Outside groups have put about $24.5 million into ads for the Los Angeles mayoral runoff between Mayor Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman since the June 8 primary, according to filings with the city’s Ethics Commission. That dwarfs what the candidates have raised on their own: Bass’s campaign has brought in $3.7 million, Raman’s $1.1 million in direct contributions plus city matching funds, according to a tally by LAist. The committees spending on Bass’s or Raman’s behalf are legally barred from coordinating with either campaign, but nothing stops them from running ads, and they have outspent the candidates roughly five to one.
Of that $24.5 million, $21.4 million bought ads with machine-readable text, filed as required with the city. Basin.la scraped the text off every one of those filings and summed, word by word, how much money went into ads containing it. The result is a map of two campaigns that are, rhetorically, barely talking about the same race: basin.la found 13 of the 20 words it tracked appear in 1% or less of the spending on the opposing side.
On the pro-Raman side, the single biggest line item is “homelessness,” present in 78% of the money spent to elect Raman or defeat Bass. “Rent” shows up in 56% of that spending, “leader” or “leadership” in 44%, and “fire,” “fires” or the Spanish “incendios” in 41%. The largest funder here is Estamos con Nithya, a committee sponsored by the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters. Half its money has come from the carpenters’ council itself and half from Aaron Sosnick, a Reno-based hedge fund manager and bike-lane advocate who has given millions across two separate committees backing Raman, Archyde reported.
One Estamos con Nithya ad opens with “Fire after fire, $3 billion wasted, a homelessness crisis out of control,” and says Los Angeles “has been burned by Karen Bass”: “$3 billion” and “burned” account for 36% and 22% of pro-Raman money respectively. About a third of that money (32%) pays for ads claiming Raman cut homelessness in her council district in half.
That claim checks out on its own terms and is incomplete on the city’s. Los Angeles County’s homeless authority, LAHSA, recorded unsheltered homelessness falling 49% year over year in Raman’s District 4, which runs through Silver Lake, Los Feliz, Sherman Oaks, Encino, Studio City, Van Nuys and Reseda. But citywide, homelessness rose 3.4% in 2026 and unsheltered homelessness rose 7.9%, the Los Angeles Times reported. Eight council districts posted double-digit declines that year; the largest was in Monica Rodriguez’s District 7, not Raman’s. Measured by raw count rather than percentage change, District 4 ranks sixth, and District 1 alone had nearly eight times as many unsheltered residents in 2025 as District 4 did. A percentage drop is easier to produce in a district that started small, one local newsletter noted in dissecting the figure.
The pro-Bass side spends differently. The largest committee opposing Raman or supporting Bass is sponsored by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the rank-and-file LAPD officers’ union, and it has paid for most of the ads built around “safer,” present in 54% of pro-Bass money. “School” appears in 50%, “500 feet” and “kids” each in 44%, “tents” in 38%, “police” in 33%.
Where “500 feet” comes from
The “500 feet” ads replay Raman saying at a January 2024 candidate forum that she didn’t think “a kid’s gonna be safer because a tent is 500 feet away from a school.” That line refers to a 2022 amendment to the city’s anti-camping ordinance, Municipal Code 41.18, which the council passed 11-3 to ban sitting, lying or storing property within 500 feet of a school or daycare. Raman voted against it, along with council members Mike Bonin and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, arguing in an official statement from her council office that encampments in prohibited zones “haven’t moved at all, or they’ve simply moved 500 feet down the street,” and that the city needed to build shelter beds and housing “for the first time in LA’s history” rather than relocate tents. She has voted the same way since: in April 2026 she opposed enforcing the ordinance at a specific Venice site, and in October 2026 the council’s Public Safety Committee held 3-2 on a motion to expand it further, after Raman asked city staff to answer capacity questions first.
Elsewhere in the pro-Bass spending, ads say the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Raman, want to “expropriate” homes and businesses: “socialists” appears in 17% of that money. None of the readable pro-Raman ads say “tents,” “police” or “school,” and none of the readable pro-Bass ads say “burned,” “$3 billion” or “by half.” Donald Trump’s name appears in 14% of pro-Raman spending and 4% of pro-Bass spending — a different kind of mention from the 34 of 150 pieces in which Bass’s own campaign, whose filings don’t itemize per-ad cost, names Trump directly.
basin.la’s $24.5 million figure, tallied from every filing since the June primary, is close to but not the same as a separate count reported by the Westside Current: as of a Thursday morning in the race’s final week, outside groups had spent nearly $12.5 million on Raman ($7.6 million supporting her, $4.9 million opposing Bass) and almost $10 million on Bass ($4.2 million supporting her, $5.7 million opposing Raman), for a combined total just over $22 million. The roughly $2.5 million gap between the two counts is consistent with filings made in the final days before the election, which the earlier snapshot would have missed.
The same week’s polling shows why both sides are spending so heavily on message rather than biography. A late-September survey had Raman ahead of Bass 39% to 28%, with 33% undecided, KTLA reported. An internal Raman campaign poll taken the same month put her ahead 44% to 39%; a poll commissioned by a pro-Bass independent committee, taken in August, had Bass ahead 41% to 35%. By late October, KTLA described the race as a toss-up, with Bass’s unfavorability rating at 65% and Raman’s at 49%, according to the Westside Current’s reporting on the same polling.
Polls paid for by interested parties disagree with each other by nine points in either direction, which is one more reason to wait for the one number neither campaign’s ad budget can buy: the count after polls close on November 3.