Incumbent LA Mayor Karen Bass will face a challenge from the left in November

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman will try to unseat the incumbent and not very popular Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in November, after conservative firebrand and former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt came in third in the city’s primary election.

Raman, who was trailing Pratt initially in returns from the June 2 primary election, sealed second place on Tuesday with 29% of the vote compared to 26% for Pratt. Bass came in first with 34%.

“I’m incredibly honored that voters have given us the opportunity to advance to the general election for Mayor of Los Angeles,” Raman said in a statement. “Now our fight for a healthier, safer, more affordable, and more joyful Los Angeles continues.”

Raman, 44, was elected to city council in 2020 in what at the time was called a political earthquake, as it was the first time in 17 years an outsider had defeated in incumbent councilmember.

Born in India and with a master’s degree in urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Raman relied on a grassroots movement of 2,000 volunteers to break into LA’s political establishment. At the city council, she focused on efforts to lower housing costs, a perennial problem in the city of 4 million residents, and to more efficiently address the equally intractable homelessness question.

In a televised debate with Bass and Pratt last month, Raman chided Bass for giving in to the powerful police union and agreeing to a massive contract that gave the union more money than the city had available and saddled LA with a $1 billion budget deficit last year, as well as cuts in essential city services.

“If you’re wondering why the streetlights are out on your block and the Bureau of Street Lighting is telling you it’s going to take a year to fix the streetlights, that is why,” Raman said.

She also called out Bass on the enormous amounts of money LA has been spending to achieve only incremental improvements in the homelessness problem that’s been plaguing the city for decades.

“Let’s use the dollars that we’re spending, let’s actually build out a real system that can get as many people indoors as possible, and let’s not put them in a $100,000 a year motel room for a year or more,” Raman said. “This system is not fiscally sustainable.”

Bass’s popularity took a thumping last year when she was on a trip to Africa as an unprecedented firestorm tore through the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy residential enclave on the city’s westside, resulting in the most destructive disaster in LA’s history.

Pratt, who lost his home in the Palisades Fire last year, took aim at Bass during last month’s debate for not allocating enough funding to the city’s fire department, which he said meant there was not enough equipment available to address the massive firestorm when it first erupted.

The former cast member of the MTV reality series The Hills, and a registered Republican, had been second to Bass in the early results of the primary election.

Despite his initial 8-point lead over Raman, the so-called “blue shift,” in which the late-arriving ballots lean heavily toward Democrats, turned out to be his undoing.

In 2022, Republican Rick Caruso went to bed on Election Night five points clear of Bass. Weeks later, when all the votes were counted, he had finished in second, a good seven points behind the eventual winner — a 12-point swing.

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