LA Squawk Box for Wednesday, June 3, 2026

City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto looks to be ousted, Controller Kenneth Mejia trounces Democratic Party backed Sokoloff, and additional ballot counting may change up the LA mayor's race top-two.

What’s happening today?

Election results will be posted later today after 4 p.m., according to the LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. You can find the update schedule here. The LA City Council and their Housing and Homelessness Committee are are meeting today.

What just happened?

Semi-final election results are in, but there are still many ballots left to count, which could mean that the election result standings reported on Election Night will change dramatically. In the city of Los Angeles, 399,147 ballots have been turned in, which is 18% of the vote, according to PDI’s tracker. In the 2022 primary, when the mayor’s race was last on the ballot, the turnout was 30%, with 662,514 ballots cast. (Further back in the 2017 election, the turnout was much lower at 431,896, but that was when LA city elections were not lined up to high turnout national elections.)

Election night on Tuesday was good to LA city’s incumbents, except for one.

In the LA mayor’s race, Mayor Karen Bass pulled results that makes her pretty confident that she’ll advance to a runoff in November. What’s more up in the air is who will end up joining her. On Tuesday night, the standings looked solidly like the top two to advance will be Bass, who ended the first day of counting with 34.78% of the votes, former reality TV personality and Palisade fire victim Spencer Pratt, with 30.44%. Council member Nithya Raman was in 3rd place, with 22.32%. Adam Miller took up the 4th place spot with 4% of the votes, while lefty candidate Rae Huang got 2.78%.

As Pratt did interviews Tuesday night that looked ahead to a runoff race with Bass, and with C-SPAN interpreting Raman’s election party speech as a “concession” (it was not), some are hoping future ballots will favor Raman and boost her past Pratt to put her into the runoff.

Those hopes are being placed onto the numerous ballots yet to be counted, and may swing things dramatically, especially for progressive candidates if past trends hold. In 2024, I wrote about how there could be stunning shifts between results reported out on election night, especially for progressive candidates, when all of the ballots have been accounted for. If the voter turnout is around what it was in 2022, then there could be more than 200,000 ballots left to count.

The most consequential result out of Tuesday night’s election could be the ousting of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. She came in third to the top two vote-getters, Marissa Roy and John McKinney. Roy, who is a progressive candidate, received 37% of the votes, followed by McKinney, who got around 33%. Feldstein Soto earned just under 20% of the votes, followed by Aida Ashouri, with 10%.

Feldstein Soto’s re-election bid was hobbled after her endorsement by the politically powerful police officers’ union was snatched from her by McKinney, when a data leak in her office came to light. She appears to be the sole incumbent in the LA city races who was having a terrible night.

In the City Controller’s race, Controller Kenneth Mejia was feeling relieved after cinching his re-election, to the point that he pulled out his dance moves at an election night party. Mejia spent the last few months fending off a Democratic Party backed challenger, Zach Sokoloff, who attempted to prevent Mejia from receiving matching funds by sitting out on a debate, and who got a $7.5 million boost from his mother via an independent expenditure committee that unleashed weeks of attack ads. Mejia won with a wide margin, scooping up 58.87% of the votes, leaving Sokoloff with 41.17%. In LA city elections, a candidate who receives more than 50% of the votes wins outright. Since there are only two candidates in the Controller’s race, the election is being decided in the June primary.

The 11th Council District race on the westside was another highly watched contest that was decided in favor of the incumbent, Traci Park. She was being challenged from the left by housing advocate Faizah Malik. Park commanded 65.33% of the votes, which left Malik to claim 34.67%.

Other incumbents were doing just fine after Tuesday, including two members of the LA City Council’s progressive bloc, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez. Both held onto more than 50% of the votes despite facing multiple challengers each, and they are expected to win their races outright. Hernandez was much closer to the line than Soto-Martinez, with just above 51% of the votes, but some supporters felt comfortable celebrating that due to the trend of later ballots leaning progressive.

Meanwhile, Katy Yaroslavsky, who represents the westside and holds a prominent role as the City Council’s budget chair, held onto her seat with ease. And LA City Council member Tim McOsker, who represents South Bay neighborhoods, had little trouble getting another term after pulling in 76.46% of the votes.

Jose Ugarte, a community outreach director, and Estuardo Mazariegos, director of a community organization, are sitting in the top two for Curren Price’s open council seat in South LA’s 9th District. And in the west San Fernando Valley race for Bob Blumenfield’s 3rd District seat, businessman Tim Gaspar and community advocate Barri Worth Girvan are positioned to head to a runoff.

Monica Rodriguez, who ran unopposed, won her seat before the election season had even unfurled. Nevertheless, based on the semi-final count, at least 20,991 voters filled in the bubble next to her name for good measure.