Odds favor Nithya Raman win for L.A. mayor despite tight race, experts say. Here’s why
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As of the latest vote tallies, Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman has earned a slight edge over incumbent Karen Bass in the mayoral race.
But election experts say the early lead is likely a sign that Raman has what it takes to remain ahead.
The ballots yet to be counted — mostly coming from vote-by-mail ballots sent on or just before election day — tend to come from younger, more progressive voters, election experts say, so they expect the next few tallies will swing further in Raman’s favor. Bass is considered the more moderate of the two Democratic candidates.
“The odds favor Raman at this point,” Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said Wednesday morning. He’s a former city councilmember and county supervisor who closely tracks local elections. “I expect that her lead will expand.”
Of course, no one knows how the uncounted ballots will fall, but local election experts are relying on trends from previous elections.
A Times poll from days before the election showed the candidates in a dead heat. There is still an estimated 37% of the vote for mayor to be counted, which translates to about 433,000 ballots, according to expected vote calculations from the Associated Press.
Bass trailed Raman by just over 16,500 votes, at 49%, as of Wednesday morning. Raman has pulled ahead with 51.1% of the vote.
The next tranche of counted ballots will be released around 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to the L.A. County registrar of voters.
Raman, first elected to the council in 2020, joined the race in February, launching a challenge against someone she had publicly endorsed just a few weeks earlier. Since then, the contest has been in many ways a generational fight, with the two staking out differing positions on public safety, housing production and strategies for ending homelessness.
Bass, 73, was backed by much of the city’s political establishment, including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the county’s Democratic Party. Raman, 45, has aligned herself with groups that have emerged at City Hall more recently, including the left-wing Democratic Socialists of America and Streets For All, a transportation advocacy group.
The first ballots counted on election night tend to come from voters who skew older and more conservative, a group that Bass needed to win by large margins, said Paul Mitchell, who heads the polling data firm PDI. The fact that Raman pulled ahead by the end of Tuesday night is not a good sign for Bass’ campaign, he said.
“This is probably better numbers than the Raman campaign could have expected,” he said.
The contest was in many ways generational, with 73-year-old Bass, a political veteran, courting longtime voters and Raman, 45, courting younger Angelenos.
Even without the early lead, experts expected the later vote counts to swing for Raman, as those voters tend to be more liberal, younger, and working class.
“At this moment it looks like the numbers are bearing out what we believed: The people who voted later, and therefore are counted later, are likely to be Raman’s main support base — the younger voters, the more progressive voters,” said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University. “It was a really good night for progressives, and it’s hard to see why or how L.A. doesn’t [follow suit].”
It’s worth noting, though, that late polling did indicate a boost of support for Bass as election day neared, so Levinson said there is a chance more undecided voters waited longer to vote, many of which may have landed in Bass’ camp.
“There were a ton of undecided voters going into the last few weeks of this race, so anybody who says, this is over … is putting the cart before the horse a bit,” Levinson said.
Still, she expects the majority of the later vote to swing for Raman.
“Based on past experience, Mayor Bass has probably got a steeper mountain to climb,” Yaroslavsky agreed.
This late progressive swing has played out repeatedly in California elections, but particularly in L.A.’s recent mayoral elections. Most recently in June’s primary, Raman initially placed third behind Bass and Republican Spencer Pratt. But as vote-by-mail ballots continued to come in — getting verified and then counted — Raman continued to close the gap, eventually surpassing Pratt.
Similarly in the 2022 primary, Bass — then considered the progressive candidate — initally trailed developer Rick Caruso, but took the lead as more ballots were counted.
“In every election since vote by mail has been a thing, the votes that are counted later tend to be more progressive,” Yaroslavsky said.
This late surge in momentum for a specific candidate or ideology isn’t a sign of any fraud or counting mishap or people voting after polls close — it’s a function of California’s voting system. Mail-in ballots, the most popular way to vote in California, are accepted for up to seven days after the election if they are postmarked on or before election day, and the official count can take up to 30 days.
“Anybody who mailed in their ballots on Monday or Sunday — or Tuesday — those ballots aren’t going to arrive until today or tomorrow, and they all have to be validated,” Yaroslavsky said. “There are a lot of ballots yet to be counted.”
Staff writers Noah Goldberg and David Zahniser contributed to this report.
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