Pauline’s Revenge

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

It makes sense that a party of postliberals, paranoiacs, and grifters would believe that any election it loses has been rigged against it.

 

But Trump-era Republicans don’t actually believe that. The mass psychosis that followed the 2020 presidential race remains the exception, not the rule.

 

Last fall the GOP was obliterated in off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, embarrassing the president. Do you recall any outcry afterward about funny business with the results?

 

How about when Republicans badly underperformed in the 2022 midterms? Or after the many, many special elections in which Democrats have overperformed over the past 16 months? Both would seem like fertile ground for suspicions about systematic vote-shifting toward the left. There’s been nothing.

 

In 2024, Democrat Elissa Slotkin bucked the national trend toward the GOP and eked out a Senate victory in Michigan, a state won by Donald Trump. There was no right-wing uproar about it. Ditto in 2022, when Trump buddy Herschel Walker lost a close Senate race to Raphael Warnock in Georgia. Republicans had been primed by Joe Biden’s victory two years earlier to doubt results from that state, but Walker quickly conceded, and that was that.

 

Far more often than not, right-wingers take defeat in stride. So why have so many lost their minds about Spencer Pratt failing to make the runoff in Los Angeles’ mayoral race?

 

Pratt is a Republican former reality TV star who launched a gonzo campaign aimed at the local Democratic establishment’s apathy toward urban dysfunction—broken lights, streets in disrepair, incompetence in responding to the wildfire that laid waste to the Pacific Palisades, including Pratt’s own home. He cranked out low-cost, high-impact, AI-generated ads mocking incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, creating an online sensation and lifting his visibility.

 

His message and his medium were populist to the core. And they worked. When L.A. voters went to the polls last week, Pratt was polling competitively with Bass and the other contender in the race, progressive councilwoman Nithya Raman. By the close of business on Election Day, he was ahead of Raman for second place. If that had held, he would have faced Bass in November’s runoff.

 

It did not hold. Because most Californians vote by mail, ballots continued to trickle in and be counted after the in-person vote was tallied. Day by day over the following week, Raman gained on Pratt; last night, she overtook him and was projected to finish in second place, eliminating him from the runoff.

 

And through it all, the first election-related right-wing mental breakdown since January 2021 played out in full public view.

 

It was led from the top, of course. “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 declared on Truth Social. The vice president backed him up, pronouncing the result “pretty shady” in an appearance on Fox News. The speaker of the House declined to say flatly that the race had been stolen from Pratt but observed that “some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove.”

 

The grassroots right didn’t need much encouragement from its leaders to smell a rat in this case, though. Check your favorite MAGA cultist’s social media account and I promise that you’ll find organic “Pratt wuz robbed” propaganda dating back days.

 

Of all the defeats the right has suffered over the last five years, why is this one so singularly traumatic that Republicans have reverted to sore-loser fantasies about vote-rigging to cope with it?

 

Anatomy of a conspiracy.

 

The fact that California sucks at counting votes surely has something to do with it.

 

The state will tally any ballot postmarked by Election Day provided that it arrives within the seven days that follow, meaning that votes aren’t just being tabulated long after the election has ended but are still being received. Security protocols like verifying signatures on mail ballots and confirming that provisional voters are registered also take time. The system’s defenders would say that it’s all worth it in the name of making voting as easy as possible, no matter how long it takes to finish counting.

 

But most people—and certainly most right-wingers—are with Nate Silver, I’m sure: “Like, honestly, ‘it's going to take us several weeks to tell you who won the election’ is failed-state sh-t and should be much more stigmatized.” I can’t imagine something more likely to trigger a low-trust institution-doubting faction like populist Republicans than a one-party Democratic state needing a month to verify election results when a state like Florida manages to do it the day of.

 

“California’s electoral system is inherently suspicious” is a decent prima facie case for the “Pratt wuz robbed” conspiracy theory. But it runs into this problem: It takes roughly three seconds’ thought to see that that theory is tremendously stupid in half a dozen ways.

 

I don’t know where to begin. With this, I suppose: Republican candidate Steve Hilton edged out progressive billionaire Tom Steyer to make the runoff for California’s gubernatorial race. Why would Democrats rig the L.A. mayor’s race to nuke Pratt but not the governor’s race to nuke Hilton?

 

And why would L.A.’s Democratic establishment, which Bass leads, connive to ensure that Raman made the mayoral runoff knowing that Bass would have a vastly easier time defeating the Republican Pratt?

 

It’s because Bass feared having to face five more months of killer populist attacks, some right-wingers would reply. But she didn’t fear it—especially not this year of all years, when Democratic motivation to vote will be sky high. Pratt was the least popular candidate in the race, saddled with the locally toxic Republican brand and with a foolish endorsement from Trump (who’s 55 points underwater in L.A.) dubbing him “a big MAGA person.” Of course Bass preferred to face him.

 

Pratt running for mayor of Los Angeles was like Zohran Mamdani running for mayor of some struggling town in Wyoming. He might get further than most members of his party via populism, media savvy, and sheer charisma, but he won’t get far. Political gravity is remorseless, which explains why Pratt’s share of the vote in L.A. almost precisely mirrored Trump’s.

 

There’s no mystery to Raman’s late surge in the race either, given that she led Pratt narrowly in the Los Angeles Times’ final poll of the race. But even if we lay that aside, there was reason to believe that her base would show up later than Pratt’s would.

 

“Voters who have lived in the same place longer, own a home, are white and are wealthier are all more likely to receive and send back their ballots early—and they are also more likely to vote Republican,” elections expert Richard Hasen noted. Raman’s flakier progressive cohort would be expected to drag its feet by comparison. Democratic voters were also incentivized to hold onto their ballots longer, per the New York Times:

 

This year, California had an unusually competitive primary election for governor, driving up turnout and raising the stakes of the statewide count. To add to the issue, many Democrats waited to return their mail ballots as the field shifted and as some were concerned that Democrats could get locked out of the top two spots.

 

On top of all that, well-organized progressive groups can and do take advantage of the fact that California allows ballot harvesting. Pro-Raman outfits likely spent the final days of the race collecting votes before dropping them off en masse.

 

In other words, Pratt’s initial second-place finish was a so-called “red mirage” a la Pennsylvania in 2020. It’s been explained to right-wingers a thousand times that Donald Trump’s disappearing “lead” in the state that year was an artifact of Republicans preferring to vote in-person and Democrats preferring to vote by mail. In-person votes were counted immediately, whereas mail ballots weren’t opened until Election Day, leading to a false impression on election night that Trump was ahead when in reality many of Biden’s votes simply hadn’t been tallied yet.

 

It isn’t complicated. The fact that many on the right persist in explaining “red mirages” with conspiracies suggests a defect in intellect or integrity, between which I leave you to decide for yourself.

 

But we still haven’t answered the question. Why are Republicans so invested in the “Pratt wuz robbed” explanation, especially when there’s another effective—and more valid—way to spin the outcome? Brain-dead leftists would rather live in urban squalor that they govern than in a city with a higher quality of life that’s governed by the right. (You would think a guy who wrote a book called Suicidal Empathy might be especially keen to push that line instead of a conspiracy theory, but no.)

 

Even some Trump-friendly California Republicans tried to dissuade the rank-and-file from chasing this dopey shiny object. Steve Hilton told CNN he’d seen no irregularities in the election. The chairman of the Los Angeles GOP posted the rules on ballot-counting to educate suspicious right-wingers on the process. A local Trump-appointed assistant U.S. attorney debunked rumors that Pratt had received zero votes in one of L.A.’s periodic ballot updates. None of it has mattered.

 

Why?

 

Emotions.

 

Two reasons, one of which is strategic and the other of which we might call “emotional.”

 

The strategic one is as subtle as a fart in church. This is an election year, and the GOP is eager to discredit the midterm results preemptively in case the big blue wave arrives. So obvious is that motive that the New York Times couldn’t resist acknowledging it in the headline to its story about the president’s reaction to Pratt’s defeat: “Trump Previews Fall Strategy With Baseless Claims of California Vote Fraud.”

 

That’s the difference between the L.A. mayoral race and the other elections I mentioned at the start of this piece. Unlike in those cases, the president had real skin in the game in this one. He wants to govern like a monarch for the rest of his term, and a Democratic Congress will make that impossible, so he’s urgently trying to prime the public to doubt the left’s electoral strength as he prepares to contest the results this fall. Pratt losing is a setback for that project given the amount of public attention to the race and the media hype around the upstart’s campaign.

 

If Democrats have the numbers to squash Pratt in L.A., Americans may reason, they might have the numbers to squash Republicans across the map. If his defeat is plausible and legitimate, potentially all GOP defeats in November are.

 

California is especially threatening to Republicans considering that Democrats stand to gain several House seats there from the tit-for-tat partisan redistricting wars. The outcome in those House races might determine which party controls the chamber. If Trump can get people in the habit of viewing Democratic victories in the state as inherently dubious, so much the better for the Stop the Steal 2.0 effort to undo those victories.

 

Why, if “Pratt wuz robbed” gets enough traction among the base, it might even soften up Republican resistance to the SAVE America Act in the Senate.

 

Still, I doubt that most of the right shares the president’s Machiavellian motive for questioning Pratt’s defeat. Their attachment to his candidacy was emotional, I sense: He ran a campaign that was lab-engineered to appeal to grassroots activists, and watching that campaign fail now has those activists questioning their ability to gauge the public mood. There are few things more distressing for populists than to discover that they no longer understand The People, even a left-leaning People like Angelenos.

 

Especially when they did famously understand The People once before.

 

It’s not a coincidence that some of the elements of Prattmania resemble elements of Trumpmania circa 2016. In both cases, a reality-television celebrity outsider whom no one regarded very highly took up working-class public-order grievances against an out-of-touch liberal establishment. And in both cases, that celebrity beat the expectations of the political smart set by connecting with the average joe through smart uses of new and old media.

 

Remember “meme magic”? Prattmania, with its AI ads and online cheering section, had an aspect of that. As with Trump, a lot of Very Online people seemed to believe they could almost will Spencer Pratt to victory through sheer enthusiasm.

 

The fact that he was running for mayor of California’s biggest city added to the excitement. No state draws more right-wing contempt for its progressive cultural bugaboos, enervated bureaucracy, high cost of living, and urban decay than Gavin Newsom’s, and few mayors have typified left-wing complacency about all of it more than Bass since the Palisades fire. If ever a Democratic electorate might be receptive to a common-sense “let’s fix this” message against the disastrous defund-the-police left, activist Republicans seemed to believe, this one might.

 

Besides, hadn’t Trump’s comeback in 2024 vanquished wokeness, or at least severely reduced its potency? The right’s great cultural victory might not have turned L.A. conservative, but maybe it opened the minds of enough Democratic voters that they’d give Pratt a respectful hearing. Even if he ended up losing to Bass in November, surely more people there would prefer him to the far-left Raman.

 

For all of those reasons, grassroots populists were heavily emotionally invested in Pratt’s success in a way they weren’t invested in the elections I mentioned in the introduction. His overperformance would prove simultaneously that they still wield real influence over politics a la 2016, that the right’s culture-war message remains potent despite the president’s troubles, that wokeness remains gravely wounded, and that MAGA still understands what the average voter wants—even in L.A.—better than any of the smug so-called experts do.

 

Then Pratt finished out of the money, and it all went up in smoke.

 

That left them with a choice. On the one hand, they could face the bitter reality that their political and cultural victories in 2024 won’t be as enduring as they hoped. They don’t actually represent The People, it turns out; they represent a very particular type of person that likes to associate with similar persons, creating an ideological bubble that blinds them to political reality.

 

Every right-winger knows the famous (and apocryphal) quote from New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael after Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” It’s cited whenever an insular liberal, particularly one in the media, seems surprised to discover they’re on the wrong side of popular sentiment. Fast-forward a half-century and insular right-wing activists can’t believe Nithya Raman finished ahead of Spencer Pratt because they don’t know anyone who likes her.

 

Call it Pauline’s revenge.

 

Accepting the result and reckoning with what it says about their own popularity was one option for populists to cope with a traumatic reality. The other was pretending that Pratt didn’t lose, avoiding reality by denying that it happened and refusing to hear otherwise in the same way their hero did when he stormed out of an interview about an election he lost.

 

Is it any surprise that they made the choice they did?

 

As I said, then, it isn’t true that the right believes that any election it loses has been rigged against it. But it might believe that any election in which it’s highly emotionally invested, and at which its own credibility is at stake, is. Trump 2020, Pratt 2026, possibly the midterms this fall: Brace yourself.