Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was narrowly ahead of City Councilmember Nithya Raman, her onetime political ally, in the race to lead the nation’s second-largest city, according to early returns Tuesday.
Bass, a veteran politician who had been politically weakened in the wake of the 2025 Palisades fire, was attempting to hold off a vigorous challenge from Raman, who stunned the city’s establishment this year by entering the race at the last minute.
The slight gap between the two candidates does not bode well for Bass, since Raman is expected to secure a larger portion of the late-arriving ballots in the coming days. Those ballots tend to be cast by the younger voters who serve as her base.
The first ballots counted on election night are from voters who tend to skew older and more conservative, a group that Bass needs to win by large margins, said Paul Mitchell, who heads the polling data firm PDI.
“This is probably better numbers than the Raman campaign could have expected,” he said. “That was probably Karen’s best set of voters.”
Raman, first elected to the council in 2020, joined the race in February, launching a challenge against someone she had publicly endorsed just a few weeks earlier. Since then, the contest has been in many ways a generational fight, with the two staking out differing positions on public safety, housing production and strategies for ending homelessness.
Bass, 73, was backed by much of the city’s political establishment, including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the county’s Democratic Party. Raman, 45, has aligned herself with groups that have emerged at City Hall more recently, including the left-wing Democratic Socialists of America and Streets For All, a transportation advocacy group.
During the campaign’s final days, Bass went to venues populated by older voters, including senior centers in West Adams and in Northridge, where she danced with elderly Angelenos. Raman showed up at bars and nightclubs and on college campuses, spreading her call for change at City Hall.
Mark Ramos, who chairs the county Democratic Party, said he felt good about Bass’ prospects, despite the bumps she faced on the campaign trail. Voters don’t focus on the election until the final week or two, said Ramos, who was among the revelers at Bass’ election night party at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood.
“There’s always a lot of noise, and social media can be effective early on, but I think when voters dig in and focus, they come home,” he said.
In Los Feliz, supporters of Raman flooded into the Greek Theatre plaza, with many cheering the election victories of Democrats in other parts of the country. Maria Spear, a grad student who knocked on doors for Raman, said affordability was a top issue in the campaign.
Spear, who spends more than half her paycheck on rent, said Raman “represents the change that I think a lot of people in the city are really yearning for.”
Bass, who previously served in Congress and the state Legislature, secured just 34% of the vote in the June 2 primary, a weak showing for an incumbent. Her disapproval ratings had remained high ever since the Palisades fire in 2025, which broke out when she was out of the country on a diplomatic mission.
Bass attempted to reverse her fortunes by touting her administration’s progress in reducing violent crime, fast-tracking affordable housing and bringing down unsheltered homelessness — the number of people living outside and in their cars — by 11%.
Raman, on the other hand, offered lacerating critiques of the mayor’s record, saying her fight against homelessness has been costly and ineffective. Raman, who took credit for a major reduction in encampments in her own Hollywood Hills district, vowed to cut street homelessness in half citywide by summer 2028 and completely by the end of her first four-year term.
Since the June 2 primary election, Bass and Raman have received a huge influx of financial support from outside political interests.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file officers, put at least $6 million into a political action committee that has been airing ads criticizing Raman over her approach to public safety, particularly her opposition to a law barring homeless encampments near schools. The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group flush with funding from Airbnb, put another $2 million into efforts to promote Bass.
Raman said those outside campaigns showed that “pay-to-play” politics have dominated Bass’ tenure. The mayor received that political support after giving expensive raises to police officers and committing the city to a $2.6-billion upgrade of the Convention Center, she said.
Bass said the Convention Center will give the city an economic boost and argued that the police raises kept the city from losing a much larger number of officers during her time in office.
Raman received her own support from well-funded interests. The carpenters union, whose leaders have voiced anger that Bass did not incorporate labor standards into her affordable housing initiative, put $3.8 million into a campaign that savaged Bass over her handling of the Palisades fire, homelessness and other issues.
Hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick, who has advocated for an expansion in the city’s bike lane network, put $8 million into a pair of committees that have promoted Raman, including the one overseen by the carpenters.
Bass went on the offensive as well, hitting Raman over her shifting political positions on public safety, homelessness, housing production and other issues. Bass repeatedly pointed out that none of Raman’s colleagues had endorsed her, saying it showed that she does not work well with others.
Yet another campaign flash point was Police Chief Jim McDonnell, who was appointed by Bass to run the LAPD in 2024.
Raman vowed to replace McDonnell, saying he had not “met the moment” during the federal immigration raids that upended the city. She accused the LAPD of protecting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and mistreating protesters, firing tear gas and less-lethal munitions at them.
As the campaign progressed, Raman gave different answers about her timeline for replacing the police chief. At one point, she said she would wait until 2030, after his term had ended. She then walked that back and said she would replace him sooner than 2030, without offering specifics. She later said she would start the replacement process on Day 1.
The race tightened in the campaign’s final weeks. In an October poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, Bass erased an 11-point gap with Raman. Both were tied at 40% support among likely L.A. voters, the survey found.
About a fifth were still undecided.
Bass and Raman have been trying different strategies to reach Spencer Pratt voters, with Raman railing against expensive electric bills and Bass focused on crime. In the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll, 41% of Pratt voters favored Bass compared with 14% for Raman.
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