The race for Los Angeles’ top two mayors is making for strange bedfellows

from Jim NewtonCalMatters

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The rules governing the election are generating new possible outcomes in the races for California’s two top executive offices — the governorship and Los Angeles mayor — and they’re also creating strange bedfellows in Los Angeles.

At the state level, attention is focused on the possibility of two Republicans coming out on top in the June primary, a mathematically possible if politically unlikely scenario. This is a result of the state’s top-two system, in which the top two vote-getters in the primary automatically advance to the November runoff.

Democrats usually prosper through this system because the state is overwhelmingly Democratic, but with two Republicans and eight Democrats on the ballotthere is an opportunity for the Republican Party to contend for an office that normal circumstances would put beyond its reach. Faced with that possibility, down-voting Democrats are being pressured to leave, as are some pundits the first two are given up system as a whole.

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

It’s a high-stakes gambit that can either give her the opponent she wants, or it can antagonize and break her support.

The rules and strategies for municipal elections in Los Angeles 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. This is a real election: If any candidate for mayor (or other city office) wins more than 50% of the votes cast in June, that candidate wins. There is no November runoff.

The city race is also different from the governor’s race in that Los Angeles has an incumbent, Bass, who won comfortably four years ago. For contenders, that makes running for mayor in some ways more difficult than running for governor. It’s the bass thinner than she was four years agobut she is still mayor and has strong support.

Finally, Los Angeles is different from California because Los Angeles is even more liberal than the state its politics are based on. On the eve of the filing deadline in Los Angeles, potential candidates for office on Bass’s political right melted away. But that wasn’t the real threat to her anyway.

Instead, Bass faces two candidates from her political left — City Councilwoman Nitya Raman and community organizer Ray Huang — as well as one from the right, MAGA favorite and former TV personality Spencer Pratt, as well as few othersincluding tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who told supporters he was willing to loan his campaign more than $2 million of his own money.

This field includes many things for which Bass can be relieved. It lacks a well-funded, high-profile contender and that distinguishes it in the first place. A poll earlier this week showed her in second placebut this is a digression. It leads in all others, though not overpoweringly.

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

As the various campaigns approach the June 2 showdown, the city’s election rules and its political demographics present Bass with an unusual, if controversial, option: Either her campaign or one of her supporters could spend heavily to boost Pratt’s profile, hoping that with Bass’ help, he can overtake Raman and face Bass in a runoff.

It’s a version of the strategy Adam Schiff used when the congressman ran for Senate in 2024. Acknowledging that former Dodger Steve Garvey was a fool who could easily beat a runoff, Schiff platformed Garvey in the primariestreating him as his most reliable opponent and bypassing then-Rep. Katie Porter. She was outraged, but Schiff got the runoff — and the result — she wanted.

Now, some Bass supporters are trying the same idea. In a social media post Sunday, Bass’s campaign highlighted her support from Latino leaders, as well calling attention to a Pratt publication attacking her in Spanish.

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

But pitching the race as itself versus Pratt is a tricky proposition. This is cynical, as some Raman supporters are sure to see it just as Porter does, more as a tactic than a serious exercise in democratic engagement. It’s tough because it depends on rallying significant support for Pratt, who has very little real support and even less natural room to grow. And it’s completely dismissive of Pratt himself, as it suggests that he’s no more of a threat to Bass than Garvey was to Schiff.

The latter assumption is almost certainly correct. Pratt is a fly whose main motivation 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’s a vanishing idea — 15.4% of the city’s voters are registered with the GOP. And he’s a conservative in a place that hasn’t elected one for mayor much longer than Pratt has been alive.

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

Still, the idea of ​​the Pratt bass booster is enough to send concerns through other campaigns. That’s because highlighting Pratt is another thing—potentially effective.

Recent polls put Raman slightly ahead of Pratt in the all-important race for second place — and thus entering the runoff — but with many undecided voters and Bass coming in at around 25%, nothing is set in the race just yet.

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

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

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.