Three candidates are locked in a battle for the mayoralty of Los Angeles, and only two will walk out of the June primary. Mayor Karen Bass is fighting for her political life against a city soured on her tenure. Councilmember Nithya Raman, the wonkish progressive DSA member without a DSA endorsement, is trying to consolidate the left while breaking into voters from the liberal mainstream. And Spencer Pratt, the reality-TV provocateur running an AI-fueled grievance campaign, is betting that Trumpian crime panic resentment still has a base in a deep-blue city, given Bass’ institutional weaknesses.
Polling behind the big three are Reverend Rae Huang, running a purist grassroots socialist campaign, and Adam Miller, running as a tech CEO with a Silicon Valley technocrat approach to homelessness. In Los Angeles’ jungle primary, any two of Bass, Raman, and Pratt could reasonably advance to face off in the general election, and much will depend on how well they can defend their voting bases against each other and against the two more marginal candidates.
But the race will not be decided citywide, but rather among the distinct political geographies that make up Los Angeles, neighborhood by neighborhood. By looking at these different political demographies, we are creating an informed, data-driven analysis of the race and the key factors that might affect who ultimately makes it to Los Angeles’ general election mayoral ballot.
Mapping Los Angeles
The three blocs in this story aren't our invention; they emerge from the data. We grouped more than a thousand Los Angeles census tracts by how they have voted across recent elections, from presidential primaries to the 2022 mayor's race to a handful of city ballot measures, letting tracts that vote alike cluster together. That yielded 11 political neighborhoods, which collapse into three blocs: Liberal LA, Conservative LA, and Left LA.
A cursory look at a map of Los Angeles in a traditional partisan election shows an almost monolithically Democratic city. But that masks the deep political divides within the city, cleaved by race, class, and fundamentally what kind of city people want to live in. These divides are reflected in presidential primaries, city elections, and particularly in ballot measures. These results show a city with several distinct political communities, with huge differences in opinion on redistribution, trust in institutions, and particularly attitudes towards crime and law enforcement. Ballot measures related to crime, and elections for positions like District and City Attorney, show some of the deepest divides in LA politics.
Each cluster has a consistent signature. Left LA, with Echo Park and Silver Lake's "Commie Corridor" at its core, gave Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and 2022 left mayoral candidate Gina Viola their highest shares in the city. Conservative LA, anchored by the San Fernando Valley suburbs and San Pedro, posted the city's highest Trump numbers in 2020 and 2024. Liberal LA, historically the largest bloc, runs from Black LA through the heavily Latino neighborhoods that formed Karen Bass's 2022 base.
To estimate each candidate's strength neighborhood by neighborhood, the model does not read support off past election results. Instead, it takes recent polling crosstabs showing how each candidate performs by race, age, education, and party, then projects those patterns onto each neighborhood's demographic makeup. It adds the 2022 Gina Viola mayoral vote as a geographic proxy for where the organized left concentrates, something clearly present in the clustering, but which polls alone cannot locate. Those neighborhood estimates are then calibrated to the latest citywide poll and weighted by an assumed June-primary electorate.
From that base demographically-generated map, we can then tune for different turnout scenarios, or scale up a candidate’s support within a particular cluster to see how it would affect the final outcome.
Bloc One
Conservative Los Angeles
Conservative LA is the largest of the city's three political worlds by sheer numbers — its three subclusters, strung across the San Fernando Valley and down to the harbor, hold roughly 40% of Los Angeles's citizen voting-age population, more eligible voters than either Liberal or Left LA. Conservative LA doesn’t outright vote Republican, but it’s in these areas that Republican candidates win their best results and where the most conservative Democrats win big. These neighborhoods handed Rick Caruso a near-majority (about 49%) in the 2022 mayoral primary, against just 37% citywide. Donald Trump pulled roughly 37% in 2024, nearly half again his 25% citywide share. The organized left barely registers here: socialist protest candidate Gina Viola drew under 4% in 2022, about half her citywide rate. Although the bloc is largest by sheer numbers, the region’s high rate of conservatism means it may not turn out as strongly as Liberal and Left Los Angeles without the enthusiasm of voting for Trump – it historically turns out about 5% above average for presidential general elections (~42% of the voting electorate) and 7% below average in primaries (~38%). One major question this Tuesday will be whether Spencer Pratt’s AI-fueled campaign can replicate some of that Trumpian enthusiasm, or whether Los Angeles’ conservatives are overwhelmed by the national environment and anti-Trump Blue Wave turnout.
Multiracial Homeowner Conservatives
The lion’s share of conservative votes are in this large cluster that spans the majority of the San Fernando Valley and San Pedro. Only 44% of its residents are renters, and the conservatism of homeownership drives its politics. This region delivered Donald Trump his highest percentage among our clusters both in 2020 (32.4%) and 2024 (38.1%). This cluster makes up about 25% of the citywide voting-eligible population, and any scenario with Spencer Pratt making the general election requires him to run up the score by motivating turnout in these neighborhoods.
The Haute Moderates
These are the wealthy Westside moderates, taking in Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, the streets around Beverly Hills, and the Orthodox Jewish precincts in Miracle Mile. It is, by far, the richest cluster in Los Angeles at $170,000 in median income, 73% white, 72% college-educated, and only 30% renter – the lowest in the city. Though Kamala Harris still won the cluster overall, this cluster gave Trump 31.8% in 2020 and 37.5% in 2024. It represents Michael Bloomberg's strongest base with 20% voteshare (vs 10% citywide), gave Rick Caruso 56% in the last mayor's race, strongly backed City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto and District Attorney Nathan Hochman, and was the only cluster in the city to pick the establishment's Paul Koretz over progressive Kenneth Mejia. They also posted by far the city's lowest support for rent control, along with majorities for both the gig-economy carve-out in Proposition 22 and the tougher sentencing in Proposition 36. This is the city’s highest concentration of what you might call ideological centrists, high-turnout swing voters with a coherent ideology. Economically libertarian and reflexively NIMBY, if they’re not too turned off by his antics and select Miller, this is where the Pratt campaign’s fury at the city's fire response lands hardest. But while this cluster is full of high-propensity voters, it only represents about 4.4% of the city’s total voting-age population. Pratt will need to clean up here, but it won’t power him to victory.
The Latino Suburban Populists
The most confounding part of Conservative LA is the suburban Latino Populists: the north San Fernando Valley neighborhoods of Sylmar and Pacoima joined with the renter- (and Latino-) neighborhoods of Northwest San Pedro. Unlike the other two conservative clusters, this cluster is relatively renter-dense (65%), moderate-income (median household income $69k), and young (50% of voting age population under 45). This cluster is perhaps best defined as “generalized populist” politically: it strongly supported Bernie Sanders in 2020, Kenneth Mejia in 2022, and Katie Porter (!) for the 2024 senate seat (26%, the highest cluster in the city), but also strongly supported the “crime panic” Proposition 36 by 68%, effectively on par with the rest of Conservative LA. This cluster delivered Caruso a majority in the primary and had an 11-point swing towards Trump between 2020 and 2024 (from 22.4% to 32.2%). With MAGA falling out of favor among the non-white voters who voted for Trump in 2024, these neighborhoods will be a key bellwether for how strong 2026’s blue wave national political environment will be in LA. If Pratt’s vote share is able to track closer to Caruso or Trump 2024 numbers, he’s likely on track for a general election appearance. If it falls below 30%, then Trump’s fascist unpopularity has rubbed too much stink onto Pratt.
Playa/Westchester Moderates
Closely related to the Haute Moderates, the bloc's strangest member is also its smallest: a tight cluster of eight tracts around Westchester, Playa del Rey, and Playa Vista, hard by LAX. By partisanship they distinguish themselves from the Haute Moderates with their fierce Democratic Party loyalty: Kamala Harris took roughly three-quarters of the vote here and Donald Trump barely cracked 23%. What lands them in Conservative LA is structure, not party. They are the bloc's second-richest cluster (about $167K median income), heavily white, dominated by homeowners, and on the down-ballot, homeowner-inflected voting that drives the clustering, they sit right alongside the Haute Moderates and the Valley homeowners rather than with the renter-left. The organized left is nearly absent (Gina Viola drew about 3%). They are barely 1% of the city's eligible voters, too small to decide anything citywide, but they are a clean example of the model finding an affluent, moderate-Democratic homeowner type that party labels alone would misfile.
Bloc Two
Liberal Los Angeles
The largest chunk of Los Angeles, its political center, is a sprawling variety of multiracial establishment liberalism, the Status Quo Coalition. Fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party, liberal Los Angeles is a shifting battleground where business and labor interests mingle and battle. Forged out of the labor organizing battles of the 1990s that flipped Los Angeles and all of California permanently blue, the political machines of Democratic Los Angeles have formed themselves more around ethnic blocs and institutional loyalties rather than clear class lines.
The Westside Liberals
Spanning a large majority of Los Angeles’ West Side and up through the Hollywood Hills and Sherman Oaks, this is one of the largest clusters and most consistent high-information voters. The region is 65% college-educated, 65% renter, and 54% non-Hispanic white, and distinguishes itself with its strong support for Elizabeth Warren (22.2%) while Bernie Sanders underperformed in 2020, for Adam Schiff (Senate) in 2024, and for Hydee Feldstein Soto in the city attorney race in 2022. These voters are staunchly socially liberal, voting 83% to codify gay marriage, among the highest rates in the city. In the 2022 mayoral race, these liberals broke decisively for Karen Bass in both the primary and the general elections, solidifying her victory. These voters are ideological liberals and committed institutionalists, loyal to the Democratic Party, hostile to the right, and skeptical of radical change.
Nithya Raman will be pushing to take a significant percentage of these voters between her detailed policy expertise and Bass’s scandals in office. If Raman can take a clear plurality of the Westside, she has a good hold on the runoff. On the other hand, if too many former Bass voters are scared off by Raman’s progressivism, we may see Miller take away a significant vote share.
(Historically) Black Los Angeles
These neighborhoods comprise historically Black Los Angeles, from Mid City through Crenshaw, Leimert Park, most of South Central, and Watts. Nowadays, the region is supermajority Latino (61%) by population, but only a plurality (46%) of the voting-age population, and still contains the largest Black voting-age population (39%) and represents the heart of the city’s Black Democratic establishment. Black voters still likely make up a majority of the primary electorate. This is Karen Bass’ home turf, the neighborhoods she represented in Congress for a decade, the party-loyal voters that voted for Biden in the March 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, and consistently give Republicans some of their lowest vote shares in the city.
Bass won this region with a commanding 60% of the vote in 2022’s primary. She likely won’t hit quite those same numbers this time around, but if she’s not pushing 50% in these areas by the time the vote is fully counted, the incumbent mayor is in trouble.
Si Se Puede
These neighborhoods– Boyle Heights, Westlake, Pico-Union, and Historic South Central– are the political geography most defined by the low-income labor organizing battles of the 1990s that mobilized Latinos both at the workplace and in defense of migrant justice.
Many of the neighborhoods that were once solidly of the Latino-Labor machine have now been recast as Left LA, between the demographic trends of gentrification and the increasing intertwining of the city’s labor movement and its socialist and tenants movements. What remains in these neighborhoods are the areas that are still strongly loyal to the Latino labor political machines. They remain overwhelmingly (85%!) Latino, 83% renter, and the lowest median income in the city, with a large number of undocumented and impoverished residents. Effective political communication in these areas happens primarily in Spanish, notable compared to the other clusters.
Politically, Si Se Puede is defined by its strong support for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary, its extremely low support for Elizabeth Warren, and its support for Kevin de León in the 2022 mayoral primary. When socialists Eunisses Hernandez and Ysabel Jurado took on older labor machine candidates in Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, these are the neighborhoods that stayed loyal to their past candidates.
Though Bass lost these areas in the 2022 primary election, organized labor solidifying behind her for the general election shored up her victory among Latino voters in November. With Labor behind Bass once again, she will want to hold an 8-10 point lead in these regions to feel comfortable. If Raman or Pratt is going to take a majority over Bass come November, they’ll need to make progress among liberal Latino voters, and that’ll show most clearly here.
Bloc Three
Left LA
Left LA is the smallest of the city's three political worlds — its four clusters, packed into the dense renter corridors that ring Downtown and climb the eastern hills, hold just under 22% of the city's citizen voting-age population. But what it lacks in size it makes up for in intensity. This is the organized heart of the city's left, the gentrified and gentrifying central and eastside neighborhoods that hold the most organized tenants unions and DSA members and make up the core base that elected socialists Hugo Soto-Martinez, Eunisses Hernandez, and Ysabel Jurado to council.
Nithya Raman’s district also includes parts of Left LA with Los Feliz and the Silver Lake hills, and if she’s going to make the runoff, she’s going to need to run up the score over Karen Bass in these neighborhoods while keeping Reverend Rae Huang from taking too much of her vote share.
Commie Corridor
“Commie Corridor” was coined by Michael Lange to describe the core New York City DSA neighborhoods that powered Zohran Mamdani to victory last year in the piece that directly inspired this. Meet Los Angeles’ Corridor: Echo Park, Silver Lake, East Hollywood, Atwater Village, and the renter blocks of Los Feliz are the ideological core of the city's left, the neighborhoods with the highest DSA member density, and the center of DSA Los Angeles’ major municipal victories so far. In the 2020 primary, Nithya Raman’s first DSA-endorsed council campaign won 57% vs 40% district wide. In 2022, Eunisses Hernandez outran her district-wide 55% with a 68% result in the Corridor. A majority of Hugo Soto-Martinez’ CD13 is in the Commie Corridor, and it gave him a 45% return in the primary (vs 40% district wide). Ysabel Jurado’s district barely overlaps with Commie Corridor, but in those tracts she outran her district-wide performance by 15 points.
This is the most left-wing primary electorate in Los Angeles, full stop. It delivered the highest combined Warren+Sanders percentage in 2020, with Biden and Bloomberg near their citywide lows (about 15% and 5%). Only here did Gina Viola reach nearly 20%, and Kenneth Mejia’s anti–police-money campaign hit a citywide-best 68% in the primary, and maintained steadfast support for reformist District Attorney George Gascon through 2024 (67%). The district showed the lowest support in the city for both Uber’s Prop 22 (36%) and Prop 36 (41%). It is where the Raman–Huang contest is most concentrated: the largest, densest left vote in the city. If Huang is going to pull any surprises, she’ll need to win a high percentage of these voters.
Multiracial Urban Professionals
This cluster is six scattered districts that share a population of students, recent grads, and early-career renters: USC and Expo Park, Downtown, Hollywood, North Hollywood, and Palms. It is genuinely mixed (33% white, 30% Latino, 19% Asian, 10% Black), overwhelmingly tenant (92% renters), and highly educated (54% with a degree), with the second-highest rent-control support in the city (71% for Prop 21). Sanders took just over 50% here, Mejia 56%, and the cluster broke against both Prop 22 (44%) and crime panic Prop 36 (47%). It is transient and low-propensity, so its weight on Tuesday depends heavily on whether these renters turn out.
Multiracial Progressive Tenants
Koreatown, Thai Town, Filipinotown, and Historic Filipinotown: the immigrant, working-renter left. It holds one of the highest renter rates in the entire city (92.9%, behind only Pico-Union), the lowest income in the bloc ($57K), and a heavily Latino and Asian population (47% and 31%). It backed Sanders at 60%, Mejia (primary) at 55%, and rent-control measure Prop 21 a whopping 69%. But its opposition to Prop 36 ran to a more moderate 55%, a reminder that the working-class immigrant left is less reflexively anti-carceral than the Commie Corridor up the hill. These neighborhoods are distinct from the rest of Left-LA by taking more of a left-populist bent, strongly supporting redistributive ballot measures and more overtly anti-establishment candidates like Sanders or Mejia, while showing considerably less support for more institutional progressive candidates like Elizabeth Warren or Karen Bass in the 2022 runoff. Also, Koreatown’s ethnically loyal voting population delivered city-best rates for Korean candidate for City Attorney Richard Kim and notably-not-Korean Senate candidate Barbara Lee.
Gentrifying Northeast LA
Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glassell Park, and Mt. Washington: the Commie Corridor "lite," softened by homeownership. Still Latino-plurality (48%) but increasingly white and Asian, with the bloc's highest income ($103K) and a near-even tenure split (49% renters). Sanders cleared 52% and Mejia 61%, and it leaned hard against Prop 22 (42%), split almost evenly on the Prop 36 crime measure (50%), and maintained majority support for George Gascon in 2024. These precincts are staunchly progressive, but to a far less intense degree than the deep Commie Corridor. Raman will need to win here handily to make the general election in November.
Synthesis: where the race breaks
Put the three cities together and the shape of the race comes into focus.
The mayoral election has three leading candidates, each associated with one of these three broader coalitions in Los Angeles politics. As the city changes, and as more and more people are unsatisfied with the direction of the city, Conservative LA and Left LA have grown and asserted themselves politically at the expense of Liberal LA. On Tuesday (and over the coming weeks as ballots are counted), we will see one more step in this process, perhaps a decisive one.