Episode Details

Mike, Godfrey, and guest co-host Jasmyne Cannick discuss the promise and perils of the LA mayoral runoff between Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. Plus, the fake controversy over California’s ballot counting process, and LA’s City Council is poised to ditch years of effort to reform the city’s charter.

How bad will the mayoral runoff be? The LA Times reports on a likely “knife fight” between now and November 3. Jasmyne writes that the “Democratic group chat is about to get messy”

Bass kicked off her general election campaign with a broadside at Raman, indicating she intends to hit Raman on police hiring and homeless encampments.

Raman, meanwhile, held a press conference, outlining her vision and appealing to the frustrations of supporters of Spencer Pratt

Pratt, who promised to leave LA if he lost the mayor’s race, has apparently changed his mind. Friday afternoon he dropped a 3-minute video attacking Bass and Raman in his typical over-the-top fashion, and claiming he has a private recording of one of them making remarks that will force them to resign in disgrace

Mike, on his most recent episode of What’s Next, Los Angeles, talked about the way the candidates are framing the race, and what that could mean for their governing coalitions and their agenda in office 

The data analysts have been crunching numbers and creating all sorts of reports on how subsections of the electorate broke in the June primary. Raman carried renters, according to Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc. Bass dominated in Latino neighborhoods, according to the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times published an updated map of the city, showing which candidates prevailed in which neighborhoods

If you want to go deep on the data, Mitchell has launched a fascinating experimental website that combines LA County 2026 primary election results with voter-file data to provide detailed analysis of nearly every race, including precinct maps, demographic correlations, ecological inference modeling, and candidate-to-candidate voting pattern comparisons. Mitchell also

Listen Now