Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman fell to third place Tuesday night in the city's mayoral primary, trailing both incumbent Karen Bass and reality-television figure Spencer Pratt by significant margins, a result that, if it holds, would end her campaign before the November general election.
Raman wept as the returns came in. Her face scrunched and her eyes watered as she addressed supporters, turning to her children with a message about the city she had hoped to reshape.
The numbers told a blunt story. With 63.1 percent of the vote counted by Wednesday morning, Bass led the field at 34.8 percent with 172,720 votes. Pratt held second at 30.4 percent with 151,149 votes. Raman sat eight points behind Pratt at 22.3 percent, just 110,848 votes, according to Associated Press figures. Under Los Angeles election rules, the top two finishers advance to November. If these margins hold, Raman is done.
The collapse is worth measuring against where Raman started. She once led polls in the race. She declared her candidacy in February after previously backing Bass, positioning herself as the candidate for progressives frustrated with the incumbent's leadership. Her platform called for a renewed homelessness plan and increased housing production, a direct challenge to Bass from the left.
But Raman carried baggage of her own making. She chairs the city council's Housing and Homelessness Committee, the very body responsible for the crisis she ran against. Critics pointed to her own record on the issue. That criticism reached a pointed crescendo when someone staged a homeless encampment outside Raman's home, a stunt that crystallized the gap between her rhetoric and her results.
Then came Spencer Pratt.
Pratt, best known from reality television, entered the race and produced viral social media videos in the campaign's final weeks. Those videos highlighted his activism after the Palisades fire and laid blame on both Raman and Bass for the city's problems. Whatever political professionals thought of his candidacy, voters responded. He pulled more than 40,000 votes ahead of Raman.
For a candidate who positioned herself as the progressive alternative to an unpopular incumbent, finishing behind a reality-TV personality is a verdict that no amount of late-counted ballots is likely to reverse entirely.
Raman has not conceded. Election analysts have projected the race could tighten as additional ballots are counted. But an eight-point deficit is a wide gap to close, and the trajectory Tuesday night moved in one direction, away from Raman.
Raman's campaign was broadly aligned with the progressive left, but she failed to lock down the institutional support that has powered similar candidacies elsewhere. The Democratic Socialists of America, known for organizing aggressive get-out-the-vote operations, backed socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City's mayoral race and helped carry him to victory there. In Los Angeles, however, the DSA's support was fractured.
Another candidate, Rae Huang, also drew favor from the organization. Huang pulled roughly 3 percent of the vote, a small share, but potentially enough to have prevented Raman from consolidating the DSA-aligned base she needed. Whether DSA-LA's divided loyalties cost Raman a spot in the runoff is an open question, but the math is suggestive. Every vote Huang drew came from the same ideological pool Raman needed to dominate.
Raman addressed her supporters as the results settled in, speaking directly to her children in remarks that captured the emotional weight of the evening:
"I hope you know that everything, every person in this room is fighting for in this campaign has been about building a city that's worthy of you, and every child in this city."
It was a personal moment. But personal moments do not change vote totals. And the vote totals told a story about a candidate who promised to fix a crisis she had been tasked with managing, and whom voters apparently decided was part of the problem rather than the solution.
If the current standings hold, Bass and Pratt will face each other in the November general election. Bass, despite widespread dissatisfaction with her leadership, finished first. Pratt, with no prior political experience, finished second. The professional progressive finished third.
The results are preliminary. Vote counting in Los Angeles can stretch for days, and Raman's supporters will watch for any shift. But the margin she needs to overcome is substantial, and nothing in Tuesday night's trajectory suggested a reversal was coming.
Los Angeles voters looked at a city councilwoman who chaired the homelessness committee while homelessness worsened, who ran to the left of an already-liberal incumbent, and who asked for a promotion on the strength of policies that had not worked in the job she already held. They said no, and they said it emphatically enough that a reality-TV star beat her by eight points.
When your own record is the best argument against your candidacy, voters tend to notice.
