Karen Bass cuts into Rick Caruso’s slim lead in L.A. mayor’s race

The Los Angeles mayor’s race has grown tighter, with businessman Rick Caruso now ahead of U.S. Rep. Karen Bass by just 2,695 votes, down from his 12,282-vote advantage a day earlier, according to new vote totals released Thursday afternoon. That gave Caruso 50.25% of the vote to Bass’ 49.75%.

Going into the day, Caruso held a 2.5-percentage-point lead in the campaign to succeed Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Roughly 545,000 votes have been counted in the mayor’s race, according to Thursday’s update. It is unclear how many uncounted votes remain, since ballots postmarked by election day are still arriving.

Experts have said they expect it to take a week or more after election day for a winner to be determined. In the June primary, Bass trailed Caruso by 5% in election-night tallies. One week later Bass went ahead, eventually winning by 7% of the vote.

The lead changed hands three times after the polls closed Tuesday night, with Caruso pushing to the narrow advantage in vote totals reported in the wee hours Wednesday morning.

The L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office estimated Wednesday that it still needed to tabulate more than 1 million ballots — 985,000 vote-by-mail, 21,000 conditional voter registration ballots and several hundred provisional ballots were left to tabulate.

The registrar did not say what portion of those ballots came from the city of Los Angeles, but Paul Mitchell, an expert in voting patterns closely monitoring the race, estimated that about 37.5% of the remaining ballots were from Los Angeles city voters. That would mean roughly 325,000 L.A. city votes remained to be counted, figuring in the roughly 50,000 added to the tally Thursday.

In L.A.’s down-ballot contests, the results did not see significant change.

City attorney candidate Hydee Feldstein Soto maintained her double-digit lead over attorney Faisal Gill. She now has nearly 58% of the vote, to Gill’s 42%, according to Thursday’s latest batch of results.

Labor organizer Hugo Soto-Martinez widened his lead slightly over Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, who was running for a third term in an Echo Park-to-Hollywood district. Soto-Martinez now has 53%, to O’Farrell’s 47%.

In the race to replace Councilmember Mike Bonin, attorney Traci Park held onto a 10-point lead over attorney Erin Darling, in a district stretching from Los Angeles International Airport north to Pacific Palisades.

On the Westside, political aide Katy Young Yaroslavsky was still well ahead of attorney Sam Yebri in the race to replace Councilmember Paul Koretz. And in the city’s harbor district, attorney Tim McOsker continued to hold a massive lead over former neighborhood council member Danielle Sandoval.

McOsker had 65%, compared with 35% for Sandoval, in the race to replace Councilmember Joe Buscaino, Thursday’s results showed.

Despite holding on to such a large margin, McOsker said he had no announcement to make. “I will keep watching the returns with everyone else,” he said.

In the race for city controller, certified public accountant Kenneth Mejia has already declared victory and Koretz, his opponent, has conceded.

All ballots that were postmarked by election day are eligible to be counted. The registrar’s office reported to Mitchell that it received 300,000 mail-in ballots on Wednesday alone.

Polls showed Bass, 69, as the front-runner since she entered the race in September 2021. The onetime community organizer served as California Assembly speaker and for the last 11 years has represented a South Los Angeles district in the House of Representatives.

Caruso, 63, was far behind when he first entered the race in February. But a record $100 million in spending, most of it Caruso’s own money, propelled him into the general election contest with Bass.

The businessman built a fortune as the developer of retail complexes including the Grove and Americana at Brand. He previously served on commissions overseeing the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Los Angeles Police Department.