Raman overtakes Pratt in Los Angeles mayoral primary

Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman has moved narrowly ahead of former reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the unsettled race for the second runoff spot against Mayor Karen Bass, reshaping a contest that appeared to be breaking Pratt’s way on election night.

Bass has already been projected by NBC News and CBS News to advance to the November runoff. The question still unresolved is whether she will face Pratt, a registered Republican who has challenged her from the right, or Raman, a Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America who would run against Bass from the left.

The latest update Sunday night from the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder showed Raman with 27.1% of the vote to Pratt’s 26.6%, with 83% of votes counted, CBS News reported. Her lead was less than 1 percentage point. NBC News reported that Raman overtook Pratt by a few thousand votes after steadily cutting into his advantage with each ballot update.

The shift was sharp. Pratt had led Raman by nearly 6 percentage points on Thursday, according to CBS News. By Friday night, NBC News reported, Raman had cut Pratt’s advantage almost in half, to just over 20,000 votes. By Sunday, she had moved into second place.

“Spencer Pratt has been losing share of the vote with every one of these new ballot dumps, and we expect that to continue,” Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc. told CBS News on Thursday. “The question is, will he drop? Will Nithya Raman rise? And at some point, will there be an inflection point where Nithya Raman would take over that second spot?”

Raman had cautioned supporters on election night that the count could take time. “We may not get an answer we like,” she said. “But regardless of what happens next, nobody, nobody can take away what all of us have built together.” She also described her campaign as a “long shot,” saying, “No one knew who I was; I was the last to enter this race. We had no institutional backing. But what we did have was a vision for Los Angeles.”

Pratt sounded confident after polls closed Tuesday, saying Bass was “not a candidate that I’m too concerned about.” He added, “I’m ready for whatever god puts in front of me. Obviously, I was going to accept whatever god’s plan was tonight. I was going to be happy if I wasn’t moving forward because I would’ve known god didn’t want me to be the mayor. Now, I feel very confident.”

A Bass-Pratt runoff could resemble a more traditional partisan and insider-versus-outsider contest. A Bass-Raman runoff would be a race between two Democrats, with Raman, a former Bass ally, challenging the incumbent from the left.

A preprimary Los Angeles Times poll found Bass and Raman both leading Pratt in head-to-head matchups, while Raman held a small advantage over Bass within the margin of error. Forty percent of respondents said they were unsure whom they would support or would not vote in a Bass-Raman matchup. A May 28 UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll cited by CBS News found Bass at 26%, Raman at 25% and Pratt at 22%, with a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.

The slow count has also affected California’s governor’s race. CBS News and NBC News projected Friday that Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former U.S. health and human services secretary and former California attorney general, advanced to the general election to succeed term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom. Under California’s top-two primary system, the two highest vote-getters advance regardless of party.

Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, is leading for the second gubernatorial runoff spot, while billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, a Democrat, remains in third, CBS News reported. Hilton, who had led the race after polls closed Tuesday before Becerra overtook him, criticized the pace of ballot counting and said he would overhaul the election process if elected.

“We’re not there yet, but it’s looking good,” Hilton said Tuesday night. “It looks very much like Californians really will have the chance to vote for change in November and take our state in a new direction.”

California counties have 30 days to count ballots on a provisional basis, according to the secretary of state. Mail-in ballots must be postmarked by Election Day and counted if received within seven days. In Los Angeles, more than 100,000 votes remain to be counted, NBC News reported.