Nithya Raman and Spencer Pratt locked in tight race to make runoff for Los Angeles mayor

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Days after California’s primary, Nithya Raman and Spencer Pratt are still waiting to see who makes the November runoff for Los Angeles mayor against incumbent Karen Bass.

The race was still too early to call on Sunday as the vote tally showed Raman moving into second place behind Bass for the first time since Tuesday, when voting ended and the count began. That puts Raman, a progressive city council member, ahead of Pratt, a former reality television personality from “The Hills.”

Raman had been running in third, but she has gained more votes than Pratt with every update provided by election officials in Los Angeles since Tuesday.

Vote counting in California is a notoriously slow process because state law practically mandates a drawn-out tally. Ballots are mailed to every eligible voter and they are counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at an election office within seven days.

Los Angeles, like other counties in California, processes and counts mail ballots in roughly the order they are received, so the last ones returned are the last ones counted.

On Tuesday night after polls closed, Los Angeles released results from mail ballots that had been returned early and already processed as well as votes cast that day. Since then, the county has been processing and releasing results from mail ballots that arrived later.

Election data shows that large numbers of Democrats held onto their mail ballots and returned them in the race’s final days, which helps explain why Bass and Raman have been doing better than Pratt in the votes counted since primary day.

The mayor’s race is nonpartisan, so none of the candidates had party identification next to their names on the ballot. Raman and Bass are both Democrats, while Pratt is a Republican.

On election night, Bass held a 4.4 percentage point lead over Pratt, who in turn had an 8.1-point lead over Raman. Since then, Bass’ lead over Pratt has grown to nearly 8 points while Raman now leads Pratt by about 0.4 points, or 3,100 votes. The Associated Press estimates there are a little less than 150,000 ballots left to be counted.

The slow count has prompted claims of fraud, without providing evidence, from some Republicans, including President Donald Trump, who said his Department of Justice would investigate.

The president suggested that the state’s Democrats were somehow cheating so that two candidates he favors — Pratt and Republican Steve Hilton in the governor’s race — would be bumped from the top two slots and therefore be ineligible for the November general election. Democrat Xavier Becerra has advanced to the general election in the governor’s race but The AP has not yet called the second slot. Hilton leads Democrat Tom Steyer by 4.3 points in the race to advance to the general election as the second-place candidate, though his lead has been nearly cut in half since election night.

The general election in Los Angeles is likely to be a referendum on Bass’s leadership regardless of whether she faces Raman or Pratt. But the two would come at the campaign from very different directions.

Pratt, a conservative, would mount a more aggressive challenge to liberal governance in the city dominated by Democrats. He has made reducing homelessness a key part of his campaign, and he’s sharply criticized Bass’s leadership during the January 2025 wildfire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood that destroyed his home and thousands of others. His candidacy had drawn outsized attention because of his celebrity, but it’s unclear if the buzz will translate into enough votes to make the runoff.

Raman, meanwhile, is taking on Bass from the left. She has promised to speed up housing construction, bring back entertainment industry jobs and improve services in a city known for dirty streets and buckled pavement. She was elected to the council with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America, though the group did not make a formal endorsement in the mayor’s race. Her last-minute candidacy was a surprise after she endorsed Bass for reelection earlier.

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Ohlemacher reported from Washington.