LA Mayor race called after ballot drop knocked Spencer Pratt out of the race.

 

Nithya Raman. New York Post.

The Los Angeles Mayor's race has been called with far left Nithya Raman knocking out insurgent GOP candidate Spencer Pratt. New York Post. Pratt was in 2nd place after incumbent Mayor Karen Bass on election day but late votes swung towards Raman. With 93% of the vote in, Bass leads with 34.7% of the vote, Raman with 28.5% and Pratt with 26.7%. Pratt, a former reality TV star, ran on improving the city and specifically the Bass's poor reaction to the Pacific Palisades fire, that ruined the neighborhood and even destroyed Pratt's house. The slow pace of the vote and disproportionate results favoring Raman has caused withering criticism among voters and has caused President Trump to open an investigation to elections in California. 

My Comment:

In a democracy, the appearance of voter fraud has the same effect as voter fraud. It causes people to lose faith in the elections and that is a recipe for disaster. People will accept the results of an election if they lose fairly, but if it takes weeks to count votes and those votes tend to support one candidate over another, than folks are going to be rightly upset. 

Was there fraud in this election? Right now it's not possible to know, largely because of how horrible California's elections are designed. They allow mail in ballots, and the only restriction is that they have to be mailed out by election day. They also allow ballot harvesting, and have weak signature verification laws and allow many suspect ballots to count. 

Given that it would be trivial for a small operation to absolutely change the course of an election. All you would need is a ballot harvesting operation that targets people that are ineligible or unlikely to vote, like at rest homes or on Skid Row. Did that happen? There are, of course, rumors, but without absolute proof we can't say either way. 

Nobody has any faith in the elections in California and everyone is assuming that Spencer Pratt will be kicked out by a late ballot drop in favor of Nithya Raman. The betting markets know this and are pricing it accordingly. https://t.co/PE2FYCYIz0

— Jeff H (@politicswarblog) June 4, 2026

Indeed, this is exactly what I predicted for the LA Mayor race a day after the election. Pratt was comfortably in 2nd place on election day and folks though he had a chance to stand for election in November. Remember, California has a "jungle primary" where the top two candidates run, regardless of party. That means in most elections, there is no GOP candidate to vote for and there was hope that in LA and the Governor's race there would finally be a Republican on the ballot in November.  But that hope was unfounded in Los Angeles, though it hasn't been ruled out for the Governor's race as of this writing. 

And I don't buy that this is how things have to be. Other states handle their elections a lot quicker and they don't allow the ballot harvesting and curing that California does. Indeed, a country as dysfunctional as India, with almost a billion voters, gets their results in a day. There is zero reason why California could not be as functional as India when it comes to votes. 

As for Pratt, he ran an impressive campaign, and if he had ran in anything other than a deep blue, one-party state like California, he could have won the general election, let alone the primary. He ran how Republicans should run in blue cities like LA, instead of focusing on Republican priorities, he tried to connect with the voters directly himself. He was almost a single issue voter, fixing LA's massive problem with mismanagement, crime and disaster recovery. That's a winning formula for blue cities that have been under the control of the Democrats for generations. 

I do think that this might be the "last straw" when it comes to California's elections. I know the Supreme Court has a case pending about the very issue of late ballots received after election day and a favorable and expected ruling would end these kinds of shenanigans right away. 

And there is also some motivation from the Trump administration to fix this. After the election in 2016, I had hoped that Trump would focus on election security but he was prevented from doing so by the Republicans in the House and Senate. I think this time he will have a freer hand as it's getting obvious to everyone that the situation in California is untenable.