In an eyes-and-ears election, the safest Democratic strongholds are in play.
Twenty-five years after Los Angeles had its last Republican mayor, the city is ugly, dirty, losing population with the rest of a troubled county, and struggling with the implosion of its most significant industry. The decline is visible, a daily presence in the life of the city.
The incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, who trained for a career in politics by traveling to Cuba with the radical Venceremos Brigade, is running for re-election. She’s been polling at 25% support, a disaster for an incumbent mayor. Among her opponents is the repellent DSA favorite Nithya Raman (the “next Mamdani“), a prominent member of the Los Angeles City Council who somehow keeps blaming the current leadership of the city for its decline. Facing left, Los Angeles rolls steadily downward.
But there’s a growing surprise in Los Angeles, as a reality television star and Republican who has never held elected office proves his ability to tell a compelling political story.
As the ad says, Spencer Pratt and his family lost their home in the Pacific Palisades fire of January 7, 2025, a disaster that keeps revealing appalling failures in the government of the city as litigation and investigations peel open the layers of the ineptitude. Seven percent of the city burned, much of it in unpopulated hills but also thousands of homes in one of LA’s most beautiful neighborhoods.
“They let my home burn down,” Pratt says, standing in front of the Airstream trailer where he lives as he waits to rebuild. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are.” He attacks. He points to reality and speaks directly. Like a certain other reality TV star who went into politics, he has a gift for a nickname: He calls the mayor Karen Basura, using the Spanish word for garbage. It sticks, and it’s showing up in random social media discourse.
The defining characteristic of the Los Angeles progressive is denial: Everything’s fine, crime isn’t a problem, it’s okay for children to walk to school through neighborhoods full of homeless encampments, the handful of infamous parks full of drug addicts are actually safe and clean.
Against that culture of relentless denial, Pratt says what is. His campaign strategy is the city. Deon Joseph is a longtime LAPD officer who patrols Skid Row, a frequent and serious ground-level critic of the way the city and county are governed. This is his response to the Pratt campaign, and the ad he links to captures precisely the flavor of the argument Pratt is making:
As predictably as the sunrise, California’s Democratic political machine is responding to the threat of Pratt’s candidacy by trying to paint him as Orange Man Jr., a dark figure driven by hate and rage. A few days ago, the former Los Angeles Times reporter Jim Newton described Pratt’s “angry, name-calling campaign” as one that keeps making “a shrill argument,” before blasting the man himself as “selfish, undisciplined and unprincipled.”
Bass, pretending that Pratt is a nobody she’s never heard of, piles on with fake emotional color:
Pratt, who saw his wife and two children rendered homeless with him as their house in the Pacific Palisades burned, is exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades – of, literally, his neighbors. Bass is trying to blunt a political criticism of a disaster that happened on her watch by painting it as pathological and mean, sidelining a forceful critic as a grifter. She’s meeting facts with feelings, coloring Pratt as distasteful.
It’s not going to work. Pratt, who is proving to be quick on his feet, responded with some fire of his own: “Yeah, I’m not sure if Karen Bass forgot that she let my house burn down and my parents’ house burn down, and I had actual neighbors burn alive across the street from my childhood home.”
The outcome of the mayoral race is very much up in the air. The last reliable polling suggested that 40 percent of the city hasn’t settled on a candidate, though that result is now a month old. But Pratt clearly has the attention of the city, and he’s being attacked because he matters as a candidate.
The Federalist spoke this week with Los Angeles County GOP Chair Roxanne Hoge, a conservative actress and lawyer who is waging an indefatigable campaign to make Republican politics matter in LA again. She warns that Bass is a formidable retail politician, though “her political instincts on a bigger scale suck.” She’s right, though Bass has also unaccountably spent her adult life winning elections for local, state, and federal office.
“She’s a wounded animal,” Hoge said about the increasingly unpopular mayor.
The DSA wing of the Democrat Party is rising in Los Angeles, and Hoge sees the hard shift to the left as a reality that’s causing real alarm in much of the city. “Democrats see the DSA as a problem,” she said.
Against a political culture that keeps drifting left and into brittle fantasy, Hoge views Pratt as a shrewd figure who appears to casually speak off the cuff while actually delivering a message with meticulous discipline. When she’s heard Pratt speak, “he said nothing without making sure it was correct.” Needing three things to win the race – an ability to diagnose the problem, an ability to offer a solution, and an ability to communicate – Hoge sees Pratt as having all three.
Los Angeles matters to the country because of its sheer size: It’s the home to 24 Assembly districts, 13 state senate districts, and 18 congressional districts. Republicans can’t give up on it.
Hoge argues that they haven’t. In a county with over a million registered Republican voters (see the 19th page of this PDF file), the GOP still has less than 20 percent of the total number of voters – but about a third of the elected officials, especially in the suburbs, in a county with 88 cities. In a deep blue county and a deep blue state, Republicans are winning elections.
“I do see hope,” Hoge says. We’ll know in a month if that hope has a serious future.
