In LA Mayor’s Race, Nithya Raman Makes Up Ground on Rick Caruso in Contest to Face Karen Bass

A sitting mayor of the second-largest city in America couldn’t break 50 percent in her own primary. Karen Bass heads to a November runoff badly wounded, and the only question left from the June 3 primary is who gets to finish the job.

That question is not yet settled. As late ballot counts trickle in across Los Angeles County, Nithya Raman — the progressive City Councilmember from CD-4 — is erasing what looked like a comfortable cushion for billionaire developer Rick Caruso. The second-place slot determines everything: whether November looks like a Bass-vs.-billionaire rematch of 2022, or something far more ideologically charged. The difference between those two outcomes isn’t just tactical. It’s a statement about what Los Angeles thinks went wrong, and who it trusts to fix it.

How Karen Bass Built a Political Career and Then Watched the Palisades Burn It Down

Karen Bass, 73, arrived at City Hall in December 2022 as a historic figure — the first Black woman elected mayor of Los Angeles, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, a serious legislator with decades of experience. She beat Caruso in 2022 despite being outspent by more than $50 million. That was the feel-good story. Then came January 2025.

The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire ignited simultaneously during catastrophic wind conditions on January 7, 2025. By the time they were contained, at least 29 people were dead and more than 16,000 structures had been destroyed. Bass was in Ghana at the time — attending the inauguration of President John Mahama — a fact that became the defining political liability of her tenure. She returned to a city that felt abandoned. Her approval rating, which had hovered around 50 percent through 2024, collapsed to below 40 percent by March 2025 and never recovered.

Caruso, who had spent over $100 million in his failed 2022 run, smelled blood. He re-entered the 2026 race in mid-2025 positioning himself as the accountability candidate, the competent executive, the man who builds things rather than watches them burn. His money and name recognition gave him an early structural advantage. But Raman, the 42-year-old data scientist and urban policy specialist, built something Caruso cannot buy: a genuine grassroots coalition furious not just about the fires, but about years of inadequate housing policy, homelessness mismanagement, and the sense that City Hall has consistently served developers over residents.

Los Angeles uses a top-two primary system — the two candidates with the most votes, regardless of party, advance to the November general election. That means the Bass-Caruso 2022 rematch that everyone assumed was inevitable is not guaranteed. Not anymore.

Late Ballots Are Rewriting the Race in Real Time as Raman Closes the Gap on Caruso

Here’s what makes the current ballot count so consequential: California’s mail-in voting system means election night totals are almost always incomplete, and the late-arriving ballots tend to skew toward younger, more progressive, and more urban voters — exactly Raman’s coalition. Caruso’s early lead on election night was built largely on same-day in-person votes and early returns from higher-income, homeowner-heavy precincts. As the count deepens into the mail ballot universe, Raman gains.

The gap that looked like 4–5 percentage points after election night has been compressing with every batch of new results released by the Los Angeles County Registrar. Political observers tracking the ballot math note that this is a familiar pattern — progressive candidates consistently outperform their election-night numbers in LA County mail counts, a trend well-documented since at least the 2020 cycle.

What’s driving Raman’s surge specifically:

• Housing and homelessness: Raman championed renter protections and anti-displacement policy in CD-4, winning loyalty from a constituency that doesn’t trust Caruso — a man whose business model is building luxury retail and residential developments — to address affordability
• Climate and wildfire preparedness: Her platform explicitly addresses urban resilience infrastructure in ways that resonate with voters still processing the devastation of January 2025
• Anti-billionaire sentiment: There is a genuine, visceral reluctance in progressive LA to hand the city’s mayoralty back to someone who tried to buy it four years ago and is trying again with the same checkbook
• Organizational ground game: Raman’s volunteer-driven operation ran registration and turnout efforts in high-density apartment corridors that historically underperform in primaries
• Endorsement infrastructure: She carried the backing of key labor unions and environmental groups that generate real voter contact, not just yard signs

Final ballot counts in LA County are expected within days of June 3. If Raman closes the remaining gap, she advances. If she doesn’t, Los Angeles gets a November election that is, in some ways, a replay of a race that already happened.

Bass, Caruso, and Raman: Three Visions for a City That Is Running Out of Patience

Karen Bass

Karen Bass is, by almost any measure, a diminished incumbent. She will almost certainly advance to November — her 30-plus percent of the primary vote is a structural floor built on Democratic base loyalty, name recognition, and the organizational backing of the political establishment. But that establishment support is precisely the problem. Bass represents continuity in a city where voters are actively looking for rupture. Her wildfire response — the absence at the moment of crisis, the subsequent bureaucratic stuttering on rebuilding permits and debris clearance — gave her opponents a single devastating image: the mayor who wasn’t there. She has spent eighteen months trying to change that narrative and largely failed. November will be brutal for her regardless of who she faces. For our ongoing US Political News coverage of races like this one, the Bass situation represents a broader pattern of incumbents drowning in crisis management failures.

Rick Caruso

Rick Caruso is a singular figure in LA politics: a man who registered as a Democrat specifically to run for mayor, who spent $104 million of his own money in 2022 and still lost to a candidate who was outspent 3-to-1, and who has now returned for another attempt with essentially the same message. He is a builder, he says. He is an executive. He gets things done. The pitch is not without logic — Los Angeles genuinely needs someone who can navigate the bureaucratic morass of permitting, infrastructure contracts, and inter-agency dysfunction that made the post-wildfire rebuilding process so agonizing. But Caruso carries enormous baggage: his real estate empire’s complicated relationship with the city’s housing shortage, his political malleability (he was a Republican for most of his adult life), and the simple fact that LA’s progressive base has already rejected him once and hasn’t forgotten why.

Nithya Raman

Nithya Raman is the candidate who shouldn’t be in this conversation — and is anyway. She entered the race as a long-shot council member taking on two candidates with dramatically more money and name recognition. She has roughly a fraction of Caruso’s financial resources. What she has instead is a coherent governing philosophy, a record of legislative accomplishment in CD-4 that she can point to, and a coalition that is genuinely motivated rather than merely mobilized. The policy-wonk-turned-politician archetype isn’t new, but Raman wears it authentically: her background in data science and urban planning gives her a specificity of argument that neither Bass nor Caruso can match. Whether that’s enough to overcome a ballot-count deficit against a man who can write checks that don’t bounce is the entire suspense of this moment.

Why the LA Mayoral Race Reveals Something Uncomfortable About Progressive Politics

Let’s be direct about what this race actually tests. If Raman makes it to November, the progressive case is straightforward: the billionaire who tried to buy City Hall in 2022 should not be rewarded with a second attempt, and the incumbent who was absent during the worst disaster in the city’s modern history should be held accountable by someone who has a real housing and climate platform. Clean narrative. Compelling argument.

But here is the harder question that progressive organizers in Los Angeles don’t fully want to answer: what has progressive governance actually delivered? The city council that Raman sits on — dominated by progressives for years — presided over a homelessness crisis that has made Los Angeles a national symbol of municipal dysfunction. The encampments, the lack of shelter beds, the failed ballot measures, the billions spent with ambiguous results — these happened on the progressive watch, not despite it. Caruso’s pitch lands because there is a legitimate grievance underneath the billionaire veneer.

Bass, meanwhile, ran in 2022 on a housing-first, anti-encampment, collaborative governance platform and has delivered mixed results at best. Her Inside Safe program produced real numbers — thousands of encampment placements — but the underlying shelter and permanent housing pipeline hasn’t kept pace, and the January 2025 fires exposed how thin her emergency management capacity actually was.

Caruso’s camp, on the other hand, has no credible answer to the affordability crisis. A man who made his fortune building luxury retail complexes and upscale apartment developments does not have a natural constituency among renters paying $2,800 a month for a one-bedroom in Silver Lake. His law-and-order positioning is a deflection from the structural questions. Neither side has fully reckoned with the scale of what Los Angeles actually needs, which is less a better mayor and more a complete reorganization of how the city funds, plans, and executes basic public services.

Raman comes closest to having that conversation honestly. Whether Los Angeles voters in November are in the mood for honest conversations — or just want someone to be furious at — is a genuinely open question.

Four Scenarios That Will Define Los Angeles Politics From November Through 2030

The outcome of the still-uncounted ballot race between Raman and Caruso will set the shape of Los Angeles politics for the next four years. Here are the concrete scenarios:

• Scenario 1 — Caruso advances, beats Bass in November: The billionaire wins on an accountability mandate. LA gets a centrist, developer-friendly administration. Progressive movement loses influence at City Hall for the first time in a decade. Watch for rollbacks of renter protections and a pivot toward market-rate housing solutions.
• Scenario 2 — Caruso advances, Bass wins November: The rematch Bass needed — Bass’s superior Democratic infrastructure beats Caruso’s money again. But a re-elected Bass with no majority mandate and sub-40 approval ratings governs from a position of profound weakness. City Council dynamics become the real power center.
• Scenario 3 — Raman advances, Bass wins November: A Bass vs. Raman general election is an intra-progressive fight over the future of the Democratic left in urban governance. Bass would likely win on incumbency and establishment support, but the race forces a genuine policy debate about what progressive urban governance should actually look like — and that debate has national implications.
• Scenario 4 — Raman advances, Raman wins November: The long-shot outcome. A Raman mayoralty would be the most significant progressive municipal victory since Bill de Blasio won New York in 2013 — and, depending on what she does with it, could either revitalize or further discredit the case for policy-driven progressive governance at scale.

The ballot count is the fulcrum. Every late envelope processed by the LA County Registrar is either opening or closing that door. Raman needs to sustain her trajectory through the remaining batches. Caruso needs his early-vote cushion to hold. Neither campaign can do anything now except watch the numbers.

Los Angeles just endured the deadliest urban wildfire disaster in modern American history, watched its mayor fly to West Africa while the hills burned, and is now being asked to choose between a billionaire who’s been rejected once, an incumbent who wasn’t home when it mattered, and a council member who might actually understand the city’s structural problems but has never run anything at this scale. The votes are still being counted. The stakes couldn’t be more specific: whoever wins November inherits a city that is genuinely, profoundly broken — and the only thing worse than the wrong person winning is voters convincing themselves that any of these three choices alone is enough to fix it.

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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