Bass Extends Lead Over Caruso to More Than 36,000 Votes in Los Angeles Mayoral Race
Rep. Karen Bass widened her advantage over developer Rick Caruso to 52.55% to 47.45% in the latest county vote update, one week after election day.
By Amy Swan ·
U.S. Rep. Karen Bass added to her already sizable lead in the Los Angeles mayoral race on Tuesday, moving more than 5 percentage points ahead of businessman Rick Caruso a week after election day.
According to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's office, Bass now leads 52.55% to 47.45%, a margin of 36,349 votes. The latest batch of roughly 33,000 newly counted ballots went heavily her way, with the congresswoman from South Los Angeles taking more than 60% of them.
It was the fifth consecutive update in which Bass gained ground on Caruso. Most election observers have said the trend appears all but certain to make her the first woman elected mayor of Los Angeles.
Since Thursday, Bass has kept a margin of roughly 60% to 40% or better in each daily release of vote totals. The pattern echoes the June primary, when Caruso opened a 5-point lead on election night before mail-in ballots, which are mostly counted later, carried Bass to a 7% win.
The shift also reflects a national pattern in which progressive Democrats such as Bass drew most of their winning votes from the mail. Bass is a lifelong Democrat. Caruso re-registered with the party shortly before this year's election, saying he had grown disillusioned with the Republican Party's sharp turn to the right.
The lead changed hands three times in the hours after polls closed on Nov. 8, and Caruso was ahead by 2.5 points on Wednesday morning. Every release of voting data from county officials since then has favored Bass, who moved into the lead on Friday.
The newest figures came a day after three experts in electoral politics said it was difficult to imagine a path for Caruso, 63, to overtake Bass, 69. Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said Bass was "on track to win the mayoralty of Los Angeles."
Raphael Sonenshein, director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, said the vote totals appeared "to be moving in kind of an irrevocable direction" in Bass' favor.
Source: Los Angeles Times
