New Poll Has Nithya Raman Up 24 Points With Latino Voters, Hours Before She Faced Karen Bass on Univision

LOS ANGELES — The number landed like a grenade hours before showtime. A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies / Los Angeles Times poll found mayoral challenger Nithya Raman leading incumbent Karen Bass 45% to 21% among Latino likely voters — a 24-point gap — with 34% undecided and the Nov. 3 election just weeks away.

The details behind the headline are worth the read. The survey was conducted Sept. 15–20 and published Oct. 2, and the Latino subsample ran 427 respondents with a six-point margin of error. And the internal split is the real story: among Latino voters ages 18 to 49, Raman led 60% to 9%. Among those 50 and older, Bass led 36% to 26%. That is not a gap. That is a canyon with a birthday in the middle.

Context matters, though, and the June primary told a different story. A Los Angeles Times analysis of election results found Bass carried 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods in June, compared with seven for Raman. The Bass campaign has challenged the Berkeley poll's methodology outright and pointed to its own August survey showing the mayor leading Raman by two points among Latino voters. So treat the poll as a snapshot, not a verdict — and both campaigns clearly know it.

There is also the bigger picture from the same Berkeley survey. FOX LA reported that among all likely voters, Raman led Bass 39% to 28%, with 33% undecided — an 11-point edge for the challenger that has both campaigns hunting the June primary's leftover voters, including supporters of Spencer Pratt, and organizing on the ground to consolidate support in the final stretch.

The poll landed against a backdrop of open warfare. Earlier Thursday, Bass went after Raman at a news conference, telling The California Post her challenger was "incredibly irresponsible" and "not ready for prime time." "I even question if she understands what fascism is or its place in history," Bass said.

The trigger: a since-deleted social media video in which Raman, appearing alongside content creator Ed Choi, repeated the phrase "Only you can stop fascist liars." The video included images of Bass and LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell with a large red X over the chief's face — imagery the Los Angeles Police Protective League said could endanger him. Raman's campaign maintains her remarks were about ICE and the Trump administration, not McDonnell, that the video's creator added the controversial imagery after the interview, and that the campaign requested the video's removal.

The fight over policing is the policy core of the feud. Bass has defended McDonnell, whom she appointed in 2024, as the city has recorded significant declines in violent crime. Raman has pledged to replace McDonnell if elected, arguing that his handling of federal immigration raids — and the protests that followed — has fallen short. The Berkeley poll found crime and public safety ranked among voters' most pressing concerns, alongside homelessness, affordable housing and city infrastructure.

Which is why Thursday night's forum mattered. "Los Latinos Preguntan: Los Candidatos Responden" aired at 7 p.m. on Univision 34 and streamed nationally on ViX — a program built specifically for Hispanic voters, who make up 37% of the city's electorate according to Univision. Rather than a traditional debate, it featured separate 30-minute one-on-one interviews with Bass and Raman, moderated by Noticiero Univision 34 anchors Gabriela Tessier and Octavio Valdez.

The format: each candidate answered questions from roughly 15 to 20 members of Los Angeles' Hispanic community — questions pre-recorded with community members and presented during each interview — on homelessness and housing, affordability, public safety, jobs and the economy, plus transportation and the environment. With ballots arriving in mailboxes and more than a third of Latino voters undecided in the Berkeley survey, it was a direct pitch to the bloc most likely to decide the race.

The mayoral forum is the first of two nights in the Univision series. On Tuesday, Oct. 20, the station continues with a California gubernatorial forum produced in partnership with Choose Children 2026, featuring former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton — a reminder of how central the Latino vote is statewide: Hispanics make up 38% of California's eligible voters, the largest share of any state in the nation, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The race has already touched the city's hardest problems. We covered the federal Skid Row raid earlier this week — 23 arrested of 28 charged in a pre-dawn sweep — and both candidates have been forced to respond to it, Bass at a news conference and Raman with her own framing. The mayor's race isn't being fought in the abstract. It's being fought over who owns public safety, block by block.

The two have shared a stage before — at the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 debates at the Skirball Cultural Center back on May 6 — but the stakes Thursday were different: ballots are arriving in mailboxes, the undecided bloc is enormous, and the forum aired squarely at the voters both campaigns say will decide the race. With 34% of Latino voters still uncommitted and less than a month to go, the next move belongs to the ground game.