What Spencer Pratt’s Defeat Tells Us About the American City

By David Wallace-Wells

In the end, Spencer Pratt didn’t win the Los Angeles mayoral primary, as his boisterous fans on X had been loudly predicting he would for weeks, passing around A.I. slopaganda, podcast clips and betting-market screenshots as though they were divination tools rather than forms of reactionary wishcasting. Pratt didn’t even make the runoff, as you might’ve assumed he would not just from reading some of his fawning coverage. His candidacy didn’t mark a new era for law-and-order politics, in Los Angeles or elsewhere, and he did not introduce a new generation of social media populism. In fact, he did worse than Donald Trump did in L.A. in 2024, and worse than Trump did in 2020. And he did considerably worse than the Republican Rick Caruso did, in 2022’s mayoral primary, when he ran as a much more generic conservative at a time of considerably less frustration with the local Democratic machine.

None of this should have been too surprising to anyone even passingly familiar with the political landscape of Los Angeles, where frustrations with the current mayor, Karen Bass, have been running high since the fires last January but which remains one of the most liberal big cities in America. Throughout the spring, the........

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