An upset rocks L.A.

Good morning, it’s Thursday, June 5 and you can expect undiluted sunshine reaching the high 70s.

Incumbents did well in this week’s election: Every sitting council member up for another term is so far poised to win outright, along with Controller Kenneth Mejia. Even Mayor Karen Bass, who is generally unpopular, has a sizable lead over her many challengers.

But there appears to be one shocking exception. Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto is stuck in third place and likely to be ousted from office after one term.

Feldstein Soto received just 19.4% of returned ballots, while her two main opponents — the Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed progressive Marissa Roy and the more conservative John McKinney — are trouncing her with 37.9% and 32.5% of votes, respectively.

The upset will shake up one of the most powerful yet least-understood offices in local government. The City Attorney prosecutes misdemeanor cases, and also acts as the city’s chief legal officer, defending against civil lawsuits, providing legal advice to council members, and initiating litigation against the state and federal government (over matters like housing laws or immigration enforcement), and against private companies like AirBnB (over, for example, alleged price-gouging after the Palisades fire). 

Just six months ago, Feldstein Soto appeared poised to cruise to victory. She enjoyed the backing of the influential LAPD officers' union, the L.A. Police Protective League, and reported nearly $500,000 in her campaign coffers as of January 1. 

Then in late March, hackers attacked the city’s servers and seized more than 300,000 confidential LAPD records, including internal affairs and shooting investigation files and other highly secretive documents that Feldstein Soto's office had stored in ongoing cases. After the hack became public in early April, the union representing rank-and-file LAPD officers said it learned of the breach from news reports and blasted Feldstein Soto for mishandling a crisis. 

Feldstein Soto “should have picked up the phone and informed us about this egregious data breach when she claims she learned of it several weeks ago,” the police union said at the time in a press statement.

The LAPD union rescinded its endorsement just weeks before the election and promptly threw its weight behind John McKinney, 58, a veteran L.A. County deputy district attorney with scant experience in civil litigation. The District Attorney, Nathan Hochman, also endorsed McKinney. Soon the centrist candidate — who had raised less than $75,000 by mid April — enjoyed the support of top business groups, including $2.1 million in outside spending from AirBnB. 

By then, Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general who is aiming to be L.A’s top lawyer at 34 years old, had had her campaign underway for well over a year. While McKinney pressed Feldstein Soto from the right, Roy had cultivated a groundswell of progressive and liberal backers, including scores of labor unions and the L.A. County Democratic Party, and seized upon the string of negative headlines and public criticism.

Feldstein Soto was accused of making legal decisions based on “personal relationships” or “perceived political gain," as a former staffer alleged in a legal claim. Her office was criticized for filing charges against pro-Palestinian protesters on the 110 Freeway — cases that elicited claims of biased prosecutions and many of which were on track to be dismissed. Shortly before the election, an investigation by LAist accused Feldstein Soto of helping political donors in criminal cases, something she adamantly denied.

On Wednesday, as results appeared to cement her third-place finish, Feldstein Soto seemed on the verge of conceding. A campaign aide released a statement that said she was “extremely proud of her record in office, including making significant progress to halt human trafficking and to hold large special interests to account.”

“The voters have spoken, however, which is what democracy is all about,” the statement said.

Roy and McKinney, meanwhile, were on the verge of declaring victory as they headed into a runoff.

McKinney said the “results reflect a desire for renewed direction in the City Attorney’s office,” while Roy said: “Ousting the incumbent is just the start.”

Can Spencer Pratt hold onto second place? Or will Councilmember Nithya Raman cut far enough into his lead to make the November ballot? Wednesday’s batch of election results showed that Raman had gained a point; she now has just shy of 23% to Pratt’s nearly 30%. The county will release daily updates between 4 and 5 p.m. until all the votes are in.

Any deeper analysis — whether from august news institutions or data freaks on X — depends in part on how many votes remain to be counted. But even that remains an open question, despite what you might see on news sites displaying trackers that claim a certain percentage of the vote is definitively outstanding.

We can’t say what percentage of votes remain uncounted because we still don’t know how many total ballots were ultimately cast. To put it in even simpler terms: We have an equation where we don’t know the denominator. 

Under state law, ballots can arrive at county election offices up to seven days after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. That means more ballots could still be arriving. We could, however, see fewer late-arriving ballots than we have in the past because last-minute voters were encouraged to use drop boxes instead of the mail. 

As of Wednesday evening, local election officials still had 713,180 ballots left to process and tally from across the county. But there’s another complication: The city of Los Angeles accounts for only a little more than a third of the county’s registered voters, and officials have not said how many of those 713,180 uncounted ballots were cast by city voters. (Using registration figures alone, you could estimate that roughly 271,000 of those ballots came from city voters, but that's very back-of-the-envelope math.)

President Richard Nixon left office half a century ago in utter disgrace. There was a bipartisan effort in Congress to impeach him. Many of his aides were convicted of crimes. And his name has been synonymous with a paranoid and corrupt style of politics ever since. 

But lately, he’s been doing great on Instagram.

Since last June, the Nixon Foundation, which jointly runs the presidential library down in Orange County, has produced a steady churn of viral content — sleek, sexy edits of archival footage set to trending music — that looks more like promo material for a hiphop artist than a disgraced, long-dead president. 

Want to understand how the Gen Z-coded videos have commenters insisting that “Gen Z is Nixonmaxxing hard as af?” Or why some suggest that Watergate was a “set up?”

Check out L.A. Material writer Tomo Chien’s dispatch from Nixon’s latest frontier. 

MORE ON RAMAN’S PROSPECTS: Does Nithya Raman have a chance of making inroads into Spencer Pratt’s lead and securing a spot in the runoff? The Los Angeles Times examines whether Pratt’s edge will hold, or whether Raman can close the gap. 

DATA CENTER PROHIBITION: Residents of Monterey Park — the city of 58,000 east of downtown L.A. — voted to ban data centers there, making it the nation’s first city to do so via public vote.

FATHER-SON SEPARATION: LAist tells the story of Axel Pecero, who came to the U.S. as a three-year-old, and last year was arrested by federal immigration officials. To preserve his chances at eventually reuniting with his son, Pecero opted to voluntarily leave the U.S. and now lives in Mexico.

PRIDE BACKLASH: Kathy Hilton — reality TV fixture, mother of Paris, resident of Bel Air — will no longer serve as grand marshal of West Hollywood’s Pride parade this Sunday, after backlash over Hilton’s ties to Donald Trump, among other issues, generated a furor.

MAGIC SELLERS: In case you missed it, L.A. Material’s Pablo Goldstein visited the city’s last magic store, The Magic Apple in Studio City, to see what its bestselling items are. (One of which is among magic’s oldest tricks.)

AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “Coming to This” by Mark Strand.

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