Spencer Pratt's LA Mayoral Flop Reveals a Surprising Urban Left Turn

Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV villain turned MAGA-adjacent Los Angeles mayoral candidate, didn't just lose the June 2026 primary — he didn't even make the runoff. More damning: he underperformed Donald Trump's own vote shares in LA in both 2020 and 2024, and fell well short of Rick Caruso's 2022 showing. Despite weeks of breathless X posts, AI-generated content, podcast hype, and betting-market screenshots declaring him a political phenomenon, Pratt's campaign collapsed the moment actual Angelenos voted. The episode became a sharp demonstration of how social media ecosystems — increasingly shaped by algorithmic curation and generative AI — can manufacture the illusion of a political surge without converting a single real vote.

The LA race featured a near-perfect tableau of American urban politics in 2026: Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent still haunted by January 2025's devastating wildfires; Pratt, the populist burn-it-all-down outsider embraced by the Manhattan Institute set and the All-In podcast crowd; and Nithya Raman, a technocratic progressive drawing comparisons to New York's Zohran Mamdani. Bass's allies reportedly ran attack ads against Pratt so toothless that Pratt's own supporters cheered them, suggesting Bass preferred a runoff against the easier target. Instead, she'll face Raman — who, in pre-primary head-to-head polls, was already beating the incumbent.

Zoom out from LA and a striking pattern emerges across America's largest cities. Rather than lurching right in response to post-pandemic disorder — as much conventional wisdom predicted — major cities have been electing or consolidating explicitly progressive leadership. Mamdani in New York is riding a post-election honeymoon deep into NBA Finals season. Michelle Wu in Boston ran unopposed for re-election after her challenger dropped out. Democratic socialist Katie Wilson unseated Seattle's incumbent mayor on a renters'-rights platform. Even Brandon Johnson in Chicago, once mocked as a cautionary tale for progressive governance, has stabilized at roughly the same approval ratings Rahm Emanuel posted at the end of his tenure.

Several forces may explain this leftward drift. Homicide rates in most major cities have not just recovered from pandemic peaks — many have hit record lows. Drug overdose deaths have declined sharply. Homelessness is down slightly. The crisis atmosphere that once fueled law-and-order politics has faded faster than the conventional wisdom predicted. Meanwhile, housing costs remain brutal in dense cities, pushing young professionals into ideological alignment with the urban working class around affordability — a problem for which progressive candidates are offering more credible answers than the center-right. Trump, notably, has largely stopped running against cities as symbols of Democratic failure.

If Raman wins the fall runoff, America's three largest cities — New York, Los Angeles, and potentially joined by others — will all be governed by leaders who would have looked like radical outliers just a decade ago. The argument is that cities, where residents most viscerally experience public goods like transit, parks, and sidewalks, are uniquely positioned to make the case for functional progressive government. The pandemic's withdrawal from collective urban life may have paradoxically reminded city dwellers what they were missing — and pushed them toward politicians promising to rebuild it.