Fox News viewers and right-wing social media addicts are positively shocked that Spencer Pratt — the MAGA aligned former reality TV star attempting — is on his way to being eliminated from the Los Angeles mayoral primary, despite the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate. Pratt currently trails incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and LA City Council member Nithya Raman in a primary out of which only two candidates will advance..
Conservative news outlets and talking heads have spent the past few weeks trying to convince people that Pratt, a former star on The Hills and tabloid staple, was a shoe-in for the Los Angeles mayoral general election by an unbeatable margin. This is not the case. In Calirfornia’s open primary system, which sees candidates of all parties run in a single pool with the top two advancing to the general, polling consistently showed Pratt was locked in a tight race for second with Raman, with late surveys giving Raman the edge. Raman surged in front of Pratt over the weekend as ballots continue to be counted.
And if you can’t beat them, accuse them of cheating.
California is notorious for its slow ballot tabulation process. While it does take most states weeks to produce official, certified tallies of their results, most can declare winners on Election Night. In California, a state which allows voters to mail their ballots or drop them off on Election Day, even declaring a winner can take an inordinate amount of time. In an already blue state, California’s last minute mail-in and drop-off voters tend to skew heavily blue, but to Republicans — and Pratt himself — the Republican candidate’s drop to third is a sign of shenanigans.
The election denier in chief, President Donald Trump, wrote Monday on Truth Social that there was “no way this could have happened. Rigged Election!”
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections! Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS, according to officials,” Trump wrote in another post, referencing Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who is currently polling in second behind Democrat Xavier Becerra in the state primary.
Over the weekend, Trump stormed out of an interview with NBC’s Meet The Press after anchor Kristen Welker pressed him to provide evidence for his claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. His years-long, and false, insistence that he actually defeated Joe Biden in a landslide has led Republicans to regularly allege fraud in their own failed election efforts, Pratt included.
“A net swing of more than 43,000 votes since Tuesday,” Pratt wrote Sunday night on X. “43,000, huh? Where have I seen that number before,” he added, including a screenshot of a news article that there are approximately 43,000 homeless people in Los Angeles on any given night. It’s unclear what Pratt is suggesting, and in any case, the homeless would still have a right to vote if they satisfy the requirements set out by the law.
Elon Musk, who poured millions into Trump’s 2024 campaign, has issued a barrage of posts questioning the validity of the election, which has not even been officially called for Raman. “The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud. When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized,” he wrote. Voter ID is not “banned” in California. First-time voters are asked to verify their identity via an array of official state identification cards or proof of residency. There is no widespread evidence of systemic voter fraud in any state of federal election.
Right-wing content creator Benny Johnson, who lives in Florida, wrote that “after 5 days of statistically impossible ballot drops, Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Spencer Pratt. The DOJ needs to keep investigating. This can’t be allowed to keep happening in America. California’s third world ‘election systems’ need to be banned.”
Andrew Kolvet, spokesman for Turning Point USA, described Raman as a “woman with absolutely zero following, no groundswell of support, and no name ID [who] absolutely killed it in mail-in voting in Los Angeles.”
“Free PSA: If you don’t want us to assume cheating, maybe make it a little less obvious,” he added.
Raman has been a figure in Los Angeles politics since 2019, and is a well-known campaigner within her city. Outraged right wingers, many of whom do not live or vote in Los Angeles, seemed to have confused Pratt’s viral AI-slop ads and Fox News appearances with an actual tidal wave of support for their preferred candidate.
The story of the Los Angeles mayoral race should be that instead of incumbent Mayor Karen Bass winning a clean sweep of the field, two potential challengers managed to pull large swaths of the electorate away from her. She is now likely to face a formidable challenge from a more left-leaning city councilmember, instead of a virtually guaranteed reelection should Pratt have advanced to the general.
But wherever the Democratic Party is hiding their “win this election immediately” vote-rigging ray gun, one would think they’d be more inclined to use it in toss up elections and not deep-blue California.