Bass again takes wider lead over Caruso in LA mayor's race update

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Rep. Karen Bass continues to pull away from developer Rick Caruso in Tuesday's update of results in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

Bass now has a lead of more than 36,000 votes, with roughly 68% of LA County's ballots counted by this point, according to the new figures from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's office.

Bass has a total of 375,143 votes to Caruso's 338,794.

That gives Bass 52.55% of the votes counted to Caruso's 47.45%

There are still hundreds of thousands of ballots left to be counted.

On election night, Caruso and Bass were in a virtual deadlock. A count released the next morning found Caruso ahead by about 12,000 votes - but less than half of the total ballots cast had been counted by that point.

Since then, new totals have slowly moved Bass ahead in the race. Both candidates have continued to express optimism they will end up on top when all the results are in.

The percentage of ballots counted has actually decreased since Monday's update, which estimated that 75% of the vote was in. That's because ballots continued to arrive by mail and are considered eligible as long as they were postmaked by Election Day.

The next vote update is expected Friday afternoon.

The video in the media player above is from an earlier report.