A Republican Led the L.A. Mayor’s Race on Election Night. A Week of Mail Ballots Erased Him.

When the polls closed in Los Angeles on the night of June 3, 2026, the second-place finisher in the city’s mayoral primary was a Republican — Spencer Pratt, the former “The Hills” reality star whose Pacific Palisades home burned in the January 2025 wildfires while Mayor Karen Bass (D) was in Ghana. Pratt led City Councilmember Nithya Raman (D) for the second runoff slot by roughly eight to ten points. Incumbent Bass led the field at about 35 percent, short of the majority a Los Angeles mayor needs to win outright.

Then Los Angeles County began counting mail ballots in batches, ordered by the date each batch arrived. Over the following week, the late-arriving ballots broke overwhelmingly Democratic. Raman closed the gap, then passed Pratt outright. By the Monday update, the standings read Bass at about 34 percent, Raman at about 29 percent, and Pratt at about 26 percent — third place, eliminated.

The November 3 runoff will now pit Bass against Raman — a Democratic Socialists of America member compared to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — in a one-party contest from which the lone Republican has vanished. Nothing about that outcome is illegal. Mail ballots in California reliably break Democratic and reliably arrive late, a documented pattern called the “blue shift.” But it played out as a federal prosecutor was openly accusing the state of blocking an audit of its voter rolls — and the combination is what turned a routine count into a fight over trust.

• ~8–10 pts — Spencer Pratt's (R) lead over Nithya Raman (D) for second place on election night, June 3, 2026 · Source: CNN, MyNewsLA election-night returns
• 34 / 29 / 26 — the post-shift standing after a week of mail counting — Bass (D) ~34%, Raman (D) ~29%, Pratt (R) ~26%, third and eliminated · Source: NBC Los Angeles, Variety
• Nov 3 — the 2026 runoff: Karen Bass (D) vs. Nithya Raman (D/DSA) — a one-party general election · Source: The Hill, Ballotpedia

California’s consolidated statewide primary was held June 3, 2026. Because Los Angeles requires a mayoral candidate to clear 50 percent to win outright, and no one did, the top two finishers advance to a November 3 runoff. When the first returns posted on election night, Bass sat in front at roughly 35 percent. The surprise was in second: Spencer Pratt, the Republican reality-television figure, held about 30.4 percent — comfortably ahead of Nithya Raman, by something in the range of eight to ten points.

Pratt had built his campaign on wildfire accountability. His Pacific Palisades home burned in the January 2025 fires while Bass was abroad in Ghana for a presidential inauguration — an absence that, as CNN reported, “severely dented her popularity.” For one night, a Republican leading the race for second place in a deep-blue city looked like the headline. As our earlier coverage of the June 3 primary-night results noted, that lead was real — but it was built almost entirely on same-day, in-person and early-returned ballots, the votes counted first.

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In California, every registered voter is mailed a ballot, and county officials keep counting ballots that arrive after Election Day so long as they were postmarked on time. Los Angeles County processes those ballots in batches, ordered by the date each batch arrived — which means the votes counted last are, by definition, the ones returned last. Democrats vote by mail at higher rates and tend to return their ballots later, so the late batches lean their way. Local outlets ABC7 and NBC LA both walked viewers through the mechanism as it unfolded.

That is exactly what happened. Pratt’s election-night cushion shrank with every update. By the weekend, NBC Los Angeles reported, Raman had pulled within a few thousand votes; she then took a narrow lead of roughly 3,100 ballots over the weekend and extended it. By Monday she sat at about 28.6 percent to Pratt’s 25.8 percent, with Bass holding the top line at 34.3 percent. The Associated Press projected Raman into the runoff. The Republican who led on election night finished third.

“Folks, we’re dealing with a fraction of a percentage point, there’s still hundreds of thousands of votes outstanding, and LA officials have given us the next three weeks to count.”

Spencer Pratt (R), candidate for L.A. mayor, on Instagram · paraphrased from his posted remarks

The November ballot now offers Los Angeles voters a choice between two Democrats. Nithya Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — the first DSA-backed candidate ever to win a Los Angeles City Council seat — and she chairs the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. She opposes federal immigration enforcement and has authored the city’s rent-stabilization, tenant anti-harassment, and right-to-counsel-for-tenants ordinances. Fox News framed the matchup bluntly, casting Bass as a sitting mayor now “facing a Mamdani-style socialist,” a reference to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Bass, for her part, has the party machinery behind her. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) endorsed her on May 28, days before the primary, crediting her with an 18 percent decline in homelessness, drops in violent crime, and resistance to ICE operations in the city. Whatever the November result, the Republican option is gone — eliminated not by a single decisive vote but by a week-long count whose direction was, to anyone who follows California elections, entirely predictable.

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The L.A. flip landed in the middle of a separate, documented fight over how California runs its elections. The U.S. Department of Justice — through U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (a Trump appointee in the Central District of California) and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (a Trump appointee) — has been trying to audit the state’s voter rolls and says it is being blocked. The DOJ sued Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D) for an electronic copy of the statewide voter file under the National Voter Registration Act; a federal judge sided with the state in January 2026, calling the demand “unprecedented and illegal,” and DOJ has appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

Essayli has also pointed to California’s rules for first-time voters who cannot supply a driver’s license number or Social Security digits: the state accepts alternatives that include a gym membership card, an employer ID, a credit or debit card, a prescription drug label, or an insurance card. On June 5 and 6, his office said it had “multiple election fraud investigations underway” in coordination with the FBI in Los Angeles — but, as ABC7 and The Washington Post both reported, it identified no specific cases and produced no evidence of widespread fraud. This is the same standoff our earlier reporting on the Essayli voter-roll-audit fight laid out: a federal demand for transparency, met by a state that has so far kept the file closed.

“California is blocking a federal audit of its voter rolls.”

U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (Trump-appointed) · Central District of California

Here is the line this story will not cross: no evidence of fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral count has been produced. The shift from Pratt to Raman is fully explained by the documented blue-shift mechanism — mail-heavy Democratic votes counted last. What Pratt, the president, and other Republicans allege is suspicion, not proof. President Trump called the result a “rigged election,” and Pratt publicly questioned how the count works. Those are accusations. They are not findings.

But suspicion is the predictable harvest of a slow, opaque, audit-resistant count run by a single party in a one-party state. When the lone Republican leads on election night and is gone a week later, when the federal government’s request to inspect the voter rolls is rebuffed in court, and when first-time voters can register with a gym card, the gap between “legal” and “trusted” widens — even if every ballot was cast and counted correctly. As our broader coverage of California’s vote-count controversies has documented, the mechanics are lawful; the problem is that almost no one outside the registrar’s office can independently verify them.

The blue shift is not a scandal. It is arithmetic, and California’s leaders are right that there is nothing inherently improper about counting every timely ballot, however late it arrives. But a state that wants its results believed cannot also be the state fighting in federal court to keep its voter rolls out of an auditor’s hands. Speed, transparency, and independent verification are how you make a legal outcome a trusted one — and Los Angeles County’s three-week count delivers none of the three.

So the November 3 runoff arrives with two Democrats on the ballot, a socialist in the second slot, and a sizable share of the electorate convinced — without proof, but also without the access that would settle it — that something went wrong. That distrust is the real cost. It was avoidable, and the people who could have avoided it are the same people, all from one party, who run the count, the rolls, and the lawsuits keeping both closed.

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