After winning the June primary for Los Angeles mayor by 7 percentage points, new polling shows California Rep. Karen Bass with a double-digit lead over her rival in the runoff, a deep-pocketed law-and-order former Republican advised by a powerhouse team.
With weeks to go, California strategists are reluctant to call the race for Bass over mall magnate Rick Caruso, a political newcomer bent on “cleaning up” the city who hopes to capture frustrated voters in the liberal enclave who have grown tired of Democrats’ light-handed approach to brazen crime.
Any day now, California Democrats expect the billionaire backed by Hollywood mainstays, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Kim Kardashian, Snoop Dogg, and Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, to renew his advertising onslaught and ramp up his ground game.
But as they wait, some question a strategy that continues to plow millions of dollars into a widening race as Caruso’s heavyweight strategists are nowhere to be seen.
“They put some guy I’ve never heard of on the record and called him senior adviser, and to me, that was sign No. 1 that they’re doing this pre-distancing already,” one Sacramento Democratic consultant said, referring to a report in Politico condemning Caruso as a “flop.”
Asked for comment, Caruso senior adviser Peter Ragone pushed back on the claim that the campaign’s senior-most advisers will not go on the record to defend their candidate.
“We respond on the record to questions about the campaign just about every day,” Ragone told the Washington Examiner in an email and offered to share clips.
Ragone said he and Areen Ibranossian are the two senior advisers “who organized and built the entire team.”
Bass’s lead, accrued after the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling began to shift political dynamics nationally and as Democratic momentum pooled from the White House, and the quiet response, has spooked observers who see warning signs ahead.
“I think he was led to the belief that money could pave the way,” the consultant said. “June just seems like a lifetime ago.”
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Caruso’s platform, which impugned elected officials for not doing enough to protect public safety as the city witnessed a dramatic increase in violent crime, appeared to draw strong support in the early primary vote count before Bass pulled ahead of her rival to cement a 7 percentage point lead. Bass won 43.1% support in the June 7 vote, compared with Caruso’s 36%, according to the Los Angeles county clerk.
Since June, Bass has racked up celebrity and political endorsements, including from President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. California Sen. Alex Padilla and former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have also echoed the support, and while Newsom hasn’t backed a candidate in the race, he appeared alongside Bass at a California homeless housing project event in Los Angeles last week.
Heading into September, the six-term congresswoman has increased her lead to 12 percentage points over Caruso, 43% to 31%, according to a recent Los Angeles Times/UC Berkeley poll, with 24% of voters still undecided. Among those deemed most likely to cast a ballot, Bass steps further ahead, leading Caruso by 40 percentage points among registered Democrats and surging to 70 points among those who describe themselves as very liberal. The survey was conducted from Aug. 9-15.
What this means for Caruso isn’t clear.
In the lead-up to the primary, Caruso’s campaign muscle, longtime advisers to Harris and other prominent California Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, blanketed the airwaves, spending some $40 million to outmaneuver Bass.
Bass has spent a fraction of that, benefiting instead from the down-ballot momentum of left-wing activists door-knocking for other candidates. While she has racked up prominent party establishment endorsements, several strategists questioned their currency in a municipal race.
Skeptics have also pointed to a raft of departures on her team, including her campaign manager and several veteran strategists early on, as a sign of issues deep inside the Bass operation. The person now leading her team “has never run a campaign before,” one observer noted.
Caruso’s team is presumed to have beat the California congresswoman before when Harris notched the vice presidential nomination over Bass.
“It’s well speculated that they drove the stake into Bass as a VP candidate with the Biden campaign,” said Rob Stutzman, a top aide to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A mayoral campaign differs from maneuvering for the national ticket’s second spot. Lisa Gritzner, a Los Angeles political consultant and the CEO of LG Strategies, pointed to the veepstakes as an inside-baseball maneuvering mission, while the mayor aspirants must persuade Angelenos to let them lead a city infrastructure with tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars running through it. Still, both hinge on the candidate’s ability to outflank the competition.
For Caruso, the team’s expertise was evident.
“They know where the bodies are buried,” said Gritzner. “I’m sure that was a part of their attraction.”
They also know Caruso. One of his now advisers, Sean Clegg, slammed the developer in a comment to the Los Angeles Times as he flirted with a mayoral run back in 2011.
“A campaign for mayor is no day at the mall, and Angelenos will see past the phony streetscape,” said Clegg, at the time a consultant to a potential rival. He called Caruso a “pay-to-play mall developer who gave money to half the City Council he’s attacking and who just went after the biggest city contract.”
An influential political consulting firm in the state, Bearstar Strategies, is known for securing victories on local and statewide tickets, with a whos-who of clients that includes Newsom, Padilla, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and former Gov. Jerry Brown. Its founder is credited with engineering Hillary Clinton’s California primary victory over then-Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination contest.
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More recently, its team managed Harris’s ill-fated presidential bid before she abandoned the race in the lead-up to the California primary and touted absentee Rep. Kai Kahele’s (D-HI) gubernatorial bid before its collapse.
On social media, reams of content related to the firm’s clients populate the Twitter feeds of senior partners, with Caruso barely surfacing between tweets on Newsom, Padilla, Bonta, and others. If the LA Times/UC Berkeley poll is a warning shot for Caruso, his near-total absence from his consultants’ online cheerleading is the sound of horses quietly bolting.
“When your consultants stop tweeting about you, the writing on the wall is even clearer than the polls,” quipped one San Francisco political commentator.
“I would suggest reading the tea leaves,” the Sacramento consultant said of Caruso’s top brass. “If you start seeing their names, maybe they feel more confident.”
Still, Bass’s inability to put Caruso fully behind her in deep-blue Los Angeles suggests a significant failure by her campaign.
“The fact that Caruso is still even in the game speaks to the weakness of the [Bass] campaign,” said the Sacramento consultant, calling Caruso “potentially fatally flawed for a city like LA.”
“If they were working for Bass, they would have f***ing buried Caruso by now,” he added.
The campaign is making signs that it is gearing up to fight and has announced field, digital, and advisory hires. But after suggesting the Washington Examiner visit the Caruso campaign office, one Los Angeles Democrat familiar with the operation shared a gif of a tumbleweed blowing through what looked like a dry California desert to indicate what might be found there.
“Bearstar is a TV-only firm. They don’t care about anything else. That’s their moneymaker,” this Democrat said, noting that the firm had encouraged Caruso to call off a door-knocking push in the final days of the primary contest.
“The money is overwhelming,” a second Sacramento Democratic operative said. “If they lose, they still win.”
Caruso has spent more than $43 million by some estimates, a mammoth sum, and will need to spend significantly more if he hopes to turn the numbers in his favor by the time mail-in ballots begin landing on doorsteps.
According to the LA Times/UC Berkeley poll, Bass is now eating into Caruso’s lead in areas of the city where he performed best during the primary, including in the San Fernando Valley, which he won by 7.5 percentage points. Today, according to the survey, he leads Bass there by 2 points.
Citywide, Bass’s lead expands to 21 percentage points among the voters most likely to cast ballots, 53% to 32%, with 14% undecided.
Bass also commands a more favorable image among voters, with 49% who said they had a favorable opinion of her compared to 35% who said the same of Caruso. By comparison, while 22% said they had an unfavorable view of Bass and 29% said they had no opinion, 40% said they had an unfavorable view of Caruso, with 24% who had no opinion.
“Maybe things will change again by November,” the Sacramento Democrat said, but “when you start getting the obituaries written before Labor Day, that’s a bad sign.”
While the poll suggests the race is Bass’s to lose, it held mixed messages, with large majorities favoring both a candidate with progressive politics (71%) and a candidate who is tough on crime (77%).
Complicating the picture for Caruso is the backlash among Democrats to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal and confusion over his stance on abortion, which he says he supports, while his opponents argue otherwise. The backlash to the court’s ruling has appeared to favor women candidates in other races around the country and is on the California ballot in November, when voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to abortion, a measure Caruso pledged $1 million toward after news of the court’s draft ruling broke.
The issue has animated registered Democrats, who favor Bass.
Caruso holds a 9-point lead with moderate voters (and a 50-point advantage with conservatives), but the congresswoman leads him by 40 percentage points with registered Democrats.
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And while voters insist that crime remains top of mind for them, a measure to recall the progressive Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, which would likely have helped Caruso, fell short on signatures and failed to qualify for the November ballot.
Still, strategists are urging caution.
“There is a lot of runway between now and November,” Gritzner said, pointing to voter turnout as a determining factor.
“If I were in LA, I’m honestly not sure who I would vote for,” the first Sacramento Democrat confided.
Stutzman said that while Bass “has certainly moved into a clear front-runner position … fall advertising has yet to begin [and] it’s been a quiet summer.”
“I wouldn’t rule out Caruso yet,” he said.
