Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman has slightly narrowed former reality TV star Spencer Pratt’s lead after the first round of post-election day updates to the mayoral primary election were released Wednesday afternoon, with a spot in the November runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass on the line.
After all in-person votes were counted on Tuesday night, Pratt held a lead of approximately 41,000 votes, or eight percentage points, over Raman. That lead has now narrowed to 37,300 votes and seven percentage points, as Pratt received 5,967 votes in the Wednesday update and Raman received 8,961 votes.
Bass received 10,981 votes in the Wednesday update, bringing her vote total to 183,701 or just under 35% of the overall vote.
While Pratt has amassed his second-place lead over Raman thanks in good part to in-person votes, it is expected that the vote-by-mail ballots still to be counted will skew more towards Bass and Raman. What remains to be seen is whether they will skew enough that Raman will be able to come from behind against Pratt and advance to a runoff election against her onetime City Hall ally Bass.
According to VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini, Raman would need to outperform Pratt among the uncounted votes by a margin of approximately 11%. Among the votes counted in the latest update, Raman outperformed Pratt by 10.4%.
The Los Angeles County Registrar is scheduled to update the election results between 4-5 PM PT daily between now and June 12. In past election cycles, those daily updates have led to dramatic changes between initial election night numbers and the final result.
In 2022, real estate magnate Rick Caruso led Bass in the mayoral primary by roughly 8,000 votes. But by the time all mail-in ballots were counted more than a week later, Bass had amassed a seven-percentage point lead over Caruso for first place, a margin of victory she grew to nearly ten points in the November runoff.
In 2024, Raman was running for re-election for her city council seat and initially had 44% of the primary vote, appearing to be headed to a November runoff against deputy city attorney Ethan Weaver. But after all mail-in ballots were counted, Raman had amassed enough votes to pass the 50% threshold needed to be re-elected without a runoff.
The county registrar has not announced how many ballots remain to be counted, but if the coming updates continue to break for Raman at this margin, Bass’ runoff opponent may not be decided for another week.
