LOS ANGELES — Spencer Pratt led the count on election night, and for a few days the largest city in California contemplated a mayoral runoff featuring a reality television star. Then the mail ballots kept arriving, the way they always do here, and by the time the Associated Press called the race on Monday afternoon the insurgent from The Hills had been passed by a city councilmember who campaigns on the failures of City Hall. No fraud was required. Just the count.
Nithya Raman, the progressive councilmember who entered the race late, will face Mayor Karen Bass in November, after finishing second with 28.5 percent of the vote to the incumbent’s 34.3, The Hollywood Reporter noted, with Pratt eliminated at 25.8. The AP made the call with roughly 65,000 ballots outstanding, judging Raman’s lead of more than 21,000 votes insurmountable, and NBC News projected the all-Democratic runoff soon after.
The result closes one of the stranger chapters in Los Angeles politics. Pratt, a first-time candidate and registered Republican, built a genuinely large following on a single argument, that Bass failed the city in last year’s wildfires, and collected more than 200,000 votes doing it. He led while election-day and Republican ballots were counted, then watched the late-arriving mail vote erode his margin day by day, a pattern as old as California’s voting system. As of Tuesday night he had not conceded, telling reporters only that Bass knows it’s on.
It is that week of counting, the most ordinary feature of the race, that has been conscripted into a national story. President Trump spent the week claiming the Democratic Party was stealing both this race and the governor’s contest, complaints aimed at mail ballots and the pace of the tally. The count he described as theft ended by eliminating the only Republican in the field through arithmetic conducted in public view, while the state’s attorney general challenged the White House to produce any evidence at all.
Raman, for her part, claimed the runoff spot with a shot at the building she works in. She said she was honored that voters had advanced her campaign, and accused a City Hall that has prioritized giving political advantage to powerful interests. The line was aimed at Bass, but it carries her whole theory of the race: that the incumbent’s Los Angeles works for donors and developers while encampments grow and rents climb.
Bass did not wait for the runoff to begin answering. By Tuesday her campaign was attacking Raman’s record on homeless encampments in her own council district, the issue both women know will decide the race. The mayor finished first, but a third of the vote for an incumbent with universal name recognition is the kind of first-place finish that reads as a warning, and nearly two-thirds of the city voted for someone else.
The runoff that emerged is the one the city’s left wanted and the incumbent feared, two Democrats arguing about housing, policing and the wildfire recovery, with no Republican foil to unite against. Raman, who came up through urban planning and homelessness policy before politics, will run at Bass from the left. Bass will run on experience and on the recovery she says is underway. The contest will be a referendum on whether the city believes her.
The race also completes a primary night that redrew California’s November ballot. The governor’s contest produced a Becerra and Hilton runoff that split down party lines, and the same slow count that decided both races remains the subject of a Justice Department observation effort that has yet to name a single allegation. California is now running its biggest races under a standing federal insinuation, and producing unremarkable democratic outcomes underneath it.
What Pratt does next matters more than a defeated first-time candidate usually would. Two hundred thousand votes is a constituency, and his argument about the fires did not lose so much as run out of Republicans. Whether he endorses, sulks, or converts his following into a permanent presence in city politics will shape how much of his vote drifts to Bass, who his campaign existed to oppose, or to Raman, who shares his diagnosis that the city is failing if not his politics.
What no one can yet say is how Trump’s stolen-election narrative survives contact with this result. The claim was built for a count that might have eliminated a Republican, and now it has one. Whether the White House drops the Los Angeles half of the story, or absorbs Pratt’s loss as further proof, will say something about how the narrative is meant to function heading into November, in a state that will hold the country’s most watched governor’s race under the same rules.
The runoff is five months away. The encampments, the rents and the burned hillsides that will decide it are already here, and neither woman on the November ballot needs a fraud theory to explain what Los Angeles voters were saying. Two-thirds of them want something other than what they have. The argument now is over which Democrat that means.
