On the menu today: This is primary day in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota. One of the biggest races will be in Los Angeles. I spent a lot of time in early 2025 laying out how the devastating effect of the wildfires was exacerbated by bad policy choices at the city, county, and state level, and how L.A. mayor Karen Bass disqualified herself from continuing to hold office by not even rushing to return from Accra, Ghana, rather than attend the inauguration of Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama. But Los Angelenos don’t want to hear it; somehow, Bass still has a decent shot at reelection, and Spencer Pratt — the Next Big Thing™ in the conservative media world — is not guaranteed to make the runoff. Choose carefully, Los Angelenos, and read on.
Does Spencer Pratt Have an Opening in Los Angeles?
The conservative media world fell in love with Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt.
Just here at NR, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Armond White, Jeff Blehar, Will Swaim and David Bahnsen, John Fund, and Kamden Mulder have variously sung his praises.
There are 14 candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles. Tonight, if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, the top two finishers advance to a runoff held on November 3. The three top candidates are incumbent Karen Bass, Pratt, and Nithya Raman, a member of the city council formerly endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and chair of the city’s Housing and Homelessness Committee.
On Bass’s and Rama’s watch, Los Angeles has become a worldwide leader in homelessness — in the bad way.
Los Angeles has more people living on the streets than any other city in the United States, which almost certainly makes it the homelessness capital of the developed world.
There are 15 counties in California whose total populations are smaller than the homeless population of L.A. County, which exceeded 75,000 people in 2023. If you filled Dodger Stadium with all the county’s homeless people, you’d have enough left over to fill Crypto.com Arena downtown.
For Pratt, finishing in the top two is an achievable goal, but not a sure thing. And presuming Pratt makes it to the runoff, he needs to persuade a majority of registered voters within the city of Los Angeles, and that is a tall order for the most rightward serious candidate. Late last month, Independent Voter News attempted to project and break down the likely turnout for the primary:
Spencer Pratt leads the overall race, but his support is concentrated in a bloc that historically underperforms in primaries. Among Republicans, he is the only candidate with meaningful support: 75 percent back Pratt, with no other candidate clearing 5 percent.
Among independents (No Party Preference and American Independent), Pratt leads with 39 percent, well ahead of Raman at 19 percent and Bass at 6 percent.
That’s a dominant position in a large voting bloc. Republicans and independents make up 35 percent of LA’s general election electorate in this model. The question is whether they show up in the primary at anything close to that rate.
Got that? We’re talking about a city that is two-thirds Democrats — and that’s on a good day for Republicans.
Karen Bass leads among Democrats in this poll, with 34 percent support. Raman trails by four points at 30 percent. Bass’s coalition is older and more black than Raman’s. The remaining Democratic vote splits between None/Other (18 percent) and Pratt (12 percent)
…The structure is clear. Pratt owns Republicans and independents. Bass owns older Democrats. Raman owns younger Democrats. Whoever turns out in the primary decides which two of those coalitions advance to November.
Keep in mind, the Los Angelenos who are most opposed to Bass’s form of mayoral leadership may have already voted with their feet. Los Angeles County, which includes the city of Los Angeles, lost 53,421 residents between July 2024 and 2025.
The spectacularly tone-deaf Bass recently lamented that she inherited a “hot mess,” which is a rather poor choice of words to describe the city before the wildfires destroyed more than 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County.
Back in March 2025, Bass’s website boasted, “Mayor Bass is leading the fastest recovery effort in modern California history.”
In the Palisades neighborhood within the city, 671 units were damaged or destroyed. A year and a half later, just 261 rebuilding applications have been received, 51 are under construction, and exactly one structure has been rebuilt, according to the county’s permitting progress dashboard.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about former Louisiana Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco, and how she chose to not seek another term in 2007, less than two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated her state. You can lay some blame for the poor preparation and response to the disaster at the federal government and the city government of New Orleans, but there was no getting around the fact that Blanco failed her state – before, during, and after the storm.
Blanco, 64, had been widely criticized not only for her immediate response to the storms, but also for a bureaucracy-bogged recovery effort.
That effort included the “Road Home” program, designed to funnel billions in federal dollars to pay hurricane-struck homeowners for repairs or buyouts. More than 115,000 people whose homes were damaged in 2005 by the hurricanes have applied for the aid. As of this week, about 3,000 have received grants.
After Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, Blanco was criticized for not requiring an evacuation of the city earlier and not sending in buses sooner to take stranded residents from the city’s shelters.
Sound familiar, Los Angelenos?
The Los Angeles city poverty rate is 16 percent, well above the California statewide average of 11.8 percent and the national average of 10.6 percent. Economic growth is projected to be just 1.6 percent this year, and the unemployment rate, currently at 5.1 percent, is expected to rise to 6.1 percent by the end of the year.
The Los Angeles Economic Development Council calculated that costs of doing business in L.A. are approximately 20 percent higher than the national average; a Standard and Poors analysis finds the metropolitan statistical area the sixth most expensive out of 380 in the U.S. A “mansion tax” enacted in 2022 has made the construction of new housing more expensive and more complicated; the city’s tax code is complicated, even by California standards.
Despite a city budget of nearly $14 billion — more than the gross domestic product of NATO member Montenegro — city infrastructure is in terrible shape, blamed on pervasive under-investment for decades. The Los Angeles Times noted that the city hadn’t repaved a single street for a six-month stretch and declared that the city had “surrendered to the potholes.” (Hey, it’s not like Los Angelenos drive much, right?)
Where’s all the money going? In some cases, exceptionally well-paid city employees. In 2024, a fire battalion chief was paid $905,060, including $650,510 in overtime pay on a base salary of $135,306. Now, we all love firefighters, but that is more than quite a few players on the Los Angeles Rams football team will make this season.
As of 2024 — the most recent year available — at least 15 city employees were paid more than $600,000 in compensation, including the Chief Port Pilot of the city of Los Angeles, who was paid $704,027.
Eighty-seven city employees were paid more than $500,000 in a single year. The one-hundredth highest-compensated city employee was a port pilot in Los Angeles Harbor who was paid $495,022. (The league minimum annual salary in Major League Baseball is $780,000, so roughly one hundred city employees are making about two-thirds of what bottom-of-the-roster players on the Los Angeles Dodgers are making this year.)
Mayor Bass’s annual salary is about $301,000, but she said she has taken a pay cut, but has refused to disclose the amount.
The city’s Democratic tax-and-spend establishment has killed the geese that had been laying the golden eggs.
The 72-year-old Bass — apparently one of the finalists to be Joe Biden’s running mate back in 2020 — has failed her city so thoroughly that you half expect Oliver Queen to show up with a bow and arrow.
The options for the city of Los Angeles are to continue the current status quo, move even further to the left with Raman, or try something new with Pratt and his “Common Spence.” If the city does not choose the Pratt option, we’re left to wonder why anyone dissatisfied with the city’s direction would stick around.
ADDENDA: California’s gubernatorial primary is today, and we may not know the two candidates advancing to the runoff for several weeks. Even the New York Times editorial board is forced to admit that California’s glacial pace of counting votes is a national embarrassment.
In each of the past three congressional election cycles, Americans waited at least a week to find out whether Democrats or Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. The main reason has been California, the nation’s most populous state, home to 52 House districts. It allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to seven days after Election Day and counts ballots with agonizing slowness. After this year’s midterms, the country may once again spend days waiting for California.
… Graham Platner contends that his opponent, Susan Collins, is controlled by the Jews — or at least, “Senator Collins is bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.” You can cover up the tattoo, but the worldview is still in his heart.
…Over in the Washington Post, I write that everyone in America should be free to fly whatever flag they want — the Stars and Stripes, the rainbow flag, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag — and we should stop insisting that the other guy’s flag is a dog whistle for some sort of secret sinister agenda.