LOS ANGELES — Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles claimed one of two spots on the November ballot late Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. Nithya Raman, a progressive former ally of the mayor, and Spencer Pratt, a onetime reality television star, were battling for second place.

Bass, 72, a former Democratic congresswoman, could avoid a November runoff and win another term outright if she receives more than 50% of the vote, but that scenario appeared unlikely after a fierce three-way contest in a field of more than a dozen contenders.

Californians vote by mail in large numbers, and ballot counting is a slow process. Leads often shift as the tally drags on for days or even weeks. Early tallies showed Bass winning 37% of the vote with about 48% of the expected vote in. Raman had about 21% and Pratt about 30%.

Raman, 44, a City Council member, has been compared to New York’s charismatic progressive mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Pratt, 42, a former star of the reality show “The Hills,” used his campaign to channel anger on the city’s Westside after a historic wildfire ravaged Pacific Palisades, the wealthy coastal enclave where he had lived.

The race for the second spot on the November ballot remained unclear, but Pratt was in a strong position late Tuesday night. Raman appealed to a base of young urban progressives, while Republicans, who represent only about 15% of the city’s voters, coalesced around Pratt.

The race was a far cry in tone and tenor from the mayoral primary in 2022, and showed that Bass, a well-known incumbent, was strikingly vulnerable.

A Los Angeles native trained as a physician assistant, she has been a local leader since the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, when she helped organize a grassroots movement that evolved into one of the city’s most influential nonprofits. She has held public office since 2004, first in the state Legislature, then in Congress, where she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus.

When she ran for mayor in 2022, she dominated a large field with 43% of the vote, then decisively beat a billionaire developer in the general election to become the first woman elected to the city’s top post. The race that year focused on homelessness and crime that had metastasized during the pandemic.

On her watch, unsheltered homelessness has steadily receded and homicide rates have fallen to levels not recorded since the 1960s. But fresh anxieties have consumed the city.

Survivors of the Palisades fire are still struggling to rebuild after the loss of 12 lives and thousands of homes. Many residents still have not forgiven Bass for being out of the country on Jan. 7, 2025, when the fire began.

Less than six months have passed since the Trump administration was forced to pull back the last of nearly 5,000 U.S. Marines and federalized National Guard troops deployed to the city last summer after protests over immigration raids.

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 coming as Los Angeles prepares to host World Cup matches and, in 2028, the Olympics.

Bass 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 backed her, including the police union, which supported her opponent last time.

But her approval ratings tanked after the fire, particularly among white West Los Angeles voters. Furthermore, echoing Democratic races nationwide, opponents calling for generational change framed her as an establishment politician in a political moment that has not been kind to incumbents.

Raman, 44, campaigned on the argument that the city’s recovery has lagged, and that the city has failed to perform basic functions despite the mayor’s best efforts. In particular, she has focused on the city’s vast ranks of renters and the backlog of requests for core services, like streetlight repairs.

A mother of young twins and the wife of a screenwriter, she won her City Council seat in 2020 with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, and has captured the imagination of a younger and more progressive generation of constituents.

Pratt, 42, has captured imaginations, too — among disaffected residents in the city’s wealthy and conservative precincts, and online, where out-of-state donors as of late May had helped him amass more than $3.2 million in campaign contributions.

A Republican, he derided Raman as a “champagne socialist” and used a Spanish word for trash, “basura,” as a nickname for the mayor. He circulated lurid artificial intelligence-generated ads on social media that portrayed Bass as Darth Vader and a Batman villain. He also referred to homeless people as “drug zombies” and suggested that they should be forced into treatment.

His campaign spending reports show a payment of $20,000 to a conservative law firm tied to Elon Musk’s lawyer, and President Donald Trump has praised him.

His profile has also been raised by Bass’ political allies, who view him as a weaker opponent than Raman in a head-to-head matchup and sought to boost him into the second general election slot.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Shawn Hubler/Ariana Drehsler
c. 2026 The New York Times Company