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Nithya Raman widened her lead over Karen Bass on Wednesday in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, with an estimated 67% of the expected vote counted and hundreds of thousands of votes still outstanding.
The Democrat Socialists of America-endorsed councilmember pulled a touch further ahead of Bass at 4pm Tuesday, as late-counted inched the ultra progressive challenger closer towards an upset over the incumbent.
The latest Los Angeles County election returns showed Raman with 405,193 votes, or 51.67%, compared with Bass’s 379,069 votes, or 48.33%, a 26,124 vote advantage that further erased the incumbent’s narrow election-night lead.
There is now 67% of the vote counted. At 3am Wednesday, Raman was at 377,458 and Bass was at 360,864, a difference of 18,205 votes, with 63% of the vote counted.
Veteran California political strategist Dan Schnur told the California Post that Raman’s strength among younger voters could make the growing deficit especially difficult for Bass to overcome.
“Nothing is definite, but given that Raman’s voters tend to vote later, their votes are going to be the last counted,” Schnur, who teaches at USC and UC Berkeley, told The Post.
“So while nothing’s guaranteed, she’s probably in a very strong and advantageous position at this point.”
The reversal echoes Raman’s June primary performance, when she overtook reality television star Spencer Pratt as additional ballots were counted, punching her ticket to the November showdown against Bass.
“Young people vote late, so their votes get counted last,” Schnur explained. “And given a system like California’s, that means we don’t see those results until well after the election.”
Veteran Los Angeles political consultant Michael Trujillo also predicted that Raman’s growing lead over Mayor Bass would carry her to victory. “She’s gonna be your next mayor,” Trujillo told the California Post.
Trujillo also attributed Raman’s growing advantage to younger voters, who he said tend to cast their ballots closer to Election Day, leaving their votes among the last to be counted.
“Young people have been voting late since absentees have been a thing,” Trujillo said. “Young people also pay their DWP bill late. They pay their credit card bill late.”
A Raman victory would mark a major breakthrough for the DSA-LA, which only endorsed her in September, propelling the lefty organization to the center of power in the nation’s second-biggest city.
Raman, 45, first stormed into City Hall in 2020 with DSA backing, unseating an incumbent councilman David Ryu.
She won re-election in 2024 and has established herself as a leading force in Los Angeles’ progressive movement.
But Schnur argued Raman’s rise has exposed a huge ideological divide between the generations in Los Angeles.
“It’s almost as if they were running to be mayor of two different cities,” he told The Post.
“Bass did well with 20th century Los Angeles, but Raman did well with 21st century LA.”
Schnur noted that Raman drew strong support from younger voters frustrated by soaring housing costs and shrinking opportunities, while Bass relied heavily on older residents.
“Young people don’t see the kind of prospects available to them going forward their parents and grandparents saw,” Schnur told The Post.
Veteran Republican pollster John McLaughlin, whose firm conducted the California Post’s October mayoral survey, pointed to Raman’s overwhelming support among younger voters, noting that 56% of her supporters were under 40.
The poll showed Raman leading Bass 46.7% to 38.8%, while 71.7% of voters disapproved of the mayor’s job performance.
“She [Bass] ran a heavily negative campaign in these couple weeks, which appears to have kept her in the race and kept it close,” McLaughlin told The Post. “But it hasn’t won it for her.”
“Raman spoke to them in a way that an older candidate didn’t.”
Bass and political action committees backing her spent the final weeks hammering Raman as an inexperienced gamble, blasting her record on homeless encampments and her pledge to replace LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell.
A final UC Berkeley survey showed the candidates deadlocked at 40%, after Raman held an 11-point advantage in September.
“If Raman is elected, the overriding message from voters is that they were willing to take a risk,” Schnur told The Post.
Raman isn’t the only DSA-backed candidate on the verge of capturing a powerful City Hall office.
Marissa Roy, the socialist organization’s endorsed candidate for city attorney, has opened a commanding 223,000-vote lead over John McKinney, putting her on the brink of taking over the city’s top legal post.
