Bass Won the June Primary. Now She's Down 11 Points.

A UC Berkeley survey of 2,150 likely voters puts Nithya Raman at 39% and Karen Bass at 28%.

Nithya Raman, a Los Angeles city councilmember, leads Mayor Karen Bass 39% to 28% among likely voters with under six weeks left in the mayor's race. The survey is from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, and FOX 11 Los Angeles reported the toplines. Pollsters reached 2,150 likely voters online between September 15 and September 20, 2026, at a margin of error near 3 percentage points.

A third of those voters — 33% — haven't picked anyone. They're the ones deciding who runs City Hall through the fire rebuild, and who the city hears from the next time federal immigration agents work a block of it.

The number that explains the race isn't the horse race at all. It's the favorability line: 63% of respondents view Bass unfavorably, against 39% for Raman. An unfavorable that size isn't a position on an issue. It's a verdict on a job.

Run the arithmetic against June. Bass finished first in the primary with 34% to Raman's 29%, five points up. She's eleven down now. That's a 16-point swing in three months, and no public-safety plank in the history of consulting moves a number like that.

My argument is that the eleven points are a bill, and the charges on it are the raids and the rebuild. Both were moments when a mayor could stand in front of the city or manage the paperwork behind it, and Bass chose the clipboard both times. Competence is real and voters can't see it. What they can see is who showed up to say no on their behalf, and a mayor who governs like an administrator gives them nothing to remember. "Experience" isn't an argument you can print on a mailer.

So if the counsel inside her campaign is to run harder at crime, that counsel hands Raman the race. It concedes that the last year was about safety rather than about whether the mayor defended anyone, and it spends the final weeks arguing on ground where 63% of the city has already stopped listening.

Now the strongest case against all of that, which I'd rather name than let somebody else name for me. One poll is one poll. A September survey with a huge undecided share has been wrong about an L.A. mayoral race before, and this one's undecideds are enormous: 33% overall, and 63% of the voters who backed Spencer Pratt in the June primary still haven't chosen, per the reported results. Bass's fundraising and her institutional endorsements are real, and in a low-turnout runoff both matter.

They matter less than people think here. Money buys contact, not a new record, and no endorsement talks two-thirds of a city out of an opinion it already formed by watching. The toplines show the movement, not the cause of it — nobody gets to read the reason off a crosstab that isn't in front of them.

Both candidates are scheduled for the Jewish Los Angeles Mayoral Forum in West Los Angeles on September 29, organized by Jewish Federation Los Angeles. Back-to-back conversations, not a shared stage. It's still the next time each of them has to answer out loud.

Source: foxla.com, retrieved September 23, 2026.