was publicly praised by President Trump.
As Mr. Pratt’s early lead disappeared, he suggested without evidence on social media that homeless people might have cast fraudulent votes for Ms. Raman, and the president made baseless assertions that the California vote count was “crooked.”
On Monday, before the race was called, Mr. Trump inaccurately declared on his social media site that it was “not possible” for Mr. Pratt to have lost the lead that election officials reported before hundreds of thousands of outstanding ballots were counted. “Rigged Elections!” a Truth Social post said.
By then, Mr. Pratt had changed course, reminding his followers on social media that Ms. Raman’s lead was narrow and that the certified results were not due for three weeks, adding: “Let’s git-r-dun!”
In the 2022 primary, Ms. Bass dominated a large field with 43 percent of the vote and then decisively beat a billionaire developer in the general election. Voters that year were focused on rampant homelessness and crime that had metastasized since the pandemic started.
Since that election, unsheltered homelessness has steadily receded and homicide rates have fallen to levels not recorded since the 1960s, but fresh anxieties have since consumed Los Angeles.
Survivors of the Palisades fire are still struggling to rebuild after the loss of 12 lives and thousands of houses. Many still have not forgiven Ms. Bass for having been out of the country on Jan. 7, 2025, when the fire began.
Federal immigration crackdowns have continued to traumatize foreign-born residents, who make up more than a third of the population. About 4,000 federalized National Guard troops were deployed to the city last June after protests over immigration raids, though the Trump administration was forced to withdraw the last of them in December.
Show business, the city’s signature industry, is contracting. Municipal lawsuits over potholed streets and root-mangled sidewalks have sapped the budget. Millions of visitors are incoming for major sporting events, World Cup matches in neighboring Inglewood this year and the Summer Olympics in 2028.
A politically hostile White House also has painted Los Angeles as a corrupt and crime-ridden landscape, even as the city has celebrated dazzling new art institutions and subway lines.
Ms. Bass, a grandmother and former physician assistant who has been a fixture of Los Angeles politics since the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, asked voters for a second four-year term to continue rebuilding Pacific Palisades, shrinking the homeless population and restoring the local economy. Most of the established business and labor organizations have backed her, including a police union that supported her opponent last time.
But her approval ratings tanked after the fire, particularly among white voters in West Los Angeles. Not even a face-off last summer with the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement that Democrats cheered restored her support completely.
Opponents calling for generational change framed her as an establishment politician in a political moment that has not been kind to incumbents. As of late last month, her support stood at about 30 percent in polls.
Ms. Raman, who has an undergraduate degree in political theory from Harvard and a master’s degree in urban planning from M.I.T., has campaigned on the argument that the city’s recovery has lagged and that City Hall has failed to perform basic functions despite the mayor’s best efforts.
In particular, she has emphasized the city’s crushing shortage of affordable housing and the backlog of requests for core services, like the repair of broken streetlights. She also has questioned the city’s spending on police salaries and the mayor’s signature homelessness program.
A mother of young twins and the wife of a screenwriter, Ms. Raman has served on the City Council since 2020, when she upset an incumbent with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, which helped elect Mr. Mamdani. At City Hall, she backed Ms. Bass’s proposals and even endorsed her re-election. Only after it appeared that Mr. Pratt would be Ms. Bass’s most significant opposition did Ms. Raman jump into the race, hours before the filing deadline.
“If you’re as frustrated by the broken status quo as I am, I hope you’ll join our movement to build a city that works for everyone,” Ms. Raman said in a statement on Monday.
Detractors have argued that Ms. Raman is politically unseasoned and ideologically too far to the left to lead the city. But in recent months she has shifted some of her positions on housing more to the center.
As Ms. Raman gained ground over the weekend, Ms. Bass’s campaign highlighted the mayor’s support of the police, advocacy for Hollywood tax credits and defense of immigrants during last year’s federal crackdowns. The Bass campaign also criticized Ms. Raman’s opposition to no-camping zones as a deterrent to homeless encampments.
“A campaign against Nithya Raman, who allows encampments near schools and cuts the police force, is one Mayor Bass looks forward to winning,” the mayor’s campaign strategist, Douglas Herman, said on Monday.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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