Bass has her runoff slot locked — but who she'll face in November is still being counted, batch by batch. This is LA Mayor 2026. Today: Pratt's in second, Raman's not out, and a CalMatters opinion piece arguing this whole shape benefits Bass. I've got thoughts on that. Plus the council quietly made two housing-adjacent moves this week while everyone watched the ballot count. We're going to talk about what nobody's making the candidates answer for. Let's start with LAist: Pratt's second, Raman may still have a chance. This count really isn't closed. The thing to watch is the mail postmarked by Election Day. Those ballots land later, and they don't trickle in randomly — they skew toward higher-density, transit-adjacent precincts. That's exactly where Raman's argument lives. Right, and at this point the count is also a map of organizing. If the late mail breaks her way, it tells you where her ground game actually landed, precinct by precinct. But here's what gets me. The CalMatters opinion says the race benefits Bass. Okay, pressure-test that. What specifically helps her? An opponent with no published zoning position. That's an actual structural advantage. And I half-agree, half-want to fight it. If the finalist is Pratt, listed as a Community Advocate with nothing on record about upzoning, then yeah — Bass walks into November facing zero policy heat she'd have faced against Raman. Which means a candidate who just cleared the primary without a majority has every incentive to keep the CHIP pipeline numbers vague. Why sharpen “advancing” into a number somebody can audit if nobody across the stage can read a capital allocation? “Advancing” really is the most comfortable word in city government. It commits to nothing and sounds like progress. Now, what did the council actually do? Westside Current: they sped up nuisance property abatement, unanimously. The path to vacate a property just got faster. And nobody's asked either finalist the obvious question: do you aim that tool at slumlords, or at tenants who can't afford the repairs? The vote already happened. The candidates are silent. Stack it with the other recommendation this same week — City Planning wants a 66% hike on short-term rental fees. Two enforcement-flavored moves in seven days. Zero zoning moves. And that STR fee is a real revenue tool — it's how enforcement infrastructure gets funded. It's exactly the kind of incremental fiscal move neither Bass nor Pratt has said one coherent word about. So there's your runoff in miniature. The governing body is moving on housing while the mayoral field's policy positions are still, charitably, theoretical. Honestly, the count's almost beside the point. If neither finalist has a housing position that survives contact with the council they'd inherit, second place is the least of it. Counting continues, and so does our patience. We'll keep watching to see whether those late mail batches give Raman an opening — or confirm the field Bass would clearly prefer. That's the show. LAist, with Frank Stoltze:
The race is on for second place in the Los Angeles mayor's contest. Early trends show L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman making slight gains on reality TV personality Spencer Pratt in the race to face incumbent Karen Bass in November. The Associated Press has already declared Bass as having secured one spot in the runoff.
And Stoltze's reporting the early trends show Raman making slight gains. Slight. Which is exactly the kind of word that decides a runoff slot. Here's what I keep chewing on. The CalMatters opinion piece says this whole shape “benefits Bass.” If her November opponent is Pratt — a guy with no published zoning position — then who's pushing her on supply? Nobody. Against Raman, Bass actually has to defend her pipeline numbers. Right, and meanwhile the council isn't waiting for any of them. Thirteen-zero on nuisance abatement, City Planning floats a sixty-six percent hike on short-term rental fees — governing's happening, and not one of the finalists has had to answer for either. Two enforcement-flavored moves in a week, Adam. Zero on the zoning side. That tells you where the actual energy is. When the runner-up spot is this close, and L.A. keeps counting for days, what ballots are still out there? And is there any reason late ballots might help Raman or Pratt in some systematic way, instead of just trickling in randomly? Great question. Short answer: the outstanding ballots are a pretty specific category; they're not just stragglers. California lets mail ballots postmarked by Election Day arrive up to seven days later and still count, and that's the main pipeline still open. The Public Policy Institute of California says that rule often gets blamed for slow counts, but it's baked into state law. L.A. County's registrar told NBCLA workers were caught up on mail ballots that physically arrived by Tuesday, so what's left is mostly that postmark-window mail, plus provisional ballots that still need signature verification. As for whether that helps one candidate, we don't have a precinct-level breakdown of the outstanding ballots. We do know from LAist that, with hundreds of thousands of votes still uncounted early this week, overall L.A. County turnout was around 23 percent, so the pile is big. And the UC Berkeley–LA Times poll from May 28, per CBS Los Angeles, had Bass at 26, Raman at 25, and Pratt at 22, all within the margin of error. So even a modest tilt in late mail could move the second-place line. So if we can't say for sure that late ballots favor one candidate, is there a structural reason the count itself takes this long beyond just waiting for the mail to arrive? Yes — NBC Los Angeles lays it out pretty plainly. Beyond the postmark window, every mail ballot has to go through signature verification before it can even be opened and counted, and that's manual, time-intensive work. L.A. County Registrar Dean Logan said last Tuesday that final numbers likely wouldn't be known for more than a week, per City News Service. So what we're watching isn't fraud, or delay for delay's sake. In a race this tight, the certified results could look meaningfully different from election night. Here's Westside Current:
LOS ANGELES— Officials moved Wednesday to speed up cleanups at problem properties, approving new rules that give the city a faster path to intervene when owners fail to address unsafe or nuisance conditions. The City Council voted 13-0 to strengthen the city’s nuisance property abatement process, cutting key deadlines and giving city departments broader authority to act when properties become sites of illegal activity, public safety concerns or repeated emergency calls.
So the council moved Wednesday on nuisance abatement — cutting the clock from thirty days to fifteen before the city can step in, and owners now get forty-five days to fix things instead of ninety. Unanimous on the floor. And here's the detail I keep circling: that ordinance lets the city order buildings vacated. Vacated. That word touches displacement directly, and neither Bass nor Pratt has said one syllable about which way they'd point this tool. Right, and it's Monica Rodriguez driving it — she frames it as a “cumbersome process,” which, fine. But a faster vacate order can land on a slumlord, or it can land on tenants in a building where the repairs don't get made. The mechanism doesn't care which. And notice who was absent — Raman and Yaroslavsky. So the sharpest density-and-displacement voice in that room wasn't even in the seat for the one housing-adjacent vote of the week. From Westside Current:
LOS ANGELES— The City's short-term rental program is getting more expensive to run — and officials want hosts to pay more of the bill. In a report submitted to the City Council, the Department of City Planning recommended raising fees on short-term rental hosts, including those using Airbnb, and increasing the city’s nightly home-sharing fee from $3.30 to $5.48.
City Planning wants to bump the nightly home-sharing fee from $3.30 to $5.48 — that's a 66% jump, and the whole rationale is that the current fees don't cover the cost of running the program. Enforcement isn't free, and somebody has to fund the staff who monitor listings. And it landed in PLUM on May 29 — referred, not voted on. So we've got a fee study quietly recommending who pays for short-term rental enforcement, and neither finalist in this mayoral race has said a word about it. $11,706 for a discretionary extended home-sharing application. That's a real number in a real report, and it tells you the city is deciding right now how much friction to put on pulling housing stock out of the long-term market. That's the part that gets me. This is a housing-supply lever — every Airbnb unit is one less unit on the rental market — and it's moving through committee while the mayoral race is still a count story. The candidates owe us a sentence on it. If Pratt's the November opponent with no zoning position on record, who's pressuring the council on the harder side of this? The fee study does the math; nobody up top has to defend it. Here's CalMatters:
This week’s elections in Los Angeles brought a bounty of good news to Mayor Karen Bass. She finished on top of a crowded field and secured a spot in the November run-off. Even more advantageously, she may get the opponent she hoped for. As of Wednesday afternoon, reality TV personality Spencer Pratt led Councilmember Nithya Raman by roughly 7 percentage points for the second spot.
So CalMatters comes right out and says it — this race benefits Bass, and I actually agree with the mechanics of it. But I want to get specific about why. If her November opponent is Spencer Pratt, a guy with no published zoning position, what policy pressure does Bass face? None. Right, and that's the part the piece nails. Pratt's at 30% with 62% counted — he's closer to his ceiling than his floor, per CalMatters. So you've got a finalist who maxed out on a vibe, not a housing plan. And here's what gnaws at me. The piece notes Bass had a “bounty of good news” this week. A candidate who cleared the primary without a majority has exactly zero incentive to turn her CHIP pipeline numbers into anything you could actually audit before November. Which is why the council scares me more than the mayor's race right now. While we're counting ballots, that body passed a 13-0 abatement vote and City Planning floated a 66% short-term rental fee hike. Governing's happening — and if Pratt's the opponent, nobody's pressing Bass on any of it. Two enforcement-flavored moves in one week. Zero zoning moves. And neither finalist has said a word about either. That's what this race is giving up — the piece says it denies LA a real debate, and I think that's the most honest line in it. Got a correction, a story idea, or a question you want us to chase down? Send it our way at lamayor2026 at lantern podcasts dot com. We’re always listening.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, you can spend a little more time with the original reporting there.
That’s LA Mayor 2026 for this Friday, June 5th. This is a Lantern Podcast.