Democratic Party favorite Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) has taken the lead from billionaire developer Rick Caruso (D) in the race for mayor of Los Angeles as ballots continued to be counted.
Caruso had a slender lead on Election Night, but as mail-in ballots have come in, Bass has edged to a narrow lead. With two-thirds of the vote counted as of Saturday night, according to the Los Angeles Times, Bass has 50.8% of the vote, and Caruso has 49.2%.
Bass ran a traditional Democratic campaign, reaching out to the party’s various interest groups and ethnic constituencies.
Caruso ran an insurgent campaign that appealed directly to residents concerned about crime, homelessness, and the high cost of living. He outspent Bass heavily, using his own money to run advertisements that reached millions of voters.
The race was neck-and-neck in the final weeks, with Caruso even taking the lead in at least one poll. But the party machinery of the Democrats, masters at turning out the vote (especially in the vote-by-mail era), appears to have kicked in, and Caruso could not depend on help from the Republican Party he left behind.
The race is still too close to call, but insiders expect that a final result could come as early as Tuesday. However, some analysts caution that the counting could still take another week or so.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
