Nithya Raman has opened a double-digit lead over Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, according to a new University of California Berkeley Institute of Government Studies/Los Angeles Times poll released on Wednesday. The survey showed Raman at 39% among likely Los Angeles voters, with Bass at 28%.
That result matters now because the Nov. 3 election is less than two weeks away from the point when mail-in ballots were sent out, and the race is no longer looking like a straight rematch of the June primary. In that primary, Bass and Raman finished first and second with 34% and 29% of the vote, while Spencer Pratt took 26% before being eliminated.
The new numbers are drawing attention because they shift the shape of the contest while leaving a large part of the electorate unresolved. The poll found that 33% of Los Angeles voters were still undecided, and Mark DiCamillio said it was extraordinarily unusual to see that many undecided voters at this stage. That means Raman’s lead is real, but it is not yet locked in.
Pratt’s voters may end up mattering most in deciding whether the lead holds. According to the poll, 63% of his supporters remained undecided in the general election, while 22% favored Bass and 16% supported Raman. Pratt posted that if people did not vote for him, Raman would beat Bass, and he also wrote that Raman was “Karen’s karma,” adding a harsh attack on the Democratic Socialists of America and saying, “Good luck LA.”
There is another force pressing on the race as well. The Los Angeles Police Protective League has launched an advertising and canvassing campaign targeting 300,000 homes to defeat Raman, arguing that her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and her past votes against a billion-dollar police union raise and hiring initiatives show an anti-police agenda. That campaign collides with a poll that suggests Raman is ahead anyway, even as one-third of voters have not chosen a side.
For Bass, the danger is not only that Raman is ahead today, but that the pool of undecided voters is still large enough to move the result again. For Raman, the challenge is simpler and harder at once: keep the lead, hold enough of Pratt’s voters, and turn a polling edge into a victory before Election Day.
