The Memo: Spencer Pratt comes up short in Los Angeles, drawing hollow claims of fraud

President Trump’s favored candidate to become Los Angeles mayor looks like he won’t even make the runoff — a reality that has provoked a barrage of unsubstantiated claims of fraud from the commander in chief.

Votes are still being counted in the nation’s second-largest city, where a high proportion of ballots are customarily cast by mail. As those votes are tabulated, progressive City Council member Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of MAGA-friendly Spencer Pratt, best-known as a reality TV star, for second place.

Raman and Pratt are vying to run against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D), who will top the primary poll — but with a less-than-stellar vote share of about 35 percent as of Monday. 

Raman, who had been behind Pratt as in-person votes were tallied, is now ahead of him by roughly 3,000 votes, or four-tenths of a percentage point.

Most experts expect the left-wing Raman’s margin over the right-wing Pratt to increase as more votes are counted, given the propensity for Democratic and progressive voters to be more inclined to vote by mail than Republicans and conservatives. Los Angeles is also an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

California abjures party primaries in favor of “jungle” primaries, where all the candidates are in one contest and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election.

“He would have to beat her from this point forward if he is to come back, and I don’t see that happening,” Zev Yaroslavsky, the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs — and himself a former member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors — told this column.

None of this is likely to persuade Trump, however. 

“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had, 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” the president........

© The Hill