Turnout in the June 2026 primary ran from 16.03 percent in Watts to 57.01 percent in Studio City, a 3.6-fold gap across 99 neighborhoods. But rescale all 739 precincts to the citywide 39.35 percent and Karen Bass gains 1.08 points, Spencer Pratt loses 1.18, and the same two candidates advance. That assumes the extra voters in each precinct would have split the way its actual voters did.
At Wednesday’s debate, Karen Bass’s campaign accused Nithya Raman of skipping close to 3,000 council votes since she took office. The count holds up: 2,966, or 13.9 percent of every roll call she could have cast. Raman’s team blamed her seat on the regional air board, which meets on the same morning the council sits. The board’s own minutes confirm the conflict on two dates we checked. Measured as absences above her own rate on other days, it accounts for an estimated 519, and 1,799 of the rest fall on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when the board does not meet.
Karen Bass finished first in June with 34.27 percent, the weakest first-place primary finish by a sitting mayor of Los Angeles in the 41 elections we have results for. Fourteen candidates ran, which has happened in a primary exactly three other times, and one of those was 1969. That year the incumbent finished second with 26 percent, was written off, and won November by six and a half points.
Across the fifteen council districts, turnout in the June primary correlates with Bass’s share at -0.575. She ran strongest where the fewest people voted. Nithya Raman needs 57.1 percent of the 313,520 votes that went to eliminated candidates to pass her, and 1,348,243 registered Angelenos did not vote at all in June.
More than a third of the June electorate voted for somebody who is not on the November ballot.
