By Erika D. Smith | Updated on Jun 11, 2026 at 12:30 PM
President Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent when it comes to election results he doesn’t like. And so it has been with California: When the Republican running for Los Angeles mayor failed to advance in last week’s primary, Trump doubled down on baseless conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots.
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week. “3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!”
Trump is wrong for many reasons, not the least of which is that he’s mischaracterizing how California’s ( yes, agonizingly slow ) vote-counting process works. Mostly, though, he’s wrong because Pratt never really stood a chance.
Los Angeles is a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly 3-to-1, and the results of last week’s primary suggest that the city is getting bluer. How blue? Enough that it could soon become the new standard-bearer for West Coast progressivism — a mantle that has long belonged to San Francisco.
Consider that in LA, voters in last week’s primary didn’t just pass on Pratt, whose claim to fame is being an influencer who played the villain on MTV’s “The Hills.” Voters also chose to elevate Nithya Raman, a democratic socialist City Council member who has drawn comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani since deciding to run against LA’s incumbent Democratic mayor, Karen Bass.
It wasn’t just Raman either. Six other democratic socialist-aligned candidates also advanced in their primary races, both for City Council and for school board. Perhaps most tellingly, two of the candidates won big citywide, including Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general who led the race for LA city attorney, ousting the incumbent Democrat.
And lest anyone think the primary was merely a referendum on incumbents, three of the winning progressives were incumbents. That includes Kenneth Mejia, an anti-establishment populist who was reelected city controller by roughly 45 percentage points.
Taken together, these races accelerate a shift leftward that has been underway in LA’s Democratic political circles since at least the earliest days of the pandemic. In many ways, it’s a shift that began with Raman , who waged a longshot campaign to become the first democratic socialist on the City Council in 2020. An urban planner with degrees from Harvard and MIT, she helped clear a path for other progressives to follow suit.
Since then, the bloc has worked to change the political conversation in LA, convincing their more moderate colleagues to go along with capping rent increases for nearly half of the city’s residents, imposing a $30-an-hour minimum wage for airport and hotel workers ( though it has been delayed ), and expanding a program to send unarmed mental health professionals to some emergency calls instead of police.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles north in San Francisco, Democratic politics have been moving steadily toward the moderate middle. During the pandemic, voters ousted progressive school board members and the city’s progressive prosecutor. Later, they elected centrist Democrat Daniel Lurie, heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, as mayor.
In last week’s primary election, progressives lost again. Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, failed to advance in the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi and represent San Francisco in Congress. Also, in a win for Lurie and business groups, voters rejected a citywide ballot measure that would have raised taxes on corporations with CEOs that make dramatically more than their workers.
“LA does definitely seem to be moving in a different direction than San Francisco,” Mike Bonin, a former City Council member who now leads the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, told me this week.
Some might argue that San Francisco is moving in a better direction than Los Angeles, given the former city’s success with reducing street homelessness and open-air drug use. Also, 74% of San Franciscans approve of Lurie, while Bass is viewed unfavorably by 57% of likely voters, according to recent polling.
Voters in both cities seem to be reacting to frustrations with the failures of the political establishment, as voters have done nationally. That Democrats in San Francisco have moved right while they’ve moved left in LA likely reflects the vastly different demographics of the cities and, as such, their different priorities, Bonin says.
San Francisco is a city of much wealthier residents than it was during its progressive heyday, reshaped by tech money and filled with gentrifying neighborhoods that longtime Black and Latino residents can no longer afford. Los Angeles, meanwhile, continues to be a more diverse and largely working-class city.
For Bass, LA’s ongoing shift leftward may prove to be particularly challenging. Early primary election returns show Raman leading in parts of the city dominated by renters and younger residents who tend to lean more progressive. Bass won many of these same neighborhoods in the last mayoral election.
A recent poll from UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found that in a runoff between Raman and Bass, the former would lead 32% to 28% . With more than 95% of the primary ballots counted as of Tuesday, Bass, perhaps coincidentally, was leading Raman by 4 percentage points.
Bass seems to understand that, as an incumbent running against a democratic socialist, she has been automatically remanded to the moderate middle. In her messaging so far, she has embraced this role, touting her support for hiring more police officers and clearing more homeless encampments.
Whether America’s two largest cities are ultimately led by democratic socialists could come down to whether she can sell that message in an increasingly unforgiving political environment. At least Bass, being a Democrat, has a better chance than Pratt ever did.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
Want more Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN <GO>. Or subscribe to our daily newsletter .