LOS ANGELES, CA — There will be a runoff race for the mayor of Los Angeles between billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Rep. Karen Bass in a race defined by voter frustration over homelessness and crime.

The Associated Press declared the race headed to a runoff election because there aren't enough remaining ballots to be tallied that would tip the race. Caruso jumped ahead of the field in the race for mayor Tuesday. As of Wednesday afternoon, Caruso leads Bass by 16,371 votes.

Early returns consisting of mail-in ballots have Rick Caruso with a noticeable lead over Rep. Karen Bass in the race for mayor. With 822,545 countywide ballots counted (580,358 vote-by-mail and 242,187 vote center ballots), Caruso garnered 42.14 percent of the vote while Bass trailed with 36.95 percent as of Wednesday afternoon. Councilman Kevin de Leon trailed with 7.49 percent of early returns.

Caruso received 133,059 votes compared to 116,688 votes for Bass.

Because no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote-getters will head to a Nov. 8 runoff election.

Some campaign watchers have pondered whether Caruso — with his mighty self-funded campaign war chest and weeks-long advertising blitz — could win the race outright Tuesday, avoiding the Nov. 8 runoff. But such a result appears to be a longshot, given Bass' strong support base and the overall number of candidates on the ballot.

Heading into election day polls showed Caruso had edged out Congresswoman Karen Bass for the lead. A survey released by the Communities United for Bass for LA Mayor 2022 in late May showed Caruso with support from 37 percent of likely voters, compared with 35 percent back Bass, Bloomberg reported.

SEE ALSO: Real-Time Results: Los Angeles Sheriff's Election 2022

Caruso has paid extensively for the edge, spending more than $25 million on his campaign — the bulk of it to blanket the airwaves with his message. His message is that he can reduce crime, combat corruption at City Hall and house the homeless — mainly with 30,000 additional shelter beds.

Real-time results are below — use the scroll on the right to get to the race of your choice (they are in alphabetical order). Patch will be updating the results throughout the night as votes are tallied — refresh the page for the latest updates.

"I'm running for mayor because the city we love is in a state of emergency, rampant homelessness, people living in fear for their safety and politicians at City Hall just in it for themselves," Caruso said in a campaign video. "My only special interest is Los Angeles, the city we love. It's why I'll work for a dollar a year, and I won't take a dime from special interest."

In the same video, Caruso claims he cut crime by 30 percent in his appointed role as the president of the Police Commission.

By the time Caruso had doled out $23 million on his self-funded campaign last month, Bass spent just $700,000, according to campaign filings.

Dwarfed by Caruso's ad spending, the Bass campaign appears to be sparing its war chest for the general election — with good reason. The same poll that puts Caruso ahead in the primary shows Bass winning a head-to-head matchup if other liberal candidates such as Councilman Kevin de León exited the race. According to the poll, 48 percent of voters prefer Bass while 39 percent favor Caruso in a hypothetical general election matchup. In the primary, liberal candidates such as de León and Bass split the vote while Caruso, a former Republican turned Democrat, would seem to have the city's more conservative voters to himself among the top contenders.

Bass, 68, would be Los Angeles' first female mayor and only the second Black mayor, after Mayor Tom Bradley, who led the city from 1973 to 1993.

Bass would also be the first sitting House member to be elected mayor of Los Angeles since 1953, when Rep. Norris Poulson was elected. Then-Reps. James Roosevelt, Alphonzo Bell and Xavier Becerra lost campaigns for mayor in 1965, 1969 and 2001.

Bass was elected to the House in 2010 and was chair of the Congressional Black Caucus from 2019-21. She was under consideration to be President Joe Biden's 2020 running mate, but then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D- California, was chosen instead.

Bass' campaign has also highlighted her work as an activist before holding elected office. In 1990, she founded the nonprofit Community Coalition, with the goal of transforming social and economic conditions in South Los Angeles.

Her campaign's platform includes plans to address climate change, homelessness and public safety.

To reduce crime, Bass stresses the need for community-based investments to prevent the root causes of crime, including drug treatment and mental health services, housing, outreach, domestic violence assistance and youth programs.

Her public safety plan also calls for the hiring of civilian personnel within the Los Angeles Police Department to move desk officers to patrol, bringing the department to its authorized force of 9,700. As of May 17, the department had 9,352 sworn personnel.

Her campaign calls for temporary housing and permanent supportive housing to get the city's unhoused population off the street, setting an ambitious goal of housing 15,000 people by the end of her first year as mayor. Her temporary housing plan includes identifying available city-owned land; converting existing motels, hotels, closed hospitals and vacant commercial buildings; and partnering with religious and community institutions, as well as private companies.

To build long-term and affordable housing, she is calling for policies that will expedite affordable housing developments and state funding to increase units through the Project Homekey program. She also calls for more affordable housing, saying 352,000 people in Los Angeles are at risk of becoming homeless.

Bass also released a climate change plan and said that as mayor she would help lead the city to its goal of achieving 100% clean energy by 2035, as well as continue efforts to decarbonize buildings and achieve a zero emission Port of Los Angeles.

Caruso, 63, is the developer behind The Grove, Palisades Village and other shopping centers. He was born in Los Angeles and served as the president of the civilian Police Commission after being appointed to the panel by Mayor James Hahn in August 2001, as well as on the Board of Water and Power Commissioners.

In January — about three weeks before announcing his bid for mayor in a city almost entirely run by Democrats — Caruso changed his voter registration to Democrat after almost a decade of being registered with no party preference. He was registered as a Republican before that.

He has focused his campaign's platform on expanding homeless shelters with a goal of creating 30,000 beds in 300 days, banning encampments, increasing the LAPD's force and addressing corruption at City Hall, noting the indictment of three City Council members since 2020.

On his campaign website, he criticizes the cost of the city's Proposition HHH program aimed at building 10,000 new units of permanent supportive housing and said he will have a team conduct an audit of wasteful city spending. While Caruso's website says the average cost of the program is $700,000 per unit, the city's controller put the average cost under $600,000.

Under Caruso's plan, projects that cost more than $350,000 per unit would be canceled, and he said he would prioritize projects that keep costs low by using modular housing, shipping containers and other cheaper methods to build housing. He also said he would focus on tiny homes, Project Roomkey and Project Homekey efforts, as well as using land owned by the city to create affordable housing or shelters.

Caruso, who was endorsed by the union that represents LAPD officers, has made rising crime in Los Angeles -- a trend that has occurred in large cities across the U.S. during the pandemic -- a centerpiece of his campaign and pledged to add 1,500 new officers to the LAPD's force in his first term. The city's budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year budget is aimed at expanding the LAPD's sworn personnel to 9,735, but attrition and hiring delays have raised doubts of whether that more modest goal can even be met.

Caruso's public safety plan also includes expanding the LAPD's Gun Unit, expanding laws regarding the safe storage of firearms, doubling the number of gang prevention workers, and making it mandatory for the Los Angeles city attorney to prosecute misdemeanors. He also called for the statewide $950 minimum for felony theft charges to be reduced.

The field winnowed considerably in the final weeks of May. Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer dropped out and endorsed Bass, while Councilman Joe Buscaino dropped out and endorsed Caruso as did entrepreneur Ramit Varma.

The Los Angeles Times endorsed Bass, calling her the battle-tested leader the city needs in times of crisis.

"Bass brings nearly two decades of governing experience, including helping lead the state through extremely difficult times as the Assembly speaker during the Great Recession and state budget crisis. She has a reputation as a thoughtful, pragmatic, collaborative leader who never loses focus on the core reasons she entered public service — ensuring that no segment of society falls through the cracks.

"As a physician's assistant working in the emergency room, Bass saw how homelessness, substance abuse, untreated mental illnesses and violence were upending people's lives… That community-informed activism helps explain why Bass, as a congresswoman, has rejected calls to 'defund the police,' why she helped draft the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that would have directed millions of dollars toward reforming police practices, and why she now proposes maintaining the size of the LAPD force while also investing in crime prevention programs."

Conversely, Caruso nabbed the endorsement of the Los Angeles Daily News, which praised his success in developing popular shopping malls such as The Grove and the Palisades Village.

"If ever there was a time for an outsider candidate, this is it," the Daily News concluded. "Caruso offers a track record of working with stakeholders in many communities and successfully completing projects despite regulatory and other hurdles."

The full slate of candidates also includes Craig Greiwe, Alex Gruenenfelder, John Jackson, Andrew Kim, Gina Viola, Mel Wilson and Kevin de León also running in the primary. Buscaino, Feuer, and Varma will still appear on the primary ballot even though they withdrew from the race and endorsed other candidates.

The outcome of dozens of down-ballot primary races also hang in the balance in Los Angeles County. Voters are waiting to find out who was elected to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Los Angeles City Council and dozens more city and school board races across the county.

Scroll to the bottom of this story for real-time Los Angeles County election results.

Click here to track your ballot and make sure it is counted.

As of April, the California Secretary of State reported that 26,948,297 Californians were registered to vote, which accounts for almost 82 percent percent of the state's eligible voting population.

Not surprisingly, there are far more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, with 46.75 percent for the former and 23.92% for the latter. GOP registration in the state has been dropping steadily, a trend that shows no sign of slowing down even as Republican registration climbed at the national level over the last year.

In the 2020 election, 76 percent of registered voters in Los Angeles cast a ballot, an increase from the 2016 presidential election attributable to the pandemic-era adoption of universal vote-by-mail in California, according to the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's Office. The vast majority of voters cast their ballots by mail that year.

In Los Angeles County, the rate of voter registration is high. As of April, it was 84 percent — with 53 percent of voters registered as Democrats, 17 percent as Republicans and less than 3 percent as American Independents.

Voter turnout is not expected to be as high this primary season, especially without highly competitive statewide races.

Candidates at the top of the ballot in Los Angeles County include Los Angeles mayoral contenders:

Joe Buscaino, Mike Feuer and Ramit Varma appeared on the primary ballot even though they withdrew from the race and endorsed other candidates.

Can't see the widget below? Click here for all Los Angeles County election results.

LOS ANGELES COUNTY CITY RACES, INCLUDING LOS ANGELES CITY PRIMARY NOMINATING ELECTION FOR MAYOR

<span id="selection-marker-1" class="redactor-selection-marker"></span>

For a complete guide to statewide races, see the CalMatters California Election 2022 Voter Guide.

City News Service, The Associated Press and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report

Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.