Karen Bass finished first in the June 2 primary with 292,592 votes, or 34.27 percent of the 853,893 cast for mayor. No sitting mayor of Los Angeles has led a primary on a smaller share in the 41 elections with published results, going back to 1896. The next two, Norris Poulson’s 39.67 percent in 1961 and George Alexander’s 39.59 percent in 1909, are each more than five points higher, and Poulson went on to lose his runoff that May. Bass faces Nithya Raman in hers on November 3.
Crowded primaries
Fourteen candidates were on the June ballot for mayor. Seven Los Angeles primaries have drawn at least that many, in 1929, 1945, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2001 and this year, with 1993’s field of 24 the largest. Fletcher Bowron in 1945 and Tom Bradley in 1981 won outright, and 1929, 1993 and 2001 had no sitting mayor on the ballot, which leaves 1969 as the only other crowded primary that sent an incumbent into a runoff. The nearest miss is 1973, when Mayor Sam Yorty made the runoff from a field of thirteen and lost it to Bradley.
| 1969 primary | 2026 primary | |
|---|---|---|
| candidates | 14 | 14 |
| votes cast | 702,788 | 853,893 |
| first | Tom Bradley 41.80% | Karen Bass (incumbent) 34.27% |
| second | Sam Yorty (incumbent) 26.09% | Nithya Raman 29.02% |
| third | Baxter Ward 16.58% | Spencer Pratt 25.53% |
| eliminated vote | 32.11% | 36.71% |
The 702,788 votes cast in April 1969 were the most in any Los Angeles mayoral primary up to then, and this June’s 853,893 are the most ever. This year’s top three also finished closer together than in any primary on record, with 8.74 points separating Bass from Pratt, ahead of 9.17 in 2001 and 11.11 in 2005.
Only two candidates have finished third in a primary with more than Pratt’s 25.53 percent, Job Harriman with 26.06 in 1913 and Patrick McGee with 25.59 in 1961. Pratt and the eleven candidates behind him drew 36.71 percent of the June vote, and none of them will be on the November ballot.
Incumbents and leaders
Yorty’s 26.09 percent in April 1969 is the second-lowest primary share on record for a sitting mayor, above only James Hahn’s 23.58 percent in 2005. Bass ranks sixth from the bottom, and the five incumbents below her all finished second.
Twenty Los Angeles mayoral elections have gone to a second round, and the primary leader lost six of them. Those six had led by a median of 10.0 points, slightly more than the 9.5 for the fourteen who held on, so the size of a lead has said little about who wins. Bradley’s 15.71-point lead in 1969 was the second-largest of the six, and he lost the May runoff by 6.51, a swing of 22.2 points that only the 1911 and 1913 races have exceeded. Bass goes into November with a 5.25-point lead.
The third-place vote
Between April and May 1969, Yorty’s vote grew by 263,696 and Bradley’s by 98,626. That’s 362,322 votes beyond what the two had in April, made up of the 225,701 cast for the other twelve candidates and 136,621 more from higher runoff turnout, and on net Yorty took 73 percent of them. Raman trails Bass by 5.25 points, a third of Yorty’s 1969 deficit, and with June’s electorate held fixed she’d need about 57 percent of the 313,520 votes that went to the other twelve candidates to pass Bass. If each council district’s leftover votes divide the way that district already split between the two finalists, Bass wins by 8.8 points.
Pratt’s vote leaned heavily on the San Fernando Valley. In the five council districts that lie wholly inside it, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 12, he took 32.5 percent, against 22.3 percent in the other ten, and two of every five votes he received came from those five. Bass and Pratt finished 309 votes apart there, 88,962 to 88,653, with Raman third at 64,205. Together those districts cast 272,710 votes for mayor, nearly a third of the city’s total.
From precinct to precinct, Pratt’s share tracks Republican registration most closely, at r = +0.93, then the share of registrants 65 and older (+0.65), median household income (+0.61) and the non-Hispanic white share (+0.60). It runs lower where more households rent (-0.58). Bass’s share follows the Black population most closely, at +0.79.
In the 8th District Bass took 61.8 percent, her best result, while Raman’s best was 45.5 percent in the 13th and Pratt’s was 39.1 in the 12th. Turnout ran from 22.0 percent in the 9th to 53.3 percent in the 11th.
| district | turnout | Bass | Raman | Pratt |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 29.5% | 61.8% | 18.4% | 10.7% |
| 13 | 42.0% | 26.9% | 45.5% | 15.9% |
| 12 | 42.8% | 31.7% | 19.0% | 39.1% |
| 9 | 22.0% | 42.2% | 25.0% | 15.0% |
| 11 | 53.3% | 32.2% | 27.9% | 29.5% |
Turnout and the calendar
Los Angeles was a smaller city in 1969, and a larger share of it voted. Our city registration figures only go back to 2001, so the comparison uses mayoral votes per 1,000 residents, which can be measured across the whole record. By that measure the April 1969 primary drew 252.6 and the May runoff 301.7, the highest for any round since 1911. This June drew 223.5.
Yorty and Bradley had eight weeks between rounds. Bass and Raman have five months, and their runoff shares a November ballot with the governor’s race, where 1969’s was a spring city election. Turnout rose between rounds in 18 of the 20 runoffs on record, by a median of 17.4 percent. The 1969 runoff came close to that at 19.4 percent, while the last November runoff, in 2022, drew 43.9 percent more votes than its primary. A rise that size this year would add about 375,000 voters to June’s total.
Limits
We don’t have precinct or district returns for 1969, so every 1969 figure in this piece is a citywide total, and the vote shifts between its two rounds are net changes that can’t show which voters moved. Twenty runoffs is also a short record, and eleven of them were held before 1950, when the city was half its present size or smaller.
The 2026 correlations compare whole precincts, weighting each by its registered voters. A precinct where Republican registration and Pratt’s share both run high doesn’t show how any individual Republican voted, and reading it that way is the ecological fallacy.