Right-wing media melts down as Spencer Pratt sinks in vote count

Spencer Pratt was never going to be the mayor of Los Angeles. That is not necessarily a humiliation for the longtime reality TV star. But now his unconventional campaign, forged in the aftermath of losing his Pacific Palisades home in the January 2025 fires, is quickly giving way to a predictable right-wing meltdown over California’s elections.

Almost immediately after the polls closed on June 2, prominent conservative media personalities began aggressively promoting completely deluded claims that Democrats were actively stealing the election. On Fox News, host Laura Ingraham suggested California might have “the most corrupt voting system in the Western world.” Will Cain floated the idea that votes could be “manufactured” during the counting process. Sean Hannity amplified Donald Trump’s baseless claim that Democrats were “probably cheating” in California. Podcaster Benny Johnson claimed that “you can already see that they’re stealing and they’re cheating.” Right-wing provocateur Chris Rufo baselessly claimed that “the Dem machine has rigged election law in its favor.” Right-leaning polling firm Rasmussen claimed Pratt received zero votes in a ballot drop — a suggestion immediately contradicted by official L.A. County Registrar data, which showed Pratt receiving thousands of votes in every single update.

This kind of misinformation is not a harmless error. It feeds a broader narrative that the system is fundamentally untrustworthy, priming audiences to reject any result that doesn’t align with their preferences.

Perhaps the most revealing moment came from Megyn Kelly, who on her podcast took the “election fraud” grievance in a different direction. Rather than simply attacking election officials, she turned her fire on the voters themselves, ranting about mail-in voting: “Do we really want to make it that convenient? I mean these are lazy-ass people. If they can’t get off their fat asses and get to election polling stations on Election Day, then we don’t want you.” The mask slipped entirely. The objection was never about fraud. The objection is about voter participation. Specifically, the participation of people who tend not to vote Republican.

As of this writing, the race for the second runoff spot, the one that would put Pratt on the November ballot against incumbent Karen Bass, remains genuinely uncertain. Bass secured her spot with around 35% of the vote with about 62% of the expected votes counted, according to the Associated Press, as progressive City Council member Nithya Raman, with 22.8%, gained on Pratt’s 29.9%. Conservative media appear unable to cope with the reality that their much-hyped “star” is sinking as California continues its vote count.

For months, Fox News went all in on Pratt. Network hosts praised the former star of “The Hills” as an energetic political outsider who could dismantle the city’s progressive consensus. Pundits framed his campaign as a blueprint for Republican revival in urban America. Every viral social media post became evidence that the political map was shifting.

Right-wing media wanted Los Angeles to serve as a symbol. They wanted the city to validate years of arguments about Democratic governance, homelessness, crime, housing costs and public frustration. They wanted a celebrity Republican to demonstrate that even one of the country’s most Democratic cities was ready to embrace a right-wing alternative.

That narrative was always more wishcasting than the underlying electoral reality suggested.

Even before the election, analysts noted that Pratt’s support appeared heavily concentrated among voters already inclined toward conservative politics. His campaign generated headlines and online engagement, but attention is not the same thing as coalition-building. The question was never whether Pratt could energize Republicans. He needed to expand beyond them. Nothing in the results so far suggests a transformational realignment.

Pratt didn’t expand the conservative tent; he didn’t unearth a hidden silent majority of reality-television enthusiasts or right-wing converts in Los Angeles. He didn’t even outperform the baseline for a generic Republican. In a 14-candidate field in a nonpartisan primary, in a city that is roughly 70% Democratic, Pratt’s share of the vote tracked almost exactly with Trump’s performance in Los Angeles County in 2024.

That gap between the right’s hype and the electoral outcome has produced something we’ve seen repeatedly in recent years: a right-wing media meltdown that quickly morphs into conspiracy theorizing about the legitimacy of the vote itself.

The right’s rigmarole is comically predictable. Conservatives spend months claiming Democrats are doomed. They convince themselves that a Republican breakthrough is imminent. Then, when election night arrives and incomplete results fail to immediately validate the narrative, the accusations begin. The same people who insist every ballot must be verified become enraged when election workers actually take time to verify ballots.

The overwhelming majority of ballots in the state are cast by mail. Because California postmarks mail-in ballots up to Election Day and allows them a full week to arrive to ensure every single vote — including overseas military personnel — is counted, the process takes time. Los Angeles County alone has more registered voters than the entire populations of 41 states. California’s secretary of state explicitly warned voters that counting would continue after Election Day, and election experts have spent years explaining why results often take days or even weeks to become final. But when transparent safeguards produce results they dislike, the safeguards themselves become suspect.

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Trump quickly piled on, posting multiple messages on Truth Social that baselessly accused Democrats of “stealing” California primaries. He claimed federal prosecutors were investigating election fraud, which prompted U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — a former state Assembly Elections Committee member who knows California’s ballot-counting process intimately — to release a vague statement that he was “working with the FBI on several election fraud investigations.” On Friday, Trump sent U.S. Attorney Robert Renner to the LA County ballot processing facility. It is a chilling image: federal prosecutors deployed by a hyper-partisan administration to hover over civil servants who are merely doing the essential work of democracy.

California has become a frequent target because it serves as a useful villain in conservative political storytelling. It is diverse and overwhelmingly Democratic. It is easy to caricature.

To be sure, there is a legitimate conversation to be had about how to improve election administration — including funding, staffing, technology and public communication. But that conversation is impossible when one side is committed to framing routine procedures as evidence of criminality.

If Spencer Pratt ultimately advances to the runoff, as current incomplete results suggest he eked out, no one on the right will argue that the counting process was invalid because it took too long. No one will claim his votes should be discarded because they arrived through the same system they spent days attacking.

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