What’s Happening in Los Angeles Is an Exercise in Brute-Force Politics

Four years ago, Cuba-trained communist agitator, Karen Bass, beat real estate developer Rick Caruso in a 53-47 runoff, overcoming some $100 million in self-funded spending by the loser of the race. That was a fateful election in many ways, but it did establish that there were enough potential Republican votes to be had in Los Angeles that a candidate with money or a message could, at a minimum, make the runoff and potentially even win.

Those results are worth remembering now, four years later, when, despite running one of the most noteworthy campaigns in recent American history, Spencer Pratt has just been bounced out of the runoff in an effective three-way race thanks to a bizarre distribution of votes from mail-in ballots counted well after Election Night. 

Nobody can find an example from history in which a third-place candidate getting 20 percent of the Election Day in-person vote counted on Election Night, who had conceded the race as Nithya Raman did, suddenly jumps to 40 percent of the vote as mail-in ballots are counted. That’s because it’s never happened before, and it cannot happen in the wild.