Spencer Pratt Summer Ends in June Gloom

By Stephen Rodrick

Stephen Rodrick

It’s summertime, so I’m offering two great beach reads: Spencer Pratt’s The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

Stay with me.

Both books have been on my mind — no, seriously — as red America tries to parse election returns from Los Angeles where Pratt just finished third in the city’s mayoral primary. There’s a certain segment of the nation that can’t seem to understand how Pratt, a registered Republican and Trump voter, could not have finished in the top two and advanced to the November final. Sure, Pratt had no political experience besides being camera ready and little organization in a city where less than 20 percent of voters identify as Republican. And yes, every reputable poll had Pratt at 22 percent, just four points off his current 26 percent. And OK, Pratt deciding to spend part of the last week of campaigning on Gutfeld! while staying at the Four Seasons in New York City was a choice, much like telling everyone in an ad he was living in a trailer on his burned-out Pacific Palisades property when he was staying at the Hotel Bel-Air. 

Still, the X mob is incensed. The fix is in, they claim, a diabolical plan executed by a cabal that includes Mayor Karen Bass, late-arriving mail-in ballots, communists, and the homeless. One ardent Pratt supporter posted Sunday, “If reality star Spencer Pratt sparks the second American Civil War it will be almost too beautiful to take.” 

I don’t like to think of the aging millennials from Real World: Road Rules taking on the 82nd Airborne. OK, sometimes I like to think about it. But let’s take this seriously. This was all foretold in Pratt and Hofstadter. These two prominent political scientists never met. Pratt was born in 1983 when, “The doctor held me up like I was Simba in The Lion King,” while Hofstadter died of leukemia in 1970. Still, there is symmetry in their words.

Pratt: “Take a look inside my brain. Actually, don’t. It’s like The Matrix in there. Epiphanies and apocalyptic visions. Sacred symbols and master plans. Zeros and ones, pixels and dollar signs. Neurons firing like it’s the Fourth of July. Pew! Pew! Pew! So much noise, just to avoid sitting in silence with myself.”

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Hofstadter: “Any historian of warfare knows that it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, we can see how many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination: treason in high places can be found at almost every turning.”

Hofstadter is a doctor describing our disease. Pratt is the current patient. We just don’t like the diagnosis.

LET’S BLAME THE MEDIA. Sure, we are easy targets, but we have a long and pathetic history of falling in love with candidates based on first impressions. There was Betomania 1 (Senate campaign) and Betomania 2 (presidential run). In Maine, we rhapsodized about an oysterman and who the hell knows how that’s going to turn out.

This time, it was the right-wing media that created the conditions for a Pratt Bubble. I don’t want to single any publication out, but there is one founded by the current head of CBS News which ran headlines like “The Political Genius of Spencer Pratt” and, based on early returns, “The Revenge of the California Republicans.” Then there was the column where the writer kept referring to the candidate as “Pratt Daddy.”

I’m sure it was all written with the best of intentions. Pratt lost his home in the Palisades fires and his visceral anger with Bass is justified. The mayor had pledged not to leave the country while in office and then happened to be in Ghana during her city’s greatest hour of need. As I’ve written before, Bass seeking re-election after her fire response seems as nuts as Bass being replaced by a reality star who spent all his money because he thought he’d be bailed out by the Mayan Apocalypse.

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But there’s the twist. Pratt’s legitimate rage and charisma sedated the media into zombies, the word Pratt used to describe L.A.’s homeless population. To him, L.A.’s problem was merely a question of will — he suggested that forcing homeless addicts into rehab would be a simple process, not considering, well, the constitutional issues with coercive rehabilitation. Pratt maintained the crisis was just another left-wing scheme. “These people have been bused in by scam rehabs, scam NGOs, scam homeless nonprofits,” said Pratt on a local television station. “These people, when I unplug them and say you’re not taking our tax money anymore, they’re all going to Seattle, where the mayor will welcome them.”  

Let’s just say pushback was minimal. 

Social media fueled the concept that Pratt couldn’t lose. The phrase “Twitter is not real life” is a cliché and yet every year we seem to forget it. Yes, Pratt-associated AI ads were everywhere, but only if you were terminally online. This led the earlier mentioned outlet, recently purchased by David Ellison, to claim Pratt “has tapped into a nerve, inspiring a grassroots movement unlike any campaign before.” But had he? I’ve scoured the news and failed to come up with reports of this “grassroots movement” leading to tens of thousands of Pratt acolytes knocking on doors and creating coordinated GOTV campaigns. 

All the Pratt hype became a self-fulfilling prophecy in right-wing circles. It’s not a new story. If your media diet tells you repeatedly that Pratt’s campaign is rewriting the very future of political campaigns, you will be inclined to disregard the fact that Donald Trump only scored 32 percent of the vote in Los Angeles County in 2024. You will believe Pratt when he tells you he is going to get over 50 percent and avoid a runoff entirely. You will see the fact that Pratt raised $3.75 million as proof of concept and disregard the fact that only 17 percent of that came from L.A. residents. That kind of money is great for funding Pratt’s trips to New York City, but it doesn’t translate to actual votes. 

The California election system provided the lubricant that turned Pratt’s loss into a classic right-wing panic attack. The most casual followers of California campaigns know the count takes too fucking long because California is a mail-in ballot state that accepts any ballot postmarked on election day even if it arrives days later. Like it or hate it, that’s the law. 

For decades, California election night vote counts that include in-person voting — traditionally more Republican — have given a “red mirage.’” In 2010, Kamala Harris looked like a loser in her race for attorney general, but mail-in votes eventually gave her a 74,000-vote victory. In L.A., you just need to go back to the last mayoral election in 2022. Rick Caruso was up by two points over Bass on election night. He ended up losing by nearly 10 percent, a 12-point swing.

Republicans always conveniently forget this in their quest for justice. Pratt led Los Angeles City council member Nithya Raman by 30 percent to 22 percent for the second spot on election night. Conservative outlets declared him the winner, either out of naivete or calculating that you must declare victory before you can say the election was stolen. Some media organizations reported that Raman had conceded, apparently because she wept while thanking her supporters. (The Washington Post opinion page repeated this lie a full week after the election.)

And then the mail-in votes came in, Pratt’s lead slipped away daily around 4 p.m. Pacific when new counts were released. There were shouts of shenanigans. Pratt loyalists claimed that he received zero votes in a 24,000-vote drop. It became an Internet talking point that was not true. 

Late on Wednesday, Trump unleashed the hounds on Truth Social: “The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS”

Later, Elon Musk chimed in: “The level of fraud here is mind-blowing”

Here’s the thing — and maybe you’ve heard this before — neither Trump nor Musk offered any evidence of voter fraud. Not even Grok agreed.

ONE THING HOFSTADTER UNDERSTOOD was that utilizing conspiracy theories to explain away defeat is less about power than face-saving. Losing an election sucks. Sometimes your movement isn’t as popular as @DisgracedProp led you to believe. Sometimes 26 percent is just 26 percent. Maybe you were taken in by Pratt’s AI Batman heroics. That’s tough to admit. 

Buying into the paranoid style saves you from that pain. It is a Wendy’s Triple with cheese for the addled brain. You didn’t lose; you got screwed! And let’s face it, reality is the enemy, because reality means you might need to change. That’s hard. It’s easier to just eat your feelings. 

AS RAMAN CLOSED IN, the Pratt army’s rhetoric changed — it no longer targeted Bass, but the Democratic Socialists supported Raman. 

The rabble began accusing the Raman campaign of ballot harvesting, a process where activists can collect signed and completed ballots and return them for a voter. This was the one accusation that was true. There’s just one thing: Ballot harvesting is completely legal in Los Angeles and is done by every campaign. 

Pratt’s lead dwindled to nothing over the weekend, so the claims became more outrageous: Raman’s campaign was ballot harvesting from the homeless with the cooperation of NGOs, an already established bogeyman in the Pratt campaign. The only evidence provided was that some homeless Angelenos listed homeless shelters as their voter registration address, which, when you think about it, makes sense and is completely legal.

The AP declared Raman had locked up 2nd place on Monday night. Her current lead over Pratt stands at over 29,000 votes. The homeless population in LA is around 43,000 so Raman would have had to harvest almost 70 percent of Los Angeles’ homeless population. 

This seems unlikely.

In the end, the numbers are the numbers. In L.A., Pratt slightly underperformed Trump’s 2024 totals. At the state level, Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco combined for 35 percent of the gubernatorial vote. This is almost the same percentage as the two top Republicans garnered in California 2024’s United States Senate primary. (The fact Hilton made the general election is glossed over by the sore losers.) 

In his last presidential campaign, Trump declared he had won by a “landslide” over Harris. He won by 1.5 points. Raman’s margin over Pratt is 3.5 points.

The ragers and grifters do not care. Go back and read Pratt and Hofstadter’s words. Hofstadter was right, life’s defeats are infinitely more bearable and entertaining if they can be blamed on a cadre of invisible connivers and unfortunates, like commies and the homeless. Blame someone else and you don’t have to spend any time reevaluating how to come back with better ideas that get more votes. It’s easier to just shout louder. 

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