A supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rallies outside an early polling precinct as voters cast their ballots in local, state, and national elections, in Clearwater, Florida, U.S., November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Octavio Jones
President Donald Trump and his supporters keep insisting that Spencer Pratt, Trump’s fellow ex-reality TV star, was robbed in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Yet according to Nick Catoggio from the center-right publication The Dispatch, Trump and his backers are really upset about something else — the fact that the election results reveal their increasing irrelevance.
“It makes sense that a party of postliberals, paranoiacs, and grifters would believe that any election it loses has been rigged against it,” Catoggio wrote. “But Trump-era Republicans don’t actually believe that. The mass psychosis that followed the 2020 presidential race remains the exception, not the rule.”
After ticking off races that Republicans did not contest, such as Democratic successes in the 2022 midterm elections and the 2025 gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, Catoggio argued that there is a different reason why “your favorite MAGA cultist’s social media account” keeps insisting Pratt won.
“Pratt running for mayor of Los Angeles was like Zohran Mamdani running for mayor of some struggling town in Wyoming,” Catoggio observed. “He might get further than most members of his party via populism, media savvy, and sheer charisma, but he won’t get far.”
He added, “In other words, Pratt’s initial second-place finish was a so-called ‘red mirage’ a la Pennsylvania in 2020. It’s been explained to right-wingers a thousand times that Donald Trump’s disappearing ‘lead’ in the state that year was an artifact of Republicans preferring to vote in-person and Democrats preferring to vote by mail. In-person votes were counted immediately, whereas mail ballots weren’t opened until Election Day, leading to a false impression on election night that Trump was ahead when in reality many of Biden’s votes simply hadn’t been tallied yet.”
He added, “It isn’t complicated. The fact that many on the right persist in explaining ‘red mirages’ with conspiracies suggests a defect in intellect or integrity, between which I leave you to decide for yourself.”
From there he argued that “if Democrats have the numbers to squash Pratt in L.A., Americans may reason, they might have the numbers to squash Republicans across the map. If his defeat is plausible and legitimate, potentially all GOP defeats in November are.” After all, Pratt’s campaign was run along the same lines as Trump’s presidential bids.
“It’s not a coincidence that some of the elements of Prattmania resemble elements of Trumpmania circa 2016,” Catoggio said. “In both cases, a reality-television celebrity outsider whom no one regarded very highly took up working-class public-order grievances against an out-of-touch liberal establishment. And in both cases, that celebrity beat the expectations of the political smart set by connecting with the average Joe through smart uses of new and old media.”
He added, “Accepting the result and reckoning with what it says about their own popularity was one option for populists to cope with a traumatic reality. The other was pretending that Pratt didn’t lose, avoiding reality by denying that it happened and refusing to hear otherwise in the same way their hero did when he stormed out of an interview about an election he lost. Is it any surprise that they made the choice they did?”
Despite the lack of any evidence that the mayoral race was stolen, Trump supporters have fallen in line claiming that there was election theft.
"A 43,000-vote swing just handed Nithya Raman the edge over Spencer Pratt in LA,” an X user posted as Trump pushed election fraud narratives. “The exact size of the city's homeless population. Ballot harvesting from shelters, universal mail ballots, and late drops made it happen. Coincidence?"
Similarly House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday that “I'm not saying it's rigged. I'm saying it stinks to high heaven. And everybody knows that. Let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have, what a concept, let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”
When Raju asked Johnson if he had evidence the election was improper, the House Speaker admitted that “I don't — some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. And that's a concern. We need people to believe in the integrity of our election system.”