Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman has moved into second place in the city’s mayoral race as additional ballots are counted and appears likely to advance to the November general election.
If the results hold, Israel could become a “defining fault line” in the runoff campaign, Jared Sclar, a Democratic political consultant in San Diego, told JNS.
The issue has already surfaced during the campaign. In a May 15 appearance on the show of anti-Israel podcaster Hasan Piker, Raman, a progressive Democrat, said she agrees with organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. When Piker, who has praised Hamas, asked if she believes Israel is an apartheid state, Raman replied: “Yeah. I think that they’re not treating people fairly.”
With about 83% of ballots counted, Raman had 196,198 votes (27.1%), compared with 193,085 votes (26.7%) for Republican and former reality television personality Spencer Pratt, according to election results cited by the Associated Press. Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, led the field with more than 250,000 votes (34.7%) and has already secured a place in the runoff. On June 3, Pratt held second place with more than 151,000 votes (30.4%), and Raman was in third at almost 111,000 votes (22.3%).
Decision Desk HQ has projected that Raman will advance to face Bass in November, although major news organizations had not yet called the race as of press time. Raman’s lead over Pratt stood at just over 3,000 votes. California’s prolonged vote-counting process, which includes mail ballots received after Election Day if postmarked on time, has continued to reshape the race.
Dan Schnur, a political science lecturer at Pepperdine University, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, told JNS that Pratt’s early advantage has eroded “because Democrats vote more heavily by mail, the late votes skew heavily in that direction.”
“Since it does not appear that Pratt’s campaign had a robust field organization and get-out-the-vote effort, it’s unlikely that he will catch up,” he said.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told JNS that Raman “overtook Pratt because the bulk of younger Democrats were unsure who to vote for in the gubernatorial race and waited until the last days of the race to send in their mail ballots.”
“This happened statewide, not just in LA,” he said. “It’s very unlikely that Pratt will gain votes from here unless there are a lot of ballots from his strong areas—the western San Fernando Valley and the wealthier and Jewish areas on the Westside—that remain to be counted.”
Sclar told JNS that Pratt’s “election-night lead was frontloaded” and that Pratt’s path to the general election is “nearly gone.”
“What’s left to count is the latest-arriving mail, the same ballots that have been moving toward Raman all week,” he said. “He’d need that to flip, and it isn’t flipping. I’d be floored if he makes it.”
Sclar added that, given Los Angeles’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, it was “always somewhat unrealistic” for a Republican candidate to advance to the general election.
‘Genuine force’
According to Sclar, Raman’s likely advancement demonstrates a “progressive lane” in line with the Democratic Socialists of America and Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayor of New York City, that “can knock out a Trump-backed Republican for a runoff spot against a sitting mayor.”
However, he told JNS that he’s stopping short of calling it an “anti-Israel mandate.”
“This race was fought over homelessness, affordability and the wildfire recovery, not the Middle East, and Raman’s own record on Israel is a little more nuanced,” Sclar said. “The fairer read is that the LA left is ascendant, and Israel will become a defining fault line in the November runoff in a way it wasn’t in the primary.”
He added that the “statewide picture” for the Democratic Party shows “a party that contains both camps, not one where the anti-Israel side is clearly winning.”
Olsen told JNS that “the anti-Israel, Mamdani view has a very large following in the Democratic voter pool nationwide, not simply in Los Angeles.”
“It remains unclear if it is ‘mainstream’ or simply a very large but not supermajority viewpoint,” he said.
Rob Stutzman, a GOP strategist based in Sacramento, told JNS that he doesn’t see many parallels between Raman and Mamdani.
“She basically stumbled into this runoff as the only alternative for many Angelenos to a deeply unpopular mayor,” he said. “She has not built a movement and has moderated herself.”
Stutzman added that “it’s telling that many of her DSA colleagues have not supported her. The LA mayor race results are about Bass and who she is, not about Raman and who she is.”
Schnur told JNS that had tech entrepreneur Adam Miller “been able to become a more viable candidate, it would have been interesting to see if such an unabashed pro-Israel candidate would have won large numbers of Democratic votes.”
“Pratt’s inability to win over Democrats had a lot more to do with his party registration than his position on Israel,” he said.
