The mayoral showdown that benefits Karen Bass doesn’t really benefit Los Angeles voters

This week’s elections in Los Angeles brought a bounty of good news to Mayor Karen Bass. She finished on top of a crowded field and secured a spot in the November run-off. Even more advantageously, she may get the opponent she hoped for. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, reality TV personality Spencer Pratt led Councilmember Nithya Raman by roughly 7 percentage points for the second spot.

That’s exactly what Bass wanted, and though it’s hardly a ringing endorsement of her tenure, it well-positions her to be re-elected. At the same time, however, it should alert the city leadership to trouble in the electorate, and it may, paradoxically, deny Los Angeles an important opportunity to debate its difficulties.

The state of the electorate is represented by Pratt, who lost his Pacific Palisades home in last year’s fires. Yes, he fell well short of a result that would make him a threat to Bass. With about 62% of the ballots counted, he had received 30% of the votes. But the reality is that he’s closer to his ceiling than his floor.

Raman’s 23% of the counted votes came from residents presumably unhappy with some aspect of Bass’s record, but they overwhelmingly came from residents on the mayor’s political left. They may see Bass as having done too little to address affordability or having spent too much on policing, but they are not going to fold into Pratt’s camp.

Pratt was deliberately insulting to Raman, as well as ideologically her opposite — his fulminations about homeless people are pretty much as far from Raman’s view as is imaginable. Polling shared with me from Bass’s camp showed that more than 90% of Raman supporters considered the incumbent as their second choice.

So Bass advances with a much stronger position than she enjoyed four years ago when she walloped businessman Rick Caruso.

Pratt, by contrast, has his 30% firmly in hand, but nowhere really to grow. A few supporters of Adam Miller may swallow hard and agree to back a not-very-bright Republican who is Donald Trump’s pick for the job. But even they may have difficulty voting for a guy who knows nothing about how city government works and whose resume includes a business selling crystals and a history of blowing cash on handbags and ammunition.

If Pratt falls short as a candidate, however, he does send something of a message, albeit not the one he intends. It says something — or should say something — to leaders of Los Angeles that roughly a third of the city’s voters are so unhappy with life as it is that they are willing to back a patently absurd candidate to run the place. Those voters don’t agree on the particulars — some are upset over homelessness, others over the high cost of living or the pace of rebuilding after the fires — but it’s safe to say that many are flatly unhappy with Bass’s performance and with the state of the city more generally.

Those are messages that the mayor and council should hear, even if they came from the campaign of an unserious candidate.

What’s at risk here is that Pratt’s inability to mount a serious challenge will make it easier for Bass to skip an opportunity to debate the city’s future. A Bass-Raman run-off offered that prospect, but a Pratt challenge less so. 

Pratt’s election results demonstrate that he’s good at getting attention, but only so-so at turning that into a vote. His frothy social media content generated tons of buzz and even some national political coverage, which he used to suggest that a “tsunami” of votes would deliver him an outright majority this week.

It did not.

Contrast the scenes this week on election night: Pratt shut out reporters from his gathering, creating a scrum of reporters jostling for position when he stepped outside to make a few remarks. He seemed to enjoy answering, though mostly to suggest that his candidacy was part of “God’s plan.”

Bass, meanwhile, featured leaders of the city’s labor movement and business community. She used her remarks to champion the breadth of her support and to reiterate her determination to stand up to President Trump, who supports Pratt and is staggeringly disliked by Los Angeles voters. Bass, most comfortable running as an agent of change, was hobbled by having to promise change after having four years to deliver it. Still, the event reinforced the strength of her political position: big, broad and in tune with a city she has represented for decades in Sacramento, Washington and now at home. 

“We are a union town,” Bass said, to great applause. She’s right about that, and it was a reminder that she understands the politics of this place in a way that Pratt simply does not.

There are real issues confronting Los Angeles that deserve substantive debate this year. For instance, differences in housing policy that pit protectors of neighborhoods against advocates of more rapid construction and high-density development. Similarly, the city is awash in conflicting approaches to funding and directing law enforcement, which include Bass’s more traditional efforts to boost LAPD spending and Raman’s more progressive alternative of shifting resources toward mental health intervention and alternatives to conventional incarceration. 

Pratt’s presence in the run-off makes those debates less likely for two reasons. First, his views on those and other issues are generally to Bass’s right, and therefore well out of the mainstream of most Los Angeles voters who are, if anything, more liberal than the mayor. Second, because he poses so little threat to Bass’s re-election, she can afford to ignore him in a way that she could not have ignored Raman.

The danger, then, is that this run-off unfolds more easily for Bass and thus offers fewer points of civic reflection. That would be a missed moment, and though Bass may not have to answer for it, there are substantial pockets of the city that have misgivings about the mayor. Her critics complain of slow progress on housing construction and a lack of evident urgency on reducing homelessness, as well as a more general sense that Bass acts more as a legislative leader than as a forceful manager of city departments and priorities. 

A serious challenger would require Bass to reflect on those criticisms and to explain them — and even, perhaps, adjust to better address them.

But they aren’t likely to get much of an airing in a campaign against an opponent as easily dismissed as a failed crystal salesman who blames the mayor for burning down his house.