Imagine that there was a social media site where liberals spun each other up all day. (Let’s call this platform “Bluesky.”) Now imagine that there was a charismatic candidate for governor of Alabama who said all the right things about subjects that fired up the most prolific Democratic influencers on the internet. (Have Alabamians said these issues are the most important to them? Doesn’t matter.) Next, imagine that everyone on Bluesky became confident—no, certain—that this dream Democrat was about to turn Alabama blue. Now, imagine that this candidate lost. Finally, imagine that instead of saying to themselves, “Ah, shoot, we got ahead of ourselves,” these bleeding-heart Democrats, most of whom did not live in Alabama, became convinced that the only way their favorite Democrat could have failed to take over Alabama was if the other side cheated.

Now you understand Spencer Pratt’s third-place finish in the Los Angeles mayoral primary.

If you spent time on Elon Musk’s algorithmic For You feed on X in recent weeks, you may have gotten the impression that Pratt was riding a tidal wave of support to the mayorship. Thousands of A.I.-generated videos and postings flooded the site. A consistent message emerged: Los Angeles was not a beautiful, vibrant metropolis with serious problems, but a hellhole verging on being lost for good. The cause of that problem? The city’s homeless people, a population that is shrinking but that Pratt insists is exploding.

Pratt and his supporters, whipping each other up for weeks, thought most Angelenos saw the city just the way they did. Pratt said before last Tuesday’s election that he was confident he wouldn’t just advance to the general election by finishing in the top two, but that he would win outright by taking a majority of votes. (No poll had suggested anything close to that.) Another accelerant was the prediction markets, conservative-tilted spaces that in some cases paid to promote far-right influencers’ conspiracy posts.

The election did not go Pratt’s way. Though things looked good for him as the count got going on Tuesday night and on Wednesday, Pratt always had a long way to go. California gives its residents the widest possible time range to submit mail ballots, and as more of them were counted over the past week, Pratt’s margins against progressive city councilmember Nithya Raman got worse and worse. Her count passed his on Sunday, and most every major outlet had called the race by Monday evening. Pratt has gotten around 26 percent of the vote, right in line with what Donald Trump got in 2024, before his popularity tanked. It wasn’t even a bad showing for a MAGA-coded conservative in a deep-blue city in what looks like a blue wave year nationally. Pratt could’ve hung his hat on that.

Pratt and his supporters have chosen a different path. Instead of resolving to build on a decent performance, they’ve ridden a collective delusion—or, in some cases, profited off the delusions of their cohort—to declare the election was stolen. Republicans all over the internet, the state, and the Oval Office are now........

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