Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman has overtaken reality television star Spencer Pratt in the latest Associated Press vote count, although the outlet has not called the race.

Pratt, a Republican, had led earlier in the day, but the latest tally now shows Raman, a Democrat, ahead by more than 3,000 votes, or about 0.4 percentage points, in the officially nonpartisan mayoral race.

Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, has already advanced to a runoff as she seeks a second term. She is now waiting for the candidate she will face in the runoff, as AP has not yet called a second candidate to advance.

CALIFORNIA’S SLUGGISH VOTE COUNTING RIPPED ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM: ‘EXTREMELY EMBARRASSING’

In Los Angeles’ nonpartisan mayoral election, if no candidate wins a majority in the primary, the top two vote-getters advance to the November runoff.

Los Angeles County continues to count ballots postmarked on or before Election Day and received by June 9, drawing the attention of the Republican National Committee. County officials must complete final official results by July 2, and the secretary of state will certify results by July 10.

California’s vote count often extends beyond Election Day because every active registered voter receives a mail ballot, ballots postmarked by Election Day may arrive up to seven days later, and election workers must verify signatures and process late-arriving ballots.

WATCH: LEFT-WING LA MAYOR FACES REALITY TV CHALLENGER’S BLUNT TAKEDOWNS IN HEATED MAYORAL DEBATE

“The California primary ended on June 2, 2026; yet California is still counting ballots,” the RNC website tracker counting the seconds since polls closed reads.

“The state’s election system is a complete joke. The RNC is tracking every hour it takes California to finish the count,” it added.

Pratt and other Republicans have decried the ongoing ballot count in the race. Election officials and voting experts have said California’s extended count is largely driven by state mail ballot rules, signature verification and the processing of late-arriving ballots.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

“The question to the rest of the world is what happened to California elections? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s Gavin Newsom,” McCarthy told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “When Gavin Newsom was elected governor of California, you knew who was elected in a day to two days. Now it takes more than weeks, almost a month.”

“Why did we get here?” McCarthy continued. “Gavin changed a number of election laws in which you want to see is what did he do and why did he cause it?”

Fox News’ Eric Mack contributed to this report.

When Nithya Raman stepped up to a podium on the night of L.A.’s mayoral primary election, she thanked her supporters for standing up to the “powerful interests” who spent millions of dollars trying to “preserve this city’s broken and unjust status quo.”

“At a time when so many people have written Los Angeles off or have lost hope in the future of this incredible city,” the democratic socialist L.A. mayoral hopeful said, “you are proof that Angelenos are hungry for change.”

But as election results rolled in, the movement for change was underwhelming, or at least divided. Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was in the lead, advancing to the November runoff. That left Raman locked in a battle for a second spot with Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt.

Bass is one of several high-profile establishment Democrats to emerge on top. In California’s gubernatorial race, centrist Xavier Becerra, a veteran of the Biden Cabinet, advanced to the runoff after being challenged from the left by billionaire green activist Tom Steyer and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter. Steyer is now behind Steve Hilton, a Republican, and battling to make the runoff.

Still reeling from the rise of Donald Trump, Democrats in California and beyond are struggling to figure out the future direction of the party.

Some progressives, inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory, saw 2026 as an opportunity to move the city further left. But the results have been mixed in key races, with veteran Democrats like Bass and Becerra eking out leads even as polls show dissatisfaction with status quo politics in California.

“This was supposed to be a change revolution, but voters clearly said no to the revolution,” said Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College. “Voters want change,” she noted, “but it doesn’t appear right now that there has been an appetite for a major shift in the ideology of the city or the state.”

Becerra emerged as the Democratic favorite late in the election and won support from many establishment party leaders. Pundits said after a wild primary that included the implosion of Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign amid sex assault allegations, Becerra emerged as a “safe” choice.

Some opponents attacked his moderate views and his willingness to accept campaign donations from big oil companies like Chevron. But that did not stop his rise.

Bass was also beset with challenges, being an incumbent in a city beset with problems.

For her, election night marked a “victory with an asterisk,” Sadhwani said, noting that Bass is first incumbent L.A. mayor in more than two decades to face a runoff. “It would be wrong for Karen Bass to think that this victory … is a ringing endorsement of the work she is currently doing.”

The results underscore Bass’ unpopularity as an incumbent, garnering just 35% of the vote so far. If Raman can catch up and eventually surpass Pratt in the vote count, she could pose a considerable challenge to Bass as more young voters come to the polls in November.

Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member who leads the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said if Bass exceeded expectations it was because they were very low.

“Coming in first in a runoff isn’t a huge victory for an incumbent mayor,” he said. “Two-thirds of the city did not vote for her. That’s not a position of strength.”

James Adams, a political science professor at UC Davis, said that Becerra and Bass coming through indicates the centrist Democratic candidates were in a stronger short-term position than their rivals. But problems loom ahead, he said, as the longtime Democratic establishment that’s been governing California for the last 15 years failed to make notable progress in solving problems with affordable housing, homelessness, public transportation and education.

“I think the Democrats’ prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans’ dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,” Adams said. “But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they’re setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state’s problems while getting reelected anyway.”

Democrats in California, he said, were suffering from being in power too long.

“Whenever one party gets into a long-term, dominant position, usually because the other party is just in the midst of self-destructing … the whole thing ends in tears, because the party that is in a dominant position, they don’t have to be that good.”

As the vote count continues in the mayor’s race, democratic socialists in Los Angeles already have some wins down-ballot.

“We are gaining momentum,” said Leslie Chang, a co-chair of the 5,000-member L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, a decentralized anti-capitalist group that advocates for rental protections and defunding the police. Over the last six years, Angelenos have elected four DSA-backed City Council members and a DSA-recommended city controller.

The DSA did not officially endorse Raman, because she entered the race after the group had issued endorsements and another DSA candidate was also running for mayor. However, three of the six DSA-backed candidates for citywide office were projected to win outright.

DSA Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez were reelected by such large margins they avoided runoffs. In the city attorney’s race, DSA-endorsed Marissa Roy was in the lead and the mainstream Democratic incumbent became the first city attorney ousted in a primary in nearly a century. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, a progressive anti-establishment candidate who is not a DSA member but an ally of the group, led by nearly 20 percentage points.

When Chang knocked on doors, she said, some voters asked: “Well, what’s the difference between Nithya and Karen Bass?”

A few voters told her that after reviewing Bass’ and Raman’s websites, they found their platforms similar. Chang was surprised. She thought Raman articulated a clear and novel strategy for how to get L.A. out of the housing crisis, but she said some on the left took issue with her working with housing developers to reduce red tape.

Neel Sannappa, chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, said Raman was stymied by getting into the race late and having only a few months to campaign. It also didn’t help that a more left-wing challenger, Rae Huang, already had some momentum — not enough to win, but enough to split the left.

“Nithya does represent something real and growing in Los Angeles,” Sannappa said. “There is a hunger for more progressive, left-leaning candidates that want to make sure that we’re investing in people and not so much investing in just police … and being able to build things that are new and innovative.”

Supporters watch election results come in on their phones during Nithya Raman’s election night party at Boomtown Brewery on Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

Some have criticized Raman’s coalition-building, noting she was not endorsed by her fellow DSA-backed City Council members. Others said the MIT and Harvard graduate, who has been a councilmember for six years, performed tepidly in a May televised debate and suffered from Pratt’s attempts to tie her to the establishment.

“If you’re a part of the institution, which she is,” Sadhwani said, “then you can’t exactly claim that you’re going to bring massive change.”

Sadhwani said that California’s left, in contrast to New York’s, appears to have a charisma deficit. While Pratt and Hilton had an advantage with their television backgrounds, they also spoke “in plain terms about the real problems that the state faces.”

Part of Bass’ success can also be attributed to assembling a coalition that included the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the L.A. police officers union, the L.A. County Democratic Party and immigrant rights groups.

In the mayoral race, Sadhwani said, “the dominant political coalition still has power, money, the organization.”

“If you can garner the support of the unions, then having a broader message, maybe it’s less important,” she said. “You don’t have to work quite so hard, because the unions have the base machine.”

People attend Mayor Bass’ election party for the California 2026 primaries at the LINE Hotel on Tuesday.

(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)

Yusef Robb, a longtime Democratic strategist who is an advisor to Bass, attributed the mayor’s lead to her campaign’s success in building a broad coalition and communicating across the political spectrum. Most voters, he said, tend to think less about ideology — and whether a Democrat was mainstream or DSA-supported — than candidates’ positions on bread and butter issues.

“Mayor’s races are first and foremost about what people see outside of their front doors, when they walk their kids to school, when they drive to work,” he said. “At the end of the day, the voters look at the field and say, ‘OK, who do I trust to keep my kids from having to skip around a tent on the way to school?’ ‘Who can I trust to hire more officers?’ … and ‘Who can I trust to fight back against ICE in court through executive action and even in the streets?’ And that’s Karen Bass.”

For Democrats in this robustly blue state, part of the challenge in figuring a path forward is that every candidate — even those already in power — pitches themselves as a bona fide progressive against the status quo.

“We have led a grassroots campaign because we want to bring change to our city,” Bass said on election night. “And that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”

Raman also tried to tout herself as a change candidate. Articulating her platform in broad strokes rather than bread-and-butter detail, Raman said she wanted L.A. to be a place “where government actually functions and delivers every day on this city’s beautiful bighearted values, where we stand up against ICE, where we show up for our gay and trans siblings.”

But as she talked of neighborhoods “full of trees and shade … and people and good food,” she seemed low-key and equivocal. Her message was a far cry from the pressing one U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put forward in his presidential campaigns, highlighting the millions of Americans working for “starvation wages” and a young single mother in Nevada struggling on $10.45 an hour.

Ultimately, the fight between Bass and Raman, as a struggle between mainstream and progressive Democrats, is complicated by the fact that Bass came up through the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, founding the grassroots Community Coalition in South L.A. in the 1990s.

Campaign worker Khai Dombroe prepares balloons before Nithya Raman’s election night party.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

And even though Raman is a DSA member, she has tacked to the center during the campaign, distancing herself from past calls to defund the police by saying she did not want the LAPD to lose more officers.

While Raman and Bass have much in common, the most significant difference between them is on homelessness, Sannappa said. Even though Bass comes from a political tradition of not wanting to criminalize the unhoused, he said, she understood her voters include people wanting to move homeless people off the streets.

“Brass tacks is that we need people that are going to be willing to fight for mental health services,” Sannappa said.

“I think Nithya more so represents the direction where the Democratic Party is going to have to go.”

As L.A. becomes less affordable and homeownership becomes out of reach for many Angelenos, young renters have become a rising political constituency — a shift that many say will likely propel the city leftward.

Bonin said he expected the next new rising Democratic coalition in L.A. to be a labor-renter coalition. He cited Councilmember Soto-Martinez, a renter and union organizer, as probably the best avatar of that.

But as the middle-class splinters along generational lines, other political experts warn that many ordinary Angelenos feel increasingly shut out of L.A. politics.

“Once upon a time the Democratic Party was the party of the working class, and today it has become the party of the educated elites,” Sadhwani said. “Perhaps one of the gifts that Donald Trump has given to Democrats is to force them to contend with the everyday issues of voters, which they seem to have distanced themselves from.”

As many Angelenos feel worse off now than four years ago, Chang said Bass was not directly responsible for every problem. Still, she said, she could have done more to move the city in the right direction.

Delaying the wage boost tied to the 2028 Olympics, she said, was a move that failed working people at a time when many are struggling to make ends meet.

“My fear, of course, is people pivot away from corporate Democrats and they choose the MAGA Republican, because that is the most visible fight,” Chang said. “Or because they think, ‘Oh, well, a democratic socialist running on the Democratic Party line, this is just more of the same status quo.’ ”

Spencer Pratt’s independent bid to make the Los Angeles mayoral runoff hangs in the balance nearly a week after Election Day.

With the jungle primary leaving incumbent Democrat Mayor Karen Bass already ruled to have advanced to a November runoff, Pratt’s margin over Democrat City Councilmember Nithya Raman has slimmed to just 1% with a few thousand ballots left to make up the difference.

Pratt led Raman by just 7,494 votes in the latest AP elections tally with 78% of the vote counted to date. Bass remained in first place with 235,180 votes (34.8%), while Pratt had 184,596 votes (27.3%) and Raman had 177,102 votes (26.2%).

Los Angeles County continues to count ballots postmarked on or before Election Day and received by Tuesday, June 9, drawing the attention of the Republican National Committee. The election results must only be counted within 30 days and certified by July 10.

CALIFORNIA’S SLUGGISH VOTE COUNTING RIPPED ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM: ‘EXTREMELY EMBARRASSING’

“The California primary ended on June 2, 2026; yet California is still counting ballots,” the RNC website tracker counting the seconds since polls closed reads.

“The state’s election system is a complete joke. The RNC is tracking every hour it takes California to finish the count.”

The latest ballot update gave Raman another boost, as she picked up 23,514 votes in the latest batch, more than double Pratt’s 10,336-vote gain. That cut Pratt’s lead by 13,178 votes in a single day and pushed the contest for second place into uncertain territory.

Pratt posted a meme to X decrying the ongoing ballot count in the race.

“Me trying to figure out how votes get counted in LA,” he wrote Saturday night.

Under California’s top-two primary system, if no candidate wins more than 50% of the votes, the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election. The AP reported that Bass advanced to the runoff after finishing first in the crowded mayoral primary, while Pratt and Raman continued battling for the remaining November spot.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., pointed to California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom when discussing the delayed results.

“The question to the rest of the world is what happened to California elections? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s Gavin Newsom,” McCarthy told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “When Gavin Newsom was elected governor of California, you knew who was elected in a day to two days. Now it takes more than weeks, almost a month.”

“Why did we get here?” McCarthy continued. “Gavin changed a number of election laws in which you want to see is what did he do and why did he cause it?”

WATCH: LEFT-WING LA MAYOR FACES REALITY TV CHALLENGER’S BLUNT TAKEDOWNS IN HEATED MAYORAL DEBATE

The slow count has drawn heightened attention because later-counted ballots have steadily cut into Pratt’s lead.

Longtime Democrat strategist Michael Trujillo told The California Post on Saturday that the trend pointed to a likely runoff appearance for Raman, calling the late ballot counting “normal” for California and telling critics to “go back to where you came from.”

“I was always a little jealous of east coast elections getting so much attention in the media and on this app, yeah nevermind,” he wrote on X. “The stupidity from these out of state analysts and reporters and the bots and fake accounts it brings to what is really a very NORMAL process happening in Los Angeles and California is annoying.

“Go back to where you came from, thanks.”

SPENCER PRATT SEIZES ON HOMELESSNESS REMARKS BY KAREN BASS, BLASTS DEMOCRAT FOR FAILURES

Conservatives on X are decrying the probability of Pratt being shut out of the runoff.

“Spencer Pratt is likely going to be overtaken by far left Nithya Raman today,” Robby Starbuck wrote on X. “This graph shows the count on Election Day through last night. “Nithya did this by suddenly winning 1st in every new ballot drop.

“North Korean ‘elections’ have more self respect. Even they’d find it absurd for 3rd to suddenly jump to 1st place in every ballot drop DAYS after an election. It’s just ludicrous.”

That post also brought the attention of X owner Elon Musk.

“The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud,” Musk claimed on X, replying to Starbuck’s post. “When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized.”

SCOTUS CONSERVATIVES SIGNAL READINESS TO CURB LATE-ARRIVING MAIL BALLOTS

Starbuck noted the historic run Raman’s count has made.

“ChatGPT can’t find a single example of a 3rd place candidate surging, days AFTER Election Day, to overtake 2nd place,” he wrote Sunday morning. “It couldn’t find 1 example in all of American history. That’s what’s happening with Nithya Raman & Spencer Pratt.

“Los Angeles has 3rd world country elections.”

Democrats merely point back to an overwhelming edge in registered Democrat voters versus Republicans, even if Pratt is running as an independent.

“IF SOMETHING CAN BE EXPLAINED BY A CONVOLUTED CONSPIRACY THEORY—OR SIMPLE MATH—THEN MATH ALWAYS WINS,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., wrote on X. “LA Registered Voters. Approximate number of Dems: 1,224,737 Approximate number of Republicans: 326,292.”

RNC RAILS AGAINST CALIFORNIA’S LATE MAIL-IN BALLOT COUNTING AMID NATIONAL LITIGATION: ‘IT IS ABSURD’

Americans “want to see election integrity,” McCarthy told host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

“They want to see transparency and they want to see timely reporting: We had that in California,” McCarthy, a former Republican House member in the deep-blue state, said. “We were very liberal in the rules about absentee ballots, but we had accountability.”

“We had cut off voter registration 30 days before the election. That helps the registrars to know who’s going to vote and the candidates,” he continued. “Now we have same day voter, and you don’t have to show ID. Gavin changed the rules where he mails ballots to everyone. So he took away the choice to Californians to vote in person or to vote absentee. Everybody gets mailed a ballot. But he didn’t clean up the rolls. So that raises doubt in people’s minds.”

McCarthy noted Raman’s Election Night disappointment was originally telling.

“When you look at the LA mayor’s race, the third place person gave it like a concession speech that night and cried, and she was getting the most votes in the last drop,” McCarthy said. “So if she didn’t even believe that she could move up, that puts in question to the whole election itself. And that’s why it brings doubt to people.”

President Donald Trump had weighed in, too, with the RNC pointing to the pending Watson v. RNC Supreme Court decision on late ballot counting due soon.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

The Watson decision might come before the end of June.

“.@POTUS is right,” the RNC’s Election Integrity unit posted on X. “That’s why the RNC has boots on the ground and is fighting in the Supreme Court to stop ballots received after Election Day from being counted. MAKE ELECTIONS SECURE AGAIN!”