Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is leading the race to be re-elected despite a series of blunders and missteps during her time in office.
The former congresswoman, 72, is currently ahead in the polls for the mayorship she won in 2022, leading with 25 percent support among voters according to a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times poll.
Councilwoman Nithya Raman is in second place at 17 percent, with reality TV star Spencer Pratt registering at 14 percent with his campaign criticizing the Palisades Fire response.
Bass faced intense scrutiny for her handling of the wildfires in early 2025, which killed almost 20 people and caused more than $25 billion in damage.
The mayor was criticized for staying on a trip to Ghana for several days after the fires broke out, before it emerged that her city’s reservoirs were desperately short of water in the months leading up to the fires.
Ahead of election day on June 2, Bass remains within touching distance of her competition, with the top five rounded out by community organizer Rae Huang at eight percent and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller at six percent.
Over 25 percent of voters remain undecided in the race, according to the latest poll. If a candidate does not receive over 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates go to a run-off election in November.
If Bass were to lose her re-election, she would become the first Los Angeles Mayor to be voted out of office since 2005, with political analysts saying her lead looks vulnerable if her rivals can surge in name recognition before election day.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is leading the race to be re-elected despite a series of blunders and missteps during her time in office
Bass holds 25 percent support in the race, with reality TV star Spencer Pratt trailing her at 14 percent. Pratt has been a fierce critic of Bass’s handling of the Palisades Fire, which burned down his home (pictured)
Dan Schnur, a political communications lecturer at USC and UC Berkeley, told ABC7 that while Bass is ahead in the latest poll, she is far from secure in her re-election.
‘These are very discouraging, if not downright devastating, poll numbers for Karen Bass. She’s running ahead of her opponents, only because her opponents are not very well known,’ Schnur said.
‘Generally speaking, throughout history, Angelenos tend to re-elect their mayors. You have to go back more than 20 years, back to 2005, to find the last mayor, James Hahn, who was not re-elected to office,’ he noted.
‘So voters in Los Angeles tend to be pretty forgiving, even if they’re not seeing dramatic progress.
‘But this poll, and this election, isn’t about broader progress on issues like housing and homelessness.’
Schnur said the race is likely to be defined by voters’ assessments of Bass’s time in office, and her response to the Palisades Fire looks set to be a critical factor.
The poll found that just 31 percent of Los Angeles voters have a favorable opinion of the mayor, while 56 percent view her unfavorably.
Councilwoman Nithya Raman is in second place in the race for next Los Angeles mayor at 17 percent in the latest poll
Community organizer Rae Huang registered at eight percent support in the poll
Tech entrepreneur Adam Miller holds six percent support in the race
Bass’s tenure as Los Angeles mayor has been marked by a number of controversies and struggles, including criticisms of her handling of riots in her city in June 2025.
Protesters looted stores and rioted over Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, but Bass waited more than four days before instating curfews and deploying police to deal with the chaos.
The riots came just months after wildfires devastated the Los Angeles area, which saw Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom come under scrutiny for a perceived lack of quick action.
Earlier this year, Bass again came under criticism when the LA Fire Department released its report on the blaze that killed a dozen residents and destroyed more than 7,000 structures and homes.
Bass was accused of covering up her office’s actions throughout the 25-day fires, as an investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed there were a number of edits made in the report to downplay failures by city and fire department officials.
Two sources with insider information told the outlet that after receiving an early draft of the report, Bass told then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva that the report could expose the city to legal liabilities.
They said two people close to the mayor informed them how she wanted key findings about the LA Fire Department’s response to the massive blaze removed or softened before the report was made public.
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Should Los Angeles voters hold Karen Bass accountable for her wildfire and riot responses?
Pratt was inspired to run for mayor of LA after he and wife Heidi Montag lost their home in last year’s brutal Palisades Fire (they are pictured together in Las Vegas back in May 2025)
Pratt, whose home was burned down in the fires, has emerged as a fierce critic of the mayor in recent months as he launches his own run for her office.
And this month, internal polling for Bass warned that the reality TV star is her biggest threat in the race.
An email was sent on Thursday by the Bass campaign advisor Douglas Herman to ‘interested parties’ as it stated that the campaign’s internal pollster, Binder Research, currently shows Pratt in the position to challenge Bass in the November election runoff election according to TMZ.
The letter also reportedly cautioned that LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is a progressive candidate that entered the race late and is widely viewed as a key challenger, could topple Bass.
Campaign advisor Herman argued that Raman is not even close to being at the level of newly-elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani when it comes to ‘name awareness (and) unified base of favorable appeal’ in LA.
The 2026 Los Angeles Mayoral election will be held on June 2, 2026 and could be won by a candidate receiving more than 50 percent of the vote.
If 50 percent is not reached than it will move to a runoff between the top two candidates during the general election in November.
The Daily Mail has contacted Bass for comment.
