California’s election results are still coming in from the June 2 primary. But in the Los Angeles mayoral contest, incumbent Democrat Karen Bass didn’t crack the 51% needed to win outright, setting up a fierce runoff in November.
More importantly, there’s a massive battle between former reality TV personality and Republican Spencer Pratt and City Council member and Democrat Nithya Raman. At the time of this writing, Pratt is ahead and Raman would have to make up a huge number of votes to catch him.
Roughly 62% of the total vote has been counted as of Wednesday night. Per the New York Times, here’s where the voting totals stand right now: Karen Bass has 183,701 (35%), Spencer Pratt has 157,116 (29.9%), and Nithya Raman has 119,809 (22.8%).
So far, Pratt looks highly likely to square off against Bass in November. No Republican has won a mayoral race in Los Angeles in more than three decades, but the votes he has already earned reflect a real frustration among Angelenos with a city that has declined after years of Democratic rule.
A business leader and former city council candidate said Spencer Pratt’s rise in the Los Angeles mayoral race is a result of voters’ unhappiness with the status quo on crime, the recent wildfires, and the unfriendly business climate.
“I think a lot of people are concerned about what’s happening, they really don’t know how to fix this, and I think the crime, the homelessness, the addiction, all the above behaviors of what’s happened in our city,” said John Putnam, the president of Putnam Brands. “The politicians that are causing this, I think a lot people are seeing that. And I think Spencer’s actually bringing the light in a real way.”
However, when independent pollsters cross-referenced the newly unsealed mail-in ballot logs from the conservative pockets of San Fernando Valley, they detected a massive, uncounted surge in the electronic tallies. What the local county registrar’s office actually discovered in the audited metadata regarding a sudden batch of thousands of disputed signatures completely transformed the legal standing of the race…
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