Republicans Missed A Huge Opportunity In Los Angeles
And they’re still too busy whining to notice.
This piece was originally posted at Ali’s joint The Camelopard.
Let’s get this out of the way first: There was no way that Spencer Pratt was going to win the mayoral race in Los Angeles. Only 16 percent of registered voters in the city of Los Angeles are Republicans, and Pratt was an abysmal candidate. Karen Bass would have been thrilled to run against Spencer Pratt. She would have whipped him into stiff peaks and held the upside-down bowl over her head.
The opportunity was not to have Spencer Pratt as the mayor of Los Angeles, or even to have a Republican as the mayor of Los Angeles. The opportunity was to pull the establishment of the Democratic Party to the right for a few years, and Republicans have blown that chance so thoroughly that Dems should send them flowers.
It is maddeningly easy to terrify establishment Democratic politicians into stepping rightward. (Chuck Schumer, I am looking at you, but not only at you.) And a hell of a lot of “conventional wisdom” pundits and Democratic strategists are only comfortable when they are scolding the Democrats for doing things like caring about orphans working in coal mines so divisively. Why not give bank presidents a few more tax breaks and classify cyanide in the drinking water as “natural nutty flavoring” instead?
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Los Angeles has had a rough couple of years and there is a ton of misinformation swirling around about the wildfires (no small amount of it spread by Spencer Pratt). A competent Republican candidate with workable ideas for the city … would still not have won. Let’s be absolutely clear on that. But they might have picked up a few more frustrated or low-information voters than Donald Trump did, and those extra points would have been months of fodder for talking heads and editors, who would point to them as a reason to ignore the country’s huge swing away from Trumpism and toward the left. It’s their sweet spot!
Instead, Republicans are reminding a nation that is already real goddamned tired of Trump’s stupid war and stupid monuments and stupid wrecking balls to the economy that the GOP is full of whiny little piss-babies who screech that it wasn’t fair every single time they get righteously stomped in an election.
The only hope of pulling off a long-term rehabilitation of the party is to stop supporting corpse-rot candidates, but apparently Republicans are too stupid and Trump-poisoned to do that.
I am in no way exaggerating Pratt’s unfitness as a candidate. Look at just a few examples of how unelectable he was:
Pratt spent time and money campaigning in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, neither of which is a part of the City of Los Angeles. They have their own mayors and everything! He wanted to be handed the top job in the city and did not bother to learn what and where the city is. You can put that down to laziness or stupidity or entitlement or any combination of the three. It doesn’t matter. It should have been an automatic disqualifier.
Pratt was a Sandy Hook truther and a fan of Alex Jones. Here, watch him not apologize for that. That also should have knocked him out of the race immediately! It should continue to automatically knock people out immediately forever.
Pratt and his wife by their own admission decided that the 2012 “Mayan apocalypse” was real and spent $10 million on cars, luxury trips and designer handbags. Guess what? If your reaction to an internet conspiracy theory is to spend all your money on bling, you have permanently forfeited your chance to control a $15 billion annual budget. I don’t care how much you are pretending to have grown as a person or how loudly you say “Oops!” You’re out.
And those are just the automatic DQs. Pratt was a catastrophically bad candidate.
In a city full of some of the most talented and well-trained creative professionals in the world, many of whom are currently scraping for work, Pratt released ads made with generative AI.
… that used people’s likenesses without permission and stepped on intellectual property.
During the campaign, he claimed to be living in an Airstream trailer when he was actually racking up a $15,000 bill at the Hotel Bel-Air.
He started his “entertainment” career by selling photos of a then-underage Mary-Kate Olsen to tabloids. The photos weren’t even his to sell. This is a story he shares in his own book, which came out in time for his campaign.
Millennials loathe him. I’m not fully up on his lore, but here’s several minutes’ worth of him being repellent. It comes across even without the context!
And of course, Pratt was never really running to be the mayor of Los Angeles at all. He was running to be a Conservative Political Figure Who Will Happily Take Your Donation. He has now successfully grifted a bunch of money, gotten the dopamine hits of being back on television and a butthurt conservative poster boy, and joined the conservative grifter ecosystem.
He has already been offered a job by Steve Hilton. On Friday, he released a video saying he’s not leaving Los Angeles even though he specifically promised us he would if he lost. There’s no universe in which he doesn’t run with this: Being a performative asshole and collecting cynical accolades from Fox News personalities is an easier way to rake in money than learning a trade.
Pratt made sure to work a sanctimonious reference to Jesus in with the threats and the swearing, so red state citizens, you have been warned: There is a real danger of Spencer Pratt staying in an expensive hotel for a few months and then running for high office in your election.
And that’s the second opportunity Republicans have missed: A loud rebuke of Spencer Pratt early on — or even a silent refusal to pay attention to him — could have been a small step toward peeling loudly unqualified dolts out of American politics.
If the GOP had any micro-scraps of integrity at all, his fellow Republicans would have disavowed Pratt and hounded him out. Instead, they posted on social media about how they were going to come to California and illegally vote for him. Har har! For all I know they did try it, but they were stupid enough to attempt their election fraud in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.
All Republicans had to do was insist on a candidate who knew even a tiny bit about the job and refuse to vote for a candidate who didn’t. They could have ushered in a renaissance of conservative politics based on something like real policy instead of grifting buoyed by bigotry.
Well, probably not, but they could at least have taken a small step toward not having to keep frozen smiles on their faces as they clap just off the beat and pretend to enjoy listening to Kid Rock at every single convention.
But they couldn’t. Spencer Pratt, a breathtakingly unqualified candidate whose entire established brand was “He’s terrible,” is the new darling of modern Republican politics. Not for bold thinking or personal integrity, but for power-whining and spreading wildly absurd, evidence-free election conspiracy theories.
Modern Republicans can’t resist further delegitimizing themselves and driving out any reasonable people who might have once supported them.
The party is dying. Good.
I don’t know who this clown is and I’m positive I’m better for it.
"On Friday, he released a video saying he’s not leaving Los Angeles even though he specifically promised us he would if he lost"
"FUCK!"
- City of Los Angeles