Photo by Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
What happens when politics is kept local.
Spencer Pratt will not advance to November’s runoff election for Los Angeles mayor. While some on the Left have rushed to portray his narrow defeat as a wholesale rejection of his message and some on the Right have flirted with election denialism, the truth is more mundane: Pratt’s loss is best understood as a testament to the extraordinary difficulty of winning office as a registered Republican reality TV star in the largest progressive city of a deeply liberal state, under an electoral system that may itself confer structural advantages to Democrats.
But amid the rush to dismiss Pratt’s campaign as a failed and dangerous experiment in West Coast MAGA revivalism, Democrats would do well to consider a more instructive question: Why, despite his defeat, did so many Angelenos find his candidacy compelling?
The problems facing Los Angeles’s four million residents require no policy expert to diagnose. The city faced a nearly $1 billion budget deficit in 2025-2026, addiction-driven homelessness currently afflicts more than 40,000 Angelenos, and residents have watched their tax burden rise steadily while struggling to identify what they receive in return.
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Jesse Arm is the director of external affairs and presidential initiatives at the Manhattan Institute. Danielle Shapiro is an external affairs associate at the Manhattan Institute.