Spencer Pratt’s LA mayoral bid surged on Election Day, only to be reversed as California’s entrenched political machine reshaped the final count after the vote.

Bill de Blasio appeared on NewsNation on June 2 and was asked to comment on Spencer Pratt’s campaign. De Blasio smugly described Pratt’s ads as “inappropriate” and wondered, “Who is behind them?”

If de Blasio hadn’t actively participated in the decline of New York City during his disastrous eight years as its mayor, his arrogance might just be dismissed as unwarranted and clueless. But de Blasio is part of a machine that profits from urban decline. Behind his arrogance is a grasping, cynical hypocrite delighted that the machine on the West Coast is as potent as the one that elevated his own mayoral tenure and now supports Zohran Mamdani.

And so way out west, the machine has struck again. In the run-up to California’s June 2 primary, Spencer Pratt, running for mayor of Los Angeles, gave us a moment of hope. But as it turns out, he will not appear on the November ballot. Angelenos will choose between a democratic socialist extremist in the form of Nithya Raman and the “moderate” option, the ex-communist, incompetent incumbent, Karen Bass.

Calling Spencer Pratt’s ads “inappropriate” is a grotesque inversion of truth. Policy failures in Los Angeles have been so intellectualized and contextualized that only crude descriptions of reality on the streets of that beleaguered city had any chance to wake voters up from their brainwashed acquiescence.

Moreover, Pratt’s ads have heralded a new era in campaign messaging. His campaign was pitch-perfect and inspired. It wasn’t merely the use of AI to produce videos at negligible cost, videos that altogether would have cost millions only a few years ago. It was the extraordinary creativity of these videos and their uncanny ability to cut to the heart of issues that by now should have every resident of Los Angeles marching on City Hall with torches and pitchforks.

A few examples should suffice. Have a look at these:

“Entering the illusion,” where two parents confront a child, telling him that “Pratt is MAGA,” wherein the child asks why getting homeless drug addicts help and rebuilding homes is MAGA.

“Catching the Pratt,” where a mother wheels her young adult daughter into the emergency room because she is “thinking for herself,” wanting to “stop addicts from injecting drugs around kids,” etc.

“You are not alone,” where a group of women in a yoga studio realize, to their astonishment, that all of them secretly support Pratt’s candidacy.

“What Spencer Pratt Has in Mind for LA,” a satirical anti-Pratt ad where, for example, a father and daughter chastise Pratt for wanting change “when everything is fine,” while speaking against a backdrop of homes in flames.

And the classic “LA is worth saving,” depicting, among other things, Karen Bass and assorted prominent Democrats dressed in Louis XIV’s Baroque attire, swigging champagne and eating cake, while laughing derisively at a mother trying to protect her children from LA’s dangerous streets.

This was a brilliant campaign. It gave Pratt, who lost his own home in the January 2025 wildfires, instant momentum. So much so, in fact, that his opponents were worried enough to see to it that a second mayoral debate was canceled. And on the day after the election, Pratt had reason for optimism. Early returns reported, “With 63 percent of the votes counted by early Wednesday morning, Bass had 35 percent, Pratt 30 percent, and Raman 22 percent.” Pratt had an 8 percent advantage over Raman. So far, so good.

That was before what members of the machine dismiss as the “red mirage” began to dissipate. It didn’t take long. By Thursday afternoon, Pratt’s lead over third-place Raman had shrunk to 33,076, i.e., from an 8.0 percent advantage to 6.0 percent.

By Friday, the trend was unmistakable. Pratt’s lead was down to 20,672, only a 3.3 percent edge. After the Saturday update, the Los Angeles Times, whose veteran reporters knew better, published an article, “Pratt holds off Raman for now,” as if his lead over Raman, by then down to 7,494 votes or 1.1 percent, left any possibility he would stay in front.

Sunday’s update made it official. Pratt was behind Raman by 4,381 votes. With weeks of counting still ahead, the chances that Pratt will recover his lead are zero. Why? What is the nature of this machine that delivers a red mirage on election night, invariably blown away by a blue wind? How is this possible?

And here it is that accusations of fraud are almost irrelevant. Yes, California’s election laws make voter fraud possible, even easy. With poorly maintained voter rolls, 29 days of “early voting,” provisional ballots, same-day voter registration, automatic motor-voter registration, universal mail-in ballots, a seven-day post-election grace period for mailed ballots to still be counted, ballot harvesting, and county elections offices under oversight by Democrat politicians and staffed by Democrat-leaning bureaucrats, there are means, motives, and opportunities for fraud.

But these laws governing elections in California are tools—all of them completely legal—that turbocharge California’s ruling political machine. To rig an election in California, fraud isn’t necessary. To focus on fraud, without also critiquing the system itself, is a fruitless distraction.

There is a reason that ballot counts in the days after the election skewed two-to-one in favor of Raman, when Pratt led Raman by 8 percent in the early returns, and it doesn’t require fraud. What happens in elections in California today, as noted political observer Chris Rufo stated in a recent interview, is “no less nefarious but much more sophisticated.”

Rufo goes on to describe how California’s system works. “Institutions that have large ground games: unions, DSA, activist groups, homeless shelters—all of these people within the liberal NGO Borg—to go chase ballots, harvest ballots, solicit, and grab all of these ballots, which are technically legal in a way that the opposition cannot do.”

This is what happened to Pratt. This is what dissolved his red mirage. A political machine of extraordinary reach dispatched its operatives to every precinct in the City of Los Angeles wherever voters could be found who were low-information, dependent on government assistance, innately conditioned to oppose a Republican, inclined to have a Pavlovian aversion to any candidate tagged with a “MAGA” affiliation, or unlikely to vote without active assistance, or some combination of all of the above. These votes for Raman were the result of selective vote harvesting from precisely targeted groups.

This is why GOP candidates lose in California. If a race is close, it isn’t enough to wage a brilliant campaign. The endgame is rigged in favor of the party that can field a permanent army to exploit California’s current election laws. That army is populated by operatives from public sector unions that are overwhelmingly partisan Democrats, along with thousands of workers at partisan NGOs. This perennial political machine is fed by taxpayers and tax deductions; the election work they do is often technically “nonpartisan,” and the public programs they provide when they are not harvesting votes are “social welfare” programs that get more funding from failure than from success.

This is California’s self-reinforcing cycle of political dysfunction. Spencer Pratt tried to disrupt the system, and his surge in the polls surprised a lot of people.

But the machine won. Again.