LOS ANGELES — Rep. Karen Bass moved closer to victory in the still-undecided Los Angeles mayor’s race Monday, with an updated tally of results showing the congresswoman leading real estate developer Rick Caruso 52.15% to 47.85% nearly a week after polls closed.
The results are not yet definitive and thousands of votes likely remain to be counted. But the latest release saw Bass continue to build her lead, with experts saying they struggled to see a path for Caruso to make up the ground ceded to Bass over the last several days of results. She would be the first woman elected mayor of Los Angeles, and only the second Black Angeleno to lead the city.
Bass now holds a 29,271-vote lead, according to the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office. Monday’s update heavily favored Bass, with the congresswoman taking in 63% of the more than 76,100 newly counted ballots. Votes cast in the city of Los Angeles accounted for about 40% of the latest tranche, which included 191,312 ballots in total.
“These results mean Karen Bass is on track to win the mayoralty of Los Angeles,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “For Caruso to win he would not only have to reverse this trend, but reverse it dramatically, winning the same percentage of votes she has recently taken. There has been no indication to believe he can do that.”
Although Caruso held a slight edge after election night, Bass has outpaced him in every tranche of results released since. The registrar-recorder’s office estimated Monday that 655,300 ballots from across the county remain to be counted, with city ballots making up an undetermined number of that total.
Raphael Sonenshein, director of the Pat Brown Center for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, said the vote totals appeared “to be moving in kind of an irrevocable direction” in Bass’ favor.
Paul Mitchell, a Democratic strategist and expert in voting patterns, said Monday that he couldn’t see a path to victory for Caruso based on the information currently available.
“The information we have now is that these are all late ballots, they’re geographically distributed throughout the city and there’s no reason to suggest that the next batch of ballots is going to be any different than the batch of ballots we just saw,” aside from marginal differences, Mitchell said.
At this point, “closing that gap would mean some astounding flip in these numbers, and there’s not really a intellectually credible reason to suggest why that could happen,” Mitchell said.
“I am honored and grateful for the support we are continuing to see. I am optimistic and looking forward to the next update,” Bass said in a statement. She was in Washington, D.C., Monday on congressional business, according to her campaign.
Caruso did not immediately comment on the latest tranche of results.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
