Bass Vs Raman Odds: The Fake Poll Kalshi Didn't Buy
Last week, a poll started ripping through Los Angeles politics. "Median Strategies," a firm nobody had heard of, showed Mayor Karen Bass leading her challenger Nithya Raman by 12 points in the November runoff. Bass amplified it in a post on X. Political feeds ran with it. It was the first public number anyone had seen in months on a race the whole city is arguing about.
It was fake. On August 17 and 18 the firm admitted it had fabricated the poll as a "social experiment" (it invented a Wisconsin poll too), and shut down (The Hill). Bass deleted her post (TheWrap, Aug 17). And here is the part that should interest anyone who cares about how information actually gets priced: through the entire life of that fake poll, the odds on Kalshi, the federally regulated market where people bet real money on who wins this race, barely moved. Bass sat around 62 cents, meaning roughly a 62% chance, before the poll appeared, while it circulated, and after it collapsed. A price in cents is the crowd's live probability: a 62¢ "yes" pays $1.00 if Bass wins. Real money looked at a 12-point Bass lead, found no fieldwork, no crosstabs, no track record behind it, and simply declined to believe it.
That's the whole reason to watch this market instead of the feed. So let's look at what the money does believe about a race that has become one of the nastiest in the country.
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The Race The Price Is Actually Watching
Start with why an incumbent mayor of Los Angeles is trading at 62 cents instead of 90. Bass took just 34.3% in the June 2 primary (under 35 for a sitting mayor) with Councilmember Raman at 29.0% and Republican reality-TV figure Spencer Pratt at 25.5% (results). The only legitimate head-to-head poll anyone has released, from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies back in May, had Raman ahead 32-28, with a quarter of voters choosing "neither." Bass's favorability with LA voters sits at 32% favorable against 50% unfavorable. Those are not front-runner numbers. They're the numbers of an incumbent the electorate has real doubts about, in a runoff where the challenger led the last real survey.
The doubts have a specific origin, and it's still burning. Bass was in Ghana when the Palisades fire erupted in January 2025; her aides had received an emergency-management email warning of "high confidence in damaging winds and elevated fire conditions" the day before she left, per LA Times reporting. She fired Fire Chief Kristin Crowley the next month. Crowley is now suing the city for retaliation, and as of June, suing Bass personally for defamation over the mayor's debate claim that "1,000 firefighters... were instead sent home on Chief Crowley's watch," a claim Crowley calls flatly false; Bass's office calls the suit "meritless" (LAMag). The LA Times reported in February that Bass personally directed the fire after-action report to be softened; Bass denies it and calls the story "muckraking journalism," and the Times stands by it. And the freshest wound: the 2026 homeless count came back up 3.4%, the first increase in two years, with an LA Times analysis finding roughly 41% of participants in her $400 million Inside Safe program back on the street. All of it was center stage at the first runoff debate on August 19 (NBC Los Angeles).
Why Raman Isn't Priced Higher Than The High 30s
If the incumbent is that wounded, why does the market still make her the favorite? Because Raman, trading around 37 cents, carries a record the Bass campaign gets to run against too. She's the DSA-linked councilmember in a city where that label cuts both ways, and her relationship with the DSA itself is messy: the group censured her in 2024, and this cycle issued only a "recommendation," not an endorsement. Her viral comment on school-adjacent homeless encampments, "I don't think a kid's gonna be safer if they are 10 feet or 500 feet away from a school," earned her a fake encampment staged outside her own home by opponents (Deseret News, May 30). The police union runs "Flip Floppin' Raman" ads. On August 13 the city council stripped her of her homelessness-committee chairmanship, which she calls payback by Bass allies. And she's being outspent nearly three to one, $3.77 million to $1.19 million, against a Bass operation endorsed by both Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.
Then there's the wild card the market has to price without any polling at all: Spencer Pratt's 218,000 primary voters. Pratt refused to endorse either candidate, declared "It's war," and claims (with nothing produced so far) to hold audio recordings damaging enough to force a resignation. A right-leaning quarter of the primary electorate with nowhere natural to go, in a runoff between two Democrats, is exactly the kind of unknown that keeps a favorite at 62 instead of 75.
How To Read This Market
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange where each outcome trades as a yes/no contract priced from 1¢ to 99¢, paying $1.00 if it happens. The current book: Bass 62¢, Raman 37¢, market settles after the November 3 runoff. Two honest notes for anyone tempted to trade it. First, the polling vacuum cuts both ways: the market is pricing fundamentals (money, endorsements, incumbency) against a single May survey that favored the challenger, and the next legitimate poll could move this price more than any news event has. Second, the fake-poll episode is the market's résumé: when a manufactured number tried to move this race, the price held. That's worth something the next time your feed tells you the race is over, in either direction.
We track this market continuously on our live LA mayor odds page, and the wider midterm picture, including why the same bettors give Democrats 84 cents to take the House, is its own strange story, told in our piece on the socialist primary wave.
Prices quoted are live Kalshi market prices as of Thursday, August 20, 2026, and will keep moving until this market settles. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange (18+; availability varies by state). OddsShopper covers prediction markets as an independent analyst: any model or panel figures referenced are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. This article does not advocate for or against any candidate or party. Trading involves risk; contracts can go to zero.
