AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.In the end, Spencer Pratt didn’t win the Los Angeles mayoral primary, as his boisterous fans on X had been loudly predicting he would for weeks, passing around A.I. slopaganda, podcast clips and betting-market screenshots as though they were divination tools rather than forms of reactionary wishcasting.
Pratt didn’t even make the runoff, as you might’ve assumed he would not just from reading some of his fawning coverage. His candidacy didn’t mark a new era for law-and-order politics, in Los Angeles or elsewhere, and he did not introduce a new generation of social media populism.
In fact, he did worse than Donald Trump did in L.A. in 2024, and worse than Trump did in 2020. And he did considerably worse than Rick Caruso, a Republican turned independent turned Democrat, did in 2022’s mayoral primary, when he ran as a much more generic conservative at a time of considerably less frustration with the local Democratic machine.None of this should have been too surprising to anyone even passingly familiar with the political landscape of Los Angeles, where frustrations with the current mayor, Karen Bass, have been running high since the fires last January but which remains one of the most liberal big cities in America.
Throughout the spring, the campaign there looked less like a glimmer of the future than a vivid vivisection of American politics in 2026. There was the zombie Democratic-machine incumbent, so unpopular it seemed hard for many in L.A. to believe she was running for re-election; the outsider-populist social-media demagogue, Pratt, building an anti-establishment campaign out of fearmongering about social disorder; and the technocratic progressive, Nithya Raman, testing the popularity of Zohran Mamdani-style politics on the West Coast, if a bit more cautiously than the left-wing insurgent in New York to whom she was so often compared.
The ultimate meaning of this race won’t be clear until the runoff in the fall, but we can now say for sure that it will tell us more about the course of progressive politics in the wake of social disorder — across the country, cities tend to be veering left — than it will about the arrival of a new New Right in the heart of liberal America.For the last few weeks, since the campaign’s one debate with all three candidates, it was easy for a casual observer to think that Pratt was in the lead, given how his candidacy came across on X, podcasts or even cable news, each of which treated the former reality-show villain as a political phenomenon rewiring the partisan landscape of L.A., saying the unsayable about local governance and social disorder and forging a new coalition of voters too fed up with the status quo to stay in their ideological lanes.
Pratt ran as a kind of burn-it-all-down outsider, powered by personal outrage and resentment, but won high-minded praise from conservatives at the Manhattan Institute as well as the “All-In” podcast bros. He got an additional boost from the incumbent mayor herself, who seemed to prefer a runoff with him to what will likely be a much more competitive one with Raman, so much so that allies of Bass’s campaign ran what appeared to be nominal attack ads against Pratt that were so persuasive in promoting his standing that his supporters cheered them on.But this was all a kind of illusion, however convincing the Pratt surge looked to the average Angeleno.
A decade or so ago, moderate political pundits often cautioned that Twitter was not real life. In the interim, we’ve come to live more and more on our screens, in ways that seem to blur the distinction between real and virtual life. But the algorithms are owned and operated now to even more explicit ideological purpose, and full of clip-farm content harvested from who-knows-where, so much so that New York magazine recently declared, “Your Feed Is the Product of a Stealth Marketing Campaign.” Since the arrival of generative A.I., certain worrywarts have feared it might easily sway the public by persuading them of disinformation.
In this case, it seemed more effective in persuading outside observers that Pratt was winning than in convincing Angelenos to actually vote for him.But this isn’t just a story about the hazards of internet politics — or, for that matter, a story about a charismatic blowhard who grabs the spotlight for a stretch and comes up short when the electorate judges him fundamentally unserious.
There is something else at play, as well, with relevance well beyond Los Angeles — an emerging pattern of urban realignment that may prove to be among the most significant shifts in contemporary American political life (with implications, perhaps, for the whole shape of the post-Trump era).Three or four years ago, it was conventional wisdom that American cities were in trouble, perhaps even in crisis, that the failures could be broadly attributed to the excesses and oversights of progressive governance and that reversing the tide would mean handing local government over to what passes for centrist strongmen in these liberal enclaves (as had happened in an earlier era with Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, for instance).Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
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