Incumbent Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto appears headed toward a rare one-term tenure after voters elevated two challengers offering sharply different visions for the office, setting up a likely November runoff between Deputy Attorney General Marrisa Roy and Deputy District Attorney John McKinney.
As of Friday’s semi-final results, Roy led the four-candidate field with 39.79% of the vote, followed by McKinney with 31.12%. Feldstein Soto trailed in third with 18.99%, while former deputy city attorney Aida Ashouri received 10.11%.
Political observers and candidates pointed to a combination of factors behind the results, including voter dissatisfaction with the incumbent’s tenure, concerns over rising city liability payouts and the emergence of two challengers who each offered voters a distinct alternative.
“I think it tells you the voters were not satisfied with the performance of the current city attorney’s office,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles City Council member and county supervisor. “They were paying close enough attention to the performance of the city attorney’s office, and they determined that they did not like what they saw. They were looking for an alternative.”
The outcome would be historically unusual.
“It is politically seismic,” said Mike Bonin, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles and a former Los Angeles City Council member. “It’s really unprecedented in modern times for an incumbent seeking reelection to not make the runoff. Incumbents have been defeated, but almost always they’re in the runoff.”
City archival records show that only one incumbent Los Angeles city attorney has failed to survive a primary election since Los Angeles held its first primary election in 1917. Erwin P. Werner, who served from 1929 to 1933, lost his reelection bid to Ray L. Cheseboro in the May 1933 primary.
Bonin said the result was particularly striking because it ran counter to the broader pattern of this year’s election, where incumbents generally fared well.
“Every incumbent member of the council won outright, left, right, center. The mayor had a better showing than people expected,” he said. “This was an unusual thing, and doubly unusual given that it was sort of running counter to the night’s electoral trend.”
Bonin said Feldstein Soto entered the race burdened by a series of controversies that accumulated throughout her first term.
“There were a lot of people who were disenchanted with her,” he said.
Among the most significant developments was the decision of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing rank-and-file Los Angeles Police Department officers, once one of Feldstein Soto’s strongest supporters, to rescind its endorsement and back McKinney instead.
The union withdrew its support in April after accusing Feldstein Soto of failing to disclose a data breach involving sensitive law enforcement records before seeking its endorsement.
“That changed the dynamic of the race completely,” Bonin said.
Another issue that repeatedly surfaced during the campaign was the city’s growing liability costs. Feldstein Soto faced criticism over a series of multimillion-dollar settlements and judgments as city liability payouts became a growing concern amid Los Angeles’ budget challenges.
According to the Los Angeles city controller’s liability claims dashboard, city liability payouts climbed from roughly $91 million in fiscal year 2021-22 to about $281 million in fiscal year 2024-25, with police-related claims accounting for the largest share of payouts.
Yaroslavsky said the issue became one of several factors that shaped voter perceptions of the incumbent’s tenure.
“Most people don’t pay much attention to the city attorney’s office until something goes wrong,” he said. “And I think that the electorate saw that there were just too many multi-million dollar settlements, sometimes even more than that, and that the city was being taken to the cleaners in the legal proceedings.”
McKinney, who entered the race only months before the election, argued that liability payouts became a defining issue for many voters.
“If there was one substantive issue that concerned voters most, I do think it was the one centered around how much the city was wasting in what I call unforced errors — the civil liabilities,” McKinney said. “I think voters held the city attorney responsible for the $250 to $300 million a year in liability payouts.”
Feldstein Soto and her office have previously argued that rising liability costs reflect broader trends beyond the city attorney’s control, including increasingly large jury awards known as “nuclear verdicts,” post-pandemic court backlogs and rising settlement values.
In a June 2025 litigation cost report, the city attorney’s office cited research finding that California led the nation in nuclear verdicts in personal injury and wrongful death cases between 2013 and 2022.
But political observers and candidates alike suggested Feldstein Soto’s challenges extended beyond any single issue.
McKinney argued that voters struggled to identify a clear vision for the office under the incumbent’s leadership.
“I don’t think the city attorney ever really defined herself as a leader,” he said. “I think it was unclear to voters what she stood for. I think it was unclear what her priorities were.”
Feldstein Soto, who acknowledged the apparent end of her reelection bid in a Friday statement to supporters, pointed instead to the role of outside spending in the race.
She said independent expenditure committees spent more than $5 million supporting two of her opponents, amplifying messages “from the left and the right.”
“While money does not always win, especially not in a binary election, money always talks thanks to Citizens United,” Feldstein Soto said, referring to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which expanded protections for independent political spending.
Feldstein also thanked supporters and said she would continue serving through the end of her term in December.
Political observers, however, said the outcome reflected broader dynamics that extend beyond campaign spending alone.
Bonin said Feldstein Soto also faced a structural challenge once Roy and McKinney consolidated support from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
“You had Marissa Roy, who sort of got the left-of-center lane, and McKinney, who got the right-of-center lane,” Bonin said. “That sort of left a narrower space in the middle for Hydee.”
Fernando Guerra, a political science professor and director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, reached a similar conclusion.
“She had a very viable candidate from the right and a viable candidate from the left, and she got squeezed out,” Guerra said.
Roy’s coalition extended beyond the city’s democratic socialist movement, Bonin said, noting she also secured support from more traditional Democratic and labor organizations.
Meanwhile, McKinney benefited from a late surge fueled in part by support from law enforcement interests after the police union broke with Feldstein Soto.
The result, Bonin said, left the incumbent without many of the institutional advantages that often help officeholders survive difficult reelection campaigns.
Those campaign messages now appear poised to define the runoff campaign.
Roy, who was backed by progressive groups including the Democratic Socialists of America, framed her campaign around labor rights, tenant protections and challenging powerful institutions.
“Our campaign has empowered everyday Angelenos—workers, renters, immigrants—to demand a city attorney who will take on Trump, fight abusive corporations, and stand for working people,” Roy said in a statement provided to the Southern California News Group.
McKinney, who built support among more moderate and law-and-order voters, centered his campaign on public safety, homelessness, quality-of-life concerns, and fiscal responsibility.
“I think my message resonated because I’m running on a quality of life agenda,” McKinney said. “And maybe what has resonated most is my very strong position against allowing people to live out on the streets. It’s inhumane, it’s impractical, and it’s unacceptable.”
Bonin said the runoff is likely to present voters with two sharply different visions for the office.
“If you hear the two of them talking side by side during the campaign, you’d almost think they’re running for different jobs,” he said.
Yaroslavsky offered a similar assessment.
“You have basically two probably divergent views about the priorities of the city attorney’s office,” he said. “People are going to have a choice, not an echo, in this election.”
Despite an estimated 543,180 ballots remaining to be processed countywide, both campaigns are already looking ahead to a likely November runoff.
“It’s just halftime,” McKinney said.