And yet, here we are the morning after the election and the L.A. mayoral race still hasn’t been called. It’s simply too close. And to make the situation seem even more bizarre, Caruso is leading Democrat Karen Bass. Granted, it’s not much of a lead. He’s up by two percent with a lead of roughly 12,000 votes out of nearly a half million that have been counted so far. But this should be over pretty soon, right? Don’t count on it. Thanks to the way the Democrats have crafted their voting laws in California, we could be waiting for quite a while. We may not even know the outcome this week. (LA Times)

Businessman Rick Caruso held a razor-thin lead over U.S. Rep. Karen Bass early Wednesday morning in the historically expensive race for mayor of Los Angeles, with returns remaining far from definitive.

Initial returns gave Bass a slight lead, but the two traded positions throughout Tuesday night, with Caruso pulling ahead slightly Wednesday morning.

Caruso leads with 51.25% of the vote, with Bass trailing at 48.75%. Just under 500,000 votes have been counted.

As the contest seesawed, Bass emerged at 10 p.m. to address a crowd at the Hollywood Palladium. She led Democratic stalwarts and elected officials in chants of “We will win!” and then declared: “We will win because we’re going to build a new Los Angeles!”

The numbers in the linked article were from this morning so there’s been a very small shift since then. This brief video report from the local ABC news outlets has fresher numbers along with a couple of excerpts from the speeches both candidates gave last night.

This is turning out to be one of the crazier races we’ve seen in a midterm cycle that was already full of plenty of craziness. Rick Caruso wasn’t supposed to win. He shouldn’t have even come close. Karen Bass was the obvious establishment choice among the Democratic power structure in addition to being a “historic” candidate. (If she wins, she would be the first female mayor of LA and only the second Black mayor.)

So what’s taking so long? As in so many other Democrat-led cities and states, Los Angeles has very loose and generous rules about mail-in voting. Ballots don’t even have to be put in the mail until election day and they will still be accepted and counted when they arrive. Nobody knows how many people waited that long and how many have yet to arrive, but it could be a significant number. And when the two candidates are only separated by a gap of barely 10,000 votes, anything could happen.

Or could it? Your first impulse might be to think that Bass has the upper hand because Democrats tend to like early voting and mail-in voting a lot more than Republicans. That’s true as a rule of thumb and it could still offer a late-stage advantage for Bass, but not necessarily.

Keep in mind that both of the candidates are running as Democrats. Also, no matter how many people think of Caruso as a Republican, there just aren’t very many Republicans in Los Angeles. He’s not tied with Bass because of GOP votes. There are a lot of Democrats voting for him too, and a lot of them probably mailed their ballots in as well.

More than anything else, this is an election that may boil down to a fundamental cultural change. Bass represents the Democratic old guard and business as usual in the city. But “business as usual” has been pretty miserable for a lot of Angelinos lately. The mass looting, gang activity, and violent crime have gotten out of control to the point where people seem to be noticing those things more than the letter after anyone’s name. Fixing those problems is what Caruso ran on and he wouldn’t be in such a competitive position if the message wasn’t resonating.

So with all of that in mind, could Rick Caruso really be the next mayor? I’m not going to jinx him by saying yes, but he’s doing a lot better than I thought he would, despite the fact that he’s a white cisgender straight male running in one of the most progressive bastions in the country.