Nithya Raman, the city councilwoman who once led polls in the Los Angeles mayoral race, dropped to third place Tuesday night, behind incumbent Karen Bass and reality television figure Spencer Pratt, and wept as the results came in, the New York Post reported.
With 63.1 percent of the vote counted or reported by Wednesday morning, Associated Press figures showed Bass leading at 34.8 percent, Pratt at 30.4 percent, and Raman at 22.3 percent. If those margins hold, the incumbent and the Palisades fire activist advance to the November general election. Raman's campaign would be finished.
That outcome would mark a sharp fall for a candidate who declared her run in February, once polled ahead of the field, and positioned herself as the progressive alternative to a mayor she had previously supported. It would also hand Los Angeles voters a general election matchup nobody predicted a year ago: a beleaguered Democratic incumbent against a viral social media personality who built his candidacy on wildfire response and civic anger.
The last vote update came around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. Bass held 172,720 votes. Pratt had 151,149. Raman trailed with 110,848, roughly eight points behind Pratt and more than twelve behind Bass.
A fourth candidate, Rae Huang, drew about 3 percent of the vote. Huang had attracted favor from the Democratic Socialists of America, which may have prevented Raman from securing the DSA endorsement outright. In a race this tight on the left, that fractured progressive support mattered.
The DSA's get-out-the-vote machinery has proven formidable elsewhere. In New York City, DSA-backed candidate Zohran Mamdani rode the organization's volunteer operation to the mayor's office. Raman never locked down that same infrastructure in Los Angeles, and the results reflect it.
Raman ran a campaign aligned with leftists dissatisfied with Bass's leadership. She called for a renewed homelessness plan and increased housing production. But she carried her own political baggage into the race: she chaired the Los Angeles City Council's Housing and Homelessness Committee, the very body most directly responsible for the city's response to the crisis she campaigned on fixing.
That contradiction did not go unnoticed. Raman faced criticism for her handling of the homeless crisis, and that criticism culminated in a homeless encampment stunt staged outside her own home. When a candidate's signature issue is also her most visible failure, voters tend to notice.
This kind of intra-party reckoning has become a pattern for Democrats across the country. Internal feuds and self-inflicted wounds keep costing the party races it expected to win.
Spencer Pratt's candidacy was easy to dismiss. A reality television figure best known for MTV's "The Hills" does not fit the traditional mold of a serious mayoral contender. But Pratt built real momentum in the waning weeks of the campaign by doing something neither Bass nor Raman managed convincingly: channeling the fury of Angelenos who watched their neighborhoods burn while city leadership fumbled.
Pratt produced viral social media videos pointing toward his Palisades fire activism and directly blaming both Raman and Bass for the city's problems. The videos connected. In a city where trust in government has cratered, a candidate who sounds angry for the same reasons ordinary residents are angry can outperform every model.
That a former reality star now stands positioned to challenge a sitting mayor in a general election says less about Pratt than it does about the depth of voter frustration with Los Angeles's political establishment. When the professional class fails badly enough, outsiders don't need traditional credentials. They just need to show up with a camera and the truth.
As results poured in Tuesday night, Raman addressed supporters, and her own children. She broke down in tears as she spoke.
"I hope you know that everything, every person in this room is fighting for in this campaign has been about building a city that's worthy of you, and every child in this city."
The emotion was real. But emotion is not a substitute for results, and Raman's record on the issue she cared most about, homelessness, gave voters little reason to promote her from a council committee chair to the mayor's office. She has not conceded.
Democrats nationally have faced a string of setbacks that go well beyond Los Angeles. Recent Supreme Court defeats have compounded the party's sense of political retreat on multiple fronts.
If the current margins hold, the November general election will pit Bass against Pratt. That matchup presents its own set of questions. Bass enters as the incumbent but hardly as a favorite in the traditional sense, her leadership during the Palisades fires and the homelessness crisis has drawn sustained criticism from across the political spectrum.
Pratt, meanwhile, would need to prove he can sustain a campaign beyond viral videos and fire-season populism. A general election is a longer, harder road than a crowded primary.
For Raman, the path forward is unclear. She staked her candidacy on the argument that she was the progressive champion Los Angeles needed. Voters, including progressive voters, looked at her record and chose differently. The DSA's refusal to consolidate behind her, with Huang siphoning a small but meaningful share of the left-wing vote, compounded the problem.
The broader lesson is one Democrats keep refusing to learn. Courtroom losses and ballot-box defeats follow the same pattern: promise transformation, deliver dysfunction, and then act surprised when voters walk away.
Los Angeles is a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by enormous margins. And yet the most energized candidacy in this race belonged to a reality TV personality running against the political establishment. That fact alone should alarm every Democratic strategist in the country.
It won't, of course. Electoral rebukes keep arriving, and the party keeps blaming the messenger instead of the message.
When your candidate finishes behind a guy from "The Hills," the problem isn't branding. It's governance.
