(Editor's note: As of this story's publication, final election results are still expected. We expect more next week and will be staying on the final results.)
Watch any of the AI videos that the Spencer Pratt campaign boosted on social media to attract voters during his run for L.A. mayor, and you’ll see the same delusion repeated over and over again.
It’s not the dweeby, Disney adult-esque plots that depict Pratt as a superhero or a Jedi that will solve all of the city’s problems, but the fantasy depicted towards the end of all of the videos that a multi-ethnic coalition of Angelenos (usually depicted in stereotypical ways, like a Latino construction worker character that seems to appear over and over again) would join in a coalition to oust L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, a liberal Democrat with a past as a leftist community activist, and elect Pratt, a MAGA Republican, to the mayor’s office.
While it’s still relatively early, and there are lots of votes left to count, if you look at the votes that have been tallied, Pratt’s hope for a multi-ethnic coalition of pissed-off Angelenos has not materialized, because it was a fantasy.
As much as people are legitimately pissed off at Bass’ middling mayorship, a majority of Angelenos, from Black and Brown South L.A. to East L.A. and up into the working class areas of the San Fernando Valley, and yes, even large portion of West L.A., would rather, it seems, trust the devil they know than a MAGA, nostalgia and shlockmeister slop merchant like Pratt.
On the other side, East Coast media commentators question why L.A. can’t get it together and elect a proper, popular leftist like Zohran Mamdani to the mayor’s office. In these people’s fantasies, L.A. is a hellhole of apolitical, individualist, apathetic, greedy, little narcissists who spend too much time stuck in traffic to have any interest in politics, class consciousness, or, at the very least, enough sense to elect a handsome socialist mayor. This is a fantasy, too.
For starters, L.A. (and the cities of Paramount and Compton) is the city that beat back ICE and CBP gestapo shock troops last summer. Also, the mayor's office might have the most media attention, but the City Council is where a lot of the political power is.
In the City Council races, leftist candidates, like incumbents Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez, won their primaries outright, so they won’t have to go to a runoff election in November.
Newcomer lefty lawyer Faizah Malik put up a decent campaign to unseat westside conservative Democrat Traci Park, but lost pretty convincingly (the Westside suddenly skewing conservative is an interesting story for later), but lefty tenant organizer and first time candidate Estuardo Mazariegos won enough votes to challenge Jose Ugarte, the chosen successor of Curren Price, he of embezzlement charge fame, in the South Central council district, in the general election in November.
But even more impressively, L.A. voters went out in droves to vote for boring positions, like the City Attorney seat, where lefty lawyer Marissa Roy trounced a much hated (for good reason) incumbent City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. Even the race for City Controller, a typically unsexy bureaucratic job, attracted more people to cast their votes for incumbent City Controller Kenneth Mejia than Bass got in her run for mayor.
Also, the good people of Monterey Park gave the biggest middle finger/fuera to Silicon Valley losers by voting overwhelmingly to ban data centers from being built in the city (86.55% to 13.45%)
You can’t call that apathy. That’s civic pride.
On the other hand, Alex Villanueva, the disgraced former sheriff, is so far coming in a very distant second to the current sheriff, Robert Luna, in the race for sheriff. Villanueva did his best to piss off, hurt, and offend most of the entirety of L.A. County, except for his voting base of chuds and goons.
He probably has little chance to win in the general election in November without lying to voters about wanting to reform the Sheriff’s Department like he did during his winning campaign in 2018. Don’t be surprised when Villanueva starts putting out sanctimonious AI videos depicting him as the only person with enough manly vigor and common sense to “clean up” L.A. Just don’t expect Angelenos to believe the fantasy.
