Top-two race in Los Angeles makes strange political bedfellows

Rules governing elections are generating novel possible outcomes in the races for California’s two top executive offices — the governorship and the mayoralty of Los Angeles — and in LA they’re producing strange bedfellows as well.

At the state level, attention has centered around the possibility that two Republicans could emerge as top finishers in the June primary, a mathematically possible if politically unlikely scenario. It’s the result of the state’s top-two system, in which the two top vote getters in the primary automatically move to the runoff in November. 

Democrats generally prosper by that system since the state is overwhelmingly Democratic, but with two Republicans and eight Democrats on the ballot, there is an opportunity for the GOP to contend for an office that normal circumstances would place well out of its reach. Faced with that possibility, low-polling Democrats are being pressed to drop out, and some pundits are giving up on the top-two system altogether. 

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, the city’s election system has opened an unusual path for Mayor Karen Bass — if she uses more of her resources to boost the signal of a fringe candidate in order to clear the field of more serious opponents. 

That’s a high-risk gambit that could either give her the opponent she wants or it could antagonize and fracture her support.

The rules and strategies for Los Angeles municipal elections are different from those at the state level, so these two races are not mirrors of each other. Start with the fact that the June municipal election is not a primary. It’s an actual election: If any candidate for mayor (or any other city office) wins more than 50% of the votes cast in June, that candidate wins. There’s no November runoff.

The city race also is different from the governor’s in that Los Angeles has an incumbent, Bass, who won comfortably four years ago. For challengers, that makes the campaign for mayor in some ways more difficult than the one for governor. Bass is weaker than she was four years ago, but she’s still mayor and has a strong core of support.

And finally, Los Angeles is different from California because LA is even more liberal than the state whose politics it anchors. In the runup to LA’s filing deadline, potential office-seekers to Bass’ political right melted away. But that wasn’t the real threat to her anyway. 

Instead, Bass is facing two candidates to her political left — City Councilmember Nithya Raman and community organizer Rae Huang — as well as one to her right, MAGA favorite and former TV personality Spencer Pratt, as well as a smattering of others, including tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who has told supporters he is prepared to loan his campaign more than $2 million of his own money.

That field includes much for Bass to be relieved about. It lacks a well-financed, high-profile challenger, and it features her in the top spot. One poll earlier this week showed her in second place, but it’s an outlier. She leads in all others, though not commandingly. 

But the field also exposes a potential vulnerability. The city’s political center of gravity may be shifting so rapidly that Bass, the first Black woman to hold the office and a veteran Democrat, may be too conservative for the city she governs. Add that to general voter dissatisfaction with her handling of the Palisades fire and its aftermath, and Bass could face a genuine threat from Raman, the most credible of her opponents.

As the various campaigns elbow toward the June 2 showdown, the city’s elections rules and its political demographics do provide Bass with an unusual, if controversial, option: Either her campaign or one of her backers could spend heavily to raise Pratt’s profile, hoping that with Bass’ help he could edge out Raman and face Bass in a runoff.

That’s a version of the strategy that Adam Schiff employed when the Congressman ran for Senate in 2024. Recognizing that former Dodger Steve Garvey was a patsy he could easily defeat in a runoff, Schiff platformed Garvey in the primary, treating him as his most credible opponent and sidestepping then-Rep. Katie Porter. She was outraged, but Schiff got the runoff — and the result — he wanted. 

Now, some Bass supporters are testing out the same idea. In a social media post Sunday, Bass’ campaign highlighted her support from Latino leaders while simultaneously drawing attention to a Pratt post attacking her in Spanish.

 “Latinos Con Bass>Ai Latinos,” the Bass post read. The point: She is backed by Latinos, and she is running against a fundamentally fake candidate. 

But framing the race as herself against Pratt is a complicated proposition. It’s cynical, as some Raman supporters are sure to see it exactly as Porter did, as a tactic rather than a serious exercise in democratic engagement. It’s difficult, as it depends on rallying substantial support for Pratt, who has very little actual backing and even less natural room for growth. And it’s entirely contemptuous of Pratt himself, as it assumes he is no more of a threat to Bass than Garvey was to Schiff.

That last assumption is almost certainly correct. Pratt is a gadfly whose main animating force for running is that he lost his house in the Palisades fire — a reminder that we owe those who suffer our sympathy but not our votes. 

Pratt is a Republican in a city where that is a vanishing notion — 15.4% of city voters are registered with the GOP. And he’s a conservative in a place that hasn’t elected one as mayor for far longer than Pratt’s been alive.

In short, Pratt has roughly the same chance of being mayor that Steve Garvey had of becoming a United States senator. Which is to say, none.

Still, the idea of Bass signal-boosting Pratt is enough to send concerns through other campaigns. That’s because highlighting Pratt is one other thing — potentially effective. 

Recent polling puts Raman narrowly ahead of Pratt in the all-important race for second place — and thus an entry into the runoff — but with lots of undecided voters and Bass coming in at around 25%, nothing is yet fixed in the race. 

If efforts to highlight Pratt’s candidacy move him up a few points and Raman down a few, Bass could get the runoff she wants. 

And that would seal this contest. After all, Schiff is now a U.S. senator.