LOS ANGELES — 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 race to succeed Mayor Eric Garcetti, with about 500,000 votes counted.
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 375,000 L.A. city votes remained to be counted before Thursday’s updated results were released.
All ballots postmarked by Nov. 8, 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 U.S. 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 Department of Water and Power and the LAPD.
