On June 2, Karen Bass emerged from the Los Angeles primary having secured roughly 34% of the vote. The math is damning: two-thirds of Angelenos essentially voted to fire their mayor. Yet, the machine delivered a runoff regardless.

This November, Bass will square off against Nithya Raman, a councilwoman deeply aligned with the city’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) bloc. Spencer Pratt, the Palisades fire survivor who campaigned as the authentic outsider, was relegated to third place and is out of the running. This outcome was no statistical quirk. It was the calculated result of a teachers’ union political operation that has spent years colonizing every tier of L.A.’s government and is now poised to seize the final office it does not yet control.

The mechanics are not complicated. The L.A. County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, which represents 800,000 workers across 300 unions and counts United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) L.A. affiliate, among its members, formally endorsed Bass for re-election in November 2025.

UTLA’s own 2026 endorsement slate skipped the mayor’s race and built out the rest of City Hall around her. Council picks Hugo Soto-Martinez, Eunisses Hernandez, and Estuardo Mazariegos, all listed on UTLA’s official endorsement page, belong to the same DSA-aligned bloc reshaping the city. The fix was in months ago.

What did the union have to fear from Spencer Pratt? Look at what he told Bill Maher on his podcast in May. Maher asked whether Pratt was strong enough to “buck the unions.” Pratt answered that union leadership was running “a scam” on its own members and pledged to push back. “You had me at hello,” Maher told him.

Pratt was the only candidate in the field who promised to take on the racket controlling California schools and run it into the ground. He was the candidate the union needed to be gone. On June 8, CBS News called the runoff for Raman over Pratt. Within days, Pratt acknowledged defeat. The union got the November matchup it wanted.

The union’s political project does not stop at L.A.’s city limits, and it is not abstract. A new Defending Education report finds that state and local teachers union affiliates have funneled $336 million to left-wing groups and political action committees since 2015.

UTLA itself has spent more than $7 million on this kind of activity. The California Teachers Association’s PACs have spent over $106 million. None of that went to teaching kids to read. It went to elections, ballot measures, and ideological allies. Some of it went directly to anti-ICE organizing. The union is not even pretending the money is for classrooms anymore.

What has all that buying bought? Ask Bass. In April 2026, UTLA threatened a massive strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District. Bass personally jumped into the talks. “I stepped into negotiations to make sure that every effort was made to find an agreement,” she said afterward, citing her concern about disruption to kids and parents. Within days, UTLA had a tentative two-year contract with an 11.65% raise and a $77,000 starting salary. Two months later, the union helped deliver Bass her runoff slot. Call that a coincidence if you want. The union didn’t.

For Angelenos, the November ballot is a runoff with no real choice. Bass and Raman are both progressive Democrats. Raman ran to Bass’s left as a DSA ally and gained ground in the count precisely because the city’s most committed left-wing activists turned out for her.

The roughly two-thirds of LA voters who picked someone other than Bass wanted accountability for the coalition that delivered Bass to a runoff against an even further-left challenger. In both cities, the candidate who threatened to break the union’s hold lost. The Teacher Freedom Alliance was founded because teachers should never be conscripted into politics they did not choose. Voters should not be either.

AFT president Randi Weingarten has spent the last several months touring bookstores promoting a manifesto her members paid for. Her local affiliates have used the same months to hand themselves their next mayor. They have until November 3 to make it stick. Same machine, same playbook, and the same political casualty: anyone who tried to compete with the union for the right to govern an American city.

L.A. didn’t pick its mayor on June 2. UTLA did. November is the formality.

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Ryan Walters is the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance and former State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma.

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