Spencer Pratt’s hold on second place in the Los Angeles mayor’s race narrowed to 1 percentage point on Saturday evening, leaving his bid to face Karen Bass in November hanging on a still-moving vote count. The latest update from the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder showed Pratt at 27.3% and Nithya Raman at 26.2% with 78% of the votes counted.
The reason the race is drawing attention now is simple: the gap changed again on Saturday, after Pratt had held a nearly 6-point lead over Raman on Thursday. By Sunday morning, the contest was still unresolved, and that made the latest tally more than a routine count update. It was the kind of shift that can turn a comfortable edge into a nervous wait in a matter of hours.
That is especially true because Karen Bass was already projected earlier in the week to advance to the runoff, which left Pratt and Raman competing for the last available spot. Under Los Angeles’ runoff system, the top candidates move on to the November election, and Bass will face whichever of the two finishes second when the counting is done.
The numbers also match what one election expert had been seeing in the vote flow. On Thursday, Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc. said late ballots were helping reshape the race and noted that Pratt had been losing share of the vote with each new ballot dump. The latest update fit that pattern, trimming Pratt’s advantage again even as he remained narrowly ahead.
What makes the race hard to call is not that Bass is in trouble; it is that she is not. Her place in the runoff was already projected, while the second spot stayed extremely close and unresolved. With 78% counted, Pratt and Raman are separated by little enough that every new batch of ballots still has the power to change who advances to the November ballot.
The next answer that matters is the only one voters in this contest are still waiting for: whether Pratt’s slim edge survives the remaining count, or whether Raman overtakes him and takes the second runoff berth against Bass.
