UPDATE (June 8, 2026, 9:25 p.m. ET): Los Angeles Council member Nithya Raman will advance to the November general election in the mayoral race to face the incumbent, Karen Bass, after overtaking ex-reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the primary, The Associated Press projects.
President Donald Trump and some of his top allies are repeating a familiar but false refrain: An election is “rigged,” as evidenced by their preferred candidate’s poor performance.
This time, their focus is on ex-reality TV star and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt.
On the night of the Tuesday primary, Pratt maintained a 9-point lead over his closest challenger, LA Council member Nithya Raman, leading his supporters to believe he would proceed to the November runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. But as mail-in ballots trickled in throughout the week, Pratt’s lead over Raman steadily narrowed, and by Sunday night, she had overtaken him by less than 1 point, with more than 80% of votes counted, according to The Associated Press. (The AP has not yet projected the second-place finisher to proceed to the runoff as of Monday afternoon.)
To Trump and his MAGA allies, a democratic socialist’s surge over a registered Republican with no political experience in a deep-blue city can only be indicative of one thing: fraud.
“No way this could have happened. Rigged Election!” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Monday morning.
A few hours later, Trump followed up with another Truth Social post.
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” he wrote.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer, a close ally of the president, told her 1.9 million followers on X on Saturday that the election “is being stolen from [Pratt] in real time!”
Benny Johnson and Elon Musk have also reposted several right-wing accounts suggesting Raman’s rise must be the result of fraud. Meghan McCain, who is a conservative commentator but also a frequent Trump critic, also injected doubt into the election results.
But election experts are not surprised by Raman’s slow rise as vote counting continues.
Why California vote counting takes so long
A poll released by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Los Angeles Times in late May suggested Pratt and Raman would be competing neck-and-neck to proceed to the runoff, and several strategists long predicted Pratt — a registered Republican backed by MAGA — would face an uphill battle in the blue city.
The mechanics of how Angelenos’ votes are counted also explain Raman’s rise: California elections officials have 30 days from Election Day to come up with the vote count, and mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to seven days after the election are eligible to be counted. (If mail-in ballots are missing signatures or have signatures that do not match those on file, state law requires election officials to contact voters to verify their signatures, adding more time to the process.)
Results posted on election night are based on in-person ballots cast at voting locations, both on Election Day and before, as well as mail-in ballots received before Election Day, according to the California secretary of state’s office. Subsequent counts include votes cast by provisional ballots, ballots from voters who registered and voted on the same day and the mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days of the election.
“This is not unusual,” Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, told MS NOW on Monday regarding the shifting results in the race.
Yaroslavsky pointed to the 2022 LA primary, when Republican turned centrist Democrat Rick Caruso was ahead of Bass on primary night before she pulled ahead a week later. In the November runoff, Bass ultimately beat Caruso by nearly 10 points. Nearly 85% of voters also voted by mail in that primary, contributing to the delay in Bass’s rise.
“It’s clear, it has always been the case, that Republicans and more conservative voters vote early, [and] working people, more progressive people vote late,” Yaroslavsky said.
