Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is heading to a Nov. 3 runoff, with challengers Spencer Pratt and City Councilmember Nithya Raman battling for the second spot, according to partial election returns posted Tuesday night.
Pratt was in second place, while Raman was in third, those returns showed.
The Associated Press declared that Bass had enough votes to make the runoff. An ebullient Bass, addressing supporters at the Line LA Hotel in Koreatown, celebrated the results.
She told the crowd that her administration had laid a foundation for the future, by moving homeless people indoors, fast-tracking new, affordable housing and strengthening the local economy.
“We are going to work together to make sure that this city thrives,” she said.
Pratt, the former reality TV star who lost his home in the January 2025 Palisades fire, said he “couldn’t be more excited” about campaigning in a second round against Bass.
“Well, obviously God wanted five more months of me exposing all the failures of our mayor, so it’s gonna be a fun ride,” Pratt told reporters. “I hope she’s ready.”
Raman, speaking to supporters at Boomtown Brewery in downtown, said Tuesday night’s results might not provide “the final answer on this race.”
“Many thousands of votes will be counted in the days ahead, and we may not get an answer we like,” she said. “But regardless of what happens next, nobody — nobody — can take away what all of us have built together.”
Bass, a former legislator who served in Sacramento and Washington, is in the biggest fight of her political career, campaigning for reelection amid widespread voter discontent. Although the race is nonpartisan, the pro-labor, establishment Democrat has been squeezed from each end of the political spectrum.
Pratt, a Republican, has been winning over conservative voters as he depicts L.A.’s citizenry as under threat from drug-addicted homeless “zombies.” He made crime a central issue in his campaign, promising voters he would enforce more of the city’s laws.
Raman, a democratic socialist, has been railing at Bass for giving police officers an expensive package of raises, saying those personnel costs have “bankrupted the city.” She also promised to ramp up the production of apartments, including in single-family neighborhoods, in a bid to bring down rental costs.
Pratt’s celebrity, along with his media savvy and message, transformed the contest into a national story. Pratt became a fixture on cable news, and his candidacy also fueled interest from Us Weekly, TMZ and other entertainment outlets.
Also competing for votes were community organizer Rae Huang, a leftist who denounced Raman as too moderate, and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, a centrist Democrat who promised to bring a more muscular management style to City Hall.
It still could be days before voters know who will face Bass in November. Mail-in ballots with a Tuesday postmark will be accepted by county election officials for another week.
On election night in 2022, real estate developer Rick Caruso was in first place, with Bass in second. Bass didn’t overtake Caruso for several days, as late-arriving mail-in ballots continued to pour in.
Bass launched her reelection campaign in 2024, at a time when her bid for a second term looked like an easy task. All that changed in the wake of the January 2025 Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades and left 12 people dead.
Even in the wake of that disaster, the mayor’s race remained largely uneventful. But the contest received a jolt in February, when Raman, who ousted an incumbent council member during her first run for city office in 2020, launched a surprise bid to unseat Bass.
Raman’s entry into the race caught the mayor and even many of Raman’s own allies off guard, reshaping the contest and raising the prospect of a generational challenge to the incumbent.
The race took another turn last month when Pratt, who is best known as a star of MTV’s “The Hills,” delivered an assured debate performance against Bass and Raman. That appearance, along with his own social media skills and his supporters’ production of slick AI videos, helped him become a breakout political star.
Pratt blamed Bass for the destruction of his home and promised to clear the city’s streets of homeless encampments, pushing them as far away as Seattle if necessary. Critics have described those plans as unworkable.
Raman, a onetime Bass ally, also blasted the mayor’s approach to homelessness, saying it was too expensive and failing to yield meaningful results.
Bass has been defending her record, pointing to a 17.5% decrease in “unsheltered” homelessness — the number of people living outside or in their vehicles — over a two-year stretch. She pointed to a historic drop in the city’s homicide rate, which has fallen to its lowest point since 1959, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The mayor received a major assist from the rank-and-file police officers’ union, which spent more than $1.2 million criticizing Raman’s approach to homelessness and police hiring, at times portraying her as a “flip flopper.”
In recent months, Bass portrayed herself as an impatient agent of change at City Hall, who declared a state of emergency on homelessness on her first day in office and ousted department heads who failed to move with urgency.
Those messages haven’t resonated with many Angelenos, according to recent surveys.
Sixty-three percent of likely voters said the city is not on the right track, according to a poll released last week by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times. Only 24% of poll respondents said the city was headed in the right direction.
In the Berkeley IGS poll, 97% of Pratt supporters said the city is headed in the wrong direction, compared with 2% who think it is moving in the right direction.
In the campaign’s final weeks, Raman and Pratt — who have traded second and third place in various polls — went after each other with fury. Raman highlighted Pratt’s effusive praise for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, telling voters that Pratt would make the city “a lot more hateful and a lot more stupid.”
Pratt, in an interview with CNN, said he is a “very different person” from the one who appeared on Jones’ program nearly two decades ago. He repeatedly attacked Raman over her opposition to a law that prohibits homeless encampments from coming within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers.
Raman also accused Bass of going easy on Pratt, alleging at one point that Bass and Pratt were working together to attack her during a televised debate in hopes of pushing her into third place. Bass and Pratt denied the allegation.
The contest even garnered the attention of President Trump, who signaled his support for Pratt last month and said he’d heard that the candidate is a “big MAGA person.”
That type of messaging might not sell in a city where fewer than 15% of the city’s voters are Republican, according to county figures compiled in April. The number of Democrats is nearly four times that amount.
Pratt said he has surrounded himself with Democrats and repeatedly pointed out that the mayor’s race is nonpartisan.
Still, the Berkeley IGS poll found that Raman and Bass would defeat Pratt by double digits in a runoff. That same survey found that Raman would lead by four percentage points in a Bass-Raman showdown.
Staff writers Noah Haggerty, Gavin Quinton and Hayley Smith contributed to this report
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