It’s official. L.A. City Council member Nithya Raman will advance to the November general election with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, not Spencer Pratt. Conservatives have been smelling something fishy for days now, and the left has been there the entire time, telling us everything is just fine and dandy, that everything is above board, and that accusations of something amiss are baseless conspiracy theories. But they’re not, and Democrats are desperately gaslighting the public about what’s really been happening.
Spencer Pratt may have been an outsider, but his message connected. After the debate, he surged to second place in the polls, then took second place on election night, ahead of Raman, setting up what could have been a serious general election fight against Bass. Then the post-election ballot drops started arriving, and Raman's numbers did something extraordinary and improbable. Her vote share roughly doubled with each new batch, jumping from around 20% to roughly 40%. She claimed first place in every single post-election drop. Pratt collapsed. Bass barely moved from first.
"Conservative news outlets and talking heads have spent the past few weeks trying to convince people that Pratt, a former star on The Hills and tabloid staple, was a shoe-in for the Los Angeles mayoral general election by an unbeatable margin," Rolling Stone magazine wrote in a desperate attempt to push a narrative. "Polling consistently showed Pratt was locked in a tight race for second with Raman, with late surveys giving Raman the edge."
Related: Of Course the California Vote Was Rigged! Here’s Why It’s Obvious.
Well, for starters, that’s not true at all. Of the three polls tracked by RealClearPolitics, Pratt had a three- and four-point lead over Raman in two of them. Not exactly a “consistent” tight race, but even if you chalk that up to subjectivity, the polling showed nothing resembling what happened in the post-election drops, where Raman was vaulted to second place by margins that dwarfed her election-night numbers.As others have pointed out, there's no comparable case in American political history of that happening in a clean race. Go ahead and look.
The left's broader defense is that California counts slowly, and everyone just needs to accept it because that’s just how their system works.
You won’t get any argument from me that the slowness is a genuine problem, but that’s nothing compared to the statistically improbable ballot drops that doubled Raman’s vote share and handed her first place in every single batch, while leaving Bass untouched. That is where the poop is. Conflating slow counting with statistical impossibility is exactly how the gaslighting works.
CNN's Harry Enten tried to end the conversation about something corrupt taking place. "The LA mayor stuff is the dumbest conspiracy theory I've ever heard & makes no sense," Enten said. "Dem establishment/Bass wanted Pratt, not Raman, to advance."
The LA mayor stuff is the dumbest conspiracy theory I've ever heard & makes no sense. Dem establishment/Bass wanted Pratt, not Raman, to advance.
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) June 8, 2026
Bass crushes Pratt in a 1-on-1 by 18 pt, while Raman beat Bass by 4.
Pratt's the rarity in LA less popular than the unpopular Bass! pic.twitter.com/qw06mvuIb1
Sorry, Harry, but the Democrat establishment did not want Spencer Pratt to advance to the general election. Let’s remember what happened in this race. Bass got torched in the debate by Pratt. His message on crime, homelessness, and the catastrophic mishandling of the Palisades fire was cutting through with voters all over the city. If Pratt advanced to a runoff, Democrats would face months of him relentlessly hammering Bass on issues where she was already vulnerable. That would have been a nightmare for the party. But a Democrat-versus-Democrat runoff was the outcome the party establishment wanted.
The establishment had every reason to keep him out, and suggesting otherwise strains credibility. Let’s recall what happened in Virginia in 2021.
Glenn Youngkin trailed Terry McAuliffe by as many as nine points in polling, gradually ate into his lead, and ultimately won.
Pratt faced a steep climb in a deeply blue city, no question. But Bass was carrying serious political baggage, and Pratt was gaining traction with voters. The possibility that he could turn a long-shot campaign into a real threat was enough to alarm the Democrat establishment, which has a great deal invested in protecting the status quo.
The left wants us to forget this and move on. They’ll call anyone who asks questions a conspiracy theorist and insist that slow counting explains everything. But slow counting doesn’t explain what people actually watched happen. Slow counting tells you when votes are counted. It doesn’t explain the anomalous post-election drops, why Raman’s share of the vote exploded, why Pratt’s vote share collapsed, and why Bass remained largely unaffected.
That’s the question Democrats don’t want asked. They want people arguing about how long California takes to count ballots rather than examining the extraordinarily improbable voting patterns in the post-election mail-in ballot returns and the shady origins of those returns. Don’t let them gaslight you.
