A Roadmap for Political Reformation
With primary season continuing apace, President Trump continues to prosper. Candidates he’s endorsed, such as GOP establishment warhawk Lindsey Graham and South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette (over Representative Nancy Mace), have won their primary races. Trump-backed Steve Hilton triumphed over Democrat billionaire Tom Steyer in California’s jungle primary for governor, where he’ll face former Biden administration official Xavier Becerra in the fall. There’s no question that the president’s hold over the Republican Party remains strong.
One candidate Trump didn’t endorse but clearly was a fan of fell short: Spencer Pratt. It looks like Pratt summer will have to wait. As votes continue rolling in, he won’t be moving on to a November runoff against incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
Pratt came in second on Election Day, giving his supporters some hope. But then California’s electoral system stepped in. As of Thursday, current mayor Karen Bass leads at 34.3%, and far-left City Councilmember Nithya Raman—essentially the West Coast version of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani—is firmly in second place at 29%. Pratt now sits a distant third at 25.5%.
Though conventional wisdom held that Bass would’ve preferred facing Pratt, a Bass-Raman runoff ensures L.A. stays firmly within Democratic control. Pratt presented a clear and present threat to the Democratic ruling establishment. He would’ve upended its ongoing experiment to see how long a major American city can last against a combination of a thriving homeless population, drug dens, and flowing fentanyl, and government malfeasance and incompetence.
His personality, charisma, and attention to the issues L.A. residents face every day elevated him to national status. But even reaching the runoff was always more pipe dream than reality. Pratt was an outsider facing a strong combination of public-sector unions, a hardened leftist political machine, and the crush of Hollywood, the media, and wealthy Democratic donors.
The problem isn’t Spencer Pratt’s loss in the L.A. mayoral race—it’s the system that made such a loss possible. As the saying goes, the system is what it does. And in California, it’s clearly tilted in favor of Democrats.
Though some voter fraud certainly exists on the margins across the U.S., and no electoral system is perfectly neutral, California is a special case. Just take the state’s lax voting requirements. As the Wall Street Journal reported on the Pratt loss, the Golden State sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters, allows same-day registration—even on Election Day—permits a gym card or even a sample ballot as a form of ID, and lets late-arriving ballots count if they include a handwritten date on the envelope. All of this is a recipe for fraud to metastasize.
Unsurprisingly, evidence of this is already surfacing. The California Post reports that an in-depth investigation found nearly 1,200 people “registered to vote at a homeless shelter with 132 beds, and another 185 at a drop-in center with zero beds.” It gets worse: records show “a whopping 7,600 voters [are] tied to homeless shelters and service providers.”
Add to this California’s permissive ballot harvesting practices. Third parties are allowed to collect votes and drop them off at polling locations, introducing yet more opportunities for fraud and abuse.
Hans von Spakovksy, formerly of The Heritage Foundation, has called ballot harvesting “a dangerous and foolish public policy that threatens the integrity of elections” and “should be prohibited in the states that currently allow it.” Even the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson, who’s no fan of President Trump’s frequent claims of widespread voter fraud, cites coercion risks (for example, pressure from union bosses or family members), challenges to ballot secrecy, and subtler abuses like collectors “helping” voters with down-ballot races.
That California’s electoral system perpetuates distrust among Californians, including Orange County Republicans, is no surprise. As Mike Solana of Pirate Wires wrote earlier this week about the L.A. mayoral race, “Elections are built on trust, and elected authority will not survive a world where the average person thinks the system’s illegitimate.” The one-party state will not be turned around until trust is restored at scale.
California has descended from the days of Governor Pete Wilson, who adopted tough-on-crime policing and oversaw a ballot initiative to prohibit illegal aliens from using social programs. Now, a Democratic-dominated political machine has helped turn California into a blossoming Third World state.
To restore trust, California should adopt precisely the opposite voting system it has now: a registration cut-off well before Election Day, voter ID, and voting only on Election Day, in person and with paper ballots. If Steve Hilton somehow pulls off a victory in the governor’s race, that could spark a political revolution that could return the state to basic sanity. And Spencer Pratt could be part of it, as Hilton has publicly floated the idea of picking Pratt as his running mate.
For now, Pratt’s mayoral race offers Republicans several key takeaways.
First, Pratt proves that a savvy social media campaign paired with a focus on local issues is the path to electoral success. He ran not as a Republican or a Democrat but as someone concerned with the inability of L.A.’s political leaders to provide basic municipal services. Rather than a Third Way mindset, he adopted a prudential stance that took the particulars of a specific community into account. Instead of running as straight-laced, movement conservatives or Trump caricatures, candidates should focus on their local communities’ top concerns.
Second, insurgent campaigns need a massive get-out-the-vote operation—especially targeting young men—as Jonathan Keeperman recommends. Some constituencies must be motivated to vote. Pratt had the talent and drive to win. All he needed was a political operation to match his natural skills and boost his candidacy.
Finally, political upstarts like Pratt need to be discovered and given resources, connections, and backing. Meteoric rises will not be sustained without help from those who have deep political connections. The Republican Party needs all the talent it can get, especially from younger generations who understand our times far better than the old guard, who still seem to pine for the return of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan.
As the Party of Trump begins to transition to the Party of Vance, finding figures with cerebral political instincts, charisma, and a sharp focus on addressing voters’ chief concerns will help carry forward the political revolution that Donald Trump started.
