Bass leads by 36,000 votes over Caruso in LA mayoral election

Rep. Karen Bass again expanded her lead over developer Rick Caruso Tuesday in the race to be Los Angeles’ next mayor, with an advantage of more than 36,000 votes, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.

Bass led by just under 30,000 votes after Monday’s update. An additional 92,776 ballots were added to the tally Tuesday for a total of nearly 1.9 million ballots counted so far, with Bass now holding a 53% to 47% lead.

An estimated 655,300 ballots were left to be processed after Monday’s update, according to the clerk’s office, but it was unclear how many of the uncounted votes are from the city of Los Angeles.

The last five updates after Election Day have all resulted in gains for Bass, who took the lead in the vote count on Friday and has expanded it since.

“I am honored and grateful for the support we are continuing to see,” Bass said Monday in a statement on Twitter. “I am optimistic and looking forward to the next update.”

“As predicted, this is a close race,” Caruso said last week. “There are hundreds of thousands of votes to count and as expected we are going to see different results each time. I continue to be cautiously optimistic about these numbers and look forward to the next series of results in the coming weeks.”

Bass, a six-term member of Congress, is seeking to become the first woman and only the second Black person to lead Los Angeles. Caruso, a billionaire developer, is looking to win a campaign that was on track to spend more than $100 million — much of it from Caruso’s own fortune — to propel him into office.

The winner will inherit leadership of a city grappling with a worsening homelessness crisis and a scandal that has embroiled City Hall for the past month, after three council members and a top county labor official took part in a leaked conversation in October 2021 that included racist comments and attempts to manipulate redistricting.

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