Former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for re-election on Monday (May 4), according to the Los Angeles Times.

“Mayor Karen Bass is the leader Los Angeles needs right now, Harris said in a statement shared with the outlet. "She has done what so many said couldn’t be done — the first ever two-year decline in homelessness, reducing crime to levels this city hasn’t seen since the 1960s, and refusing to back down when the federal government came after our neighbors.”

The endorsement comes as Californians begin receiving ballots in the mail for upcoming elections, including the Los Angeles mayoral race. Bass was sworn in by Harris as Los Angeles’ 43rd mayor in 2022, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In 2024, during the Democratic National Convention, where Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, Bass spoke of her and Harris’s history of working together to tackle youth homelessness and the child welfare system, back when Harris was Attorney General of California.

Bass is facing several challengers in the race: Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, community organizer Rae Huang, and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller.

The most recent polling, conducted by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, shows Karen Bass in the lead with 25% support, Pratt with 11%, Raman with 9%, and both Huang and Adam Miller with 3%.

While Bass is ahead, 40% of voters said they were undecided, which is concerning some election experts, as a candidate needs 50% of the vote to win the race outright and avoid a runoff.

“It is unusual for 40% of likely voters to be unsure of their choice just two months before an LA mayoralty election,” Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, said in a statement. “Although Mayor Bass faces the most challenging reelection of an incumbent mayor in decades, it is highly likely that this election will be decided in a November runoff. A lot can change between now and then, so it’s a wide-open race.”

A previous poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies in March also found that 56% of likely voters viewed Bass unfavorably because of her response to the Palisades Fire in January 2025.

Bass had previously been criticized for attending a cocktail party in Ghana on January 7, 2025, when the fires began to spread more rapidly. At the time, she was a member of a Biden administration delegation to the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, per the LA Times.

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