MAGA's kayfabe meltdown over California primary
If Spencer Pratt didn't exist, they'd have to invent him.
This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
Reality show influencer Spencer Pratt won’t be getting clobbered in November by Karen Bass, and MAGA is psyched.
It’s a golden opportunity to scream about fraud in race Republicans were always going to lose, demonizing California and pre-planting seeds of doubt about the results in its newly-drawn congressional districts this fall. Win, win, win!
In the June 2 Los Angeles mayoral primary, Pratt slipped into third place behind City Council Member Nithya Raman, meaning he won’t advance out of the jungle primary to appear on the November ballot. Voters performed exactly as pollsters predicted, rejecting a candidate who had zero chance of ever becoming mayor of the overwhelmingly Democratic city.
Time for some performative flopping!
Honestly, they ought to send Pratt a basket of fruit to thank him before they completely forget about him 10 minutes from now!
#Rigged
The result of last week’s mayoral election wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted.
The final UC Berkeley-LA Times poll showed Bass, the incumbent mayor, garnering 26 percent, with Raman and Pratt taking 25 and 22 percent respectively. Ten percent of voters were undecided, and 14 percent opted for other candidates.
In the end, the majority of voters opted not to waste their ballots on doomed candidates. Support for Democrats Huang and Miller dropped to less than four percent each, and, as of this writing, the tally stands at roughly 34 percent for Bass, 28 for Raman, and 26 for Pratt.
On election night, though, it looked like Pratt was going to edge out Raman for the number two spot. This was a terrific relief to Bass, who looked forward to facing off against a MAGA dilettante instead of a young progressive. And it was holy providence for Pratt, a figure so addicted to attention that he filed for divorce from his wife Heidi Montag as a publicity stunt, telling Life & Style: "Divorcing was the only way to keep Heidi's career going because everyone hated me so much. Look at Sandra Bullock — her divorce from Jesse James was the best thing to happen to her image."
A similar shift took place in the gubernatorial race, where former Fox News host Steve Hilton was running ahead of former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra on election night, but moved into second place as the votes were tallied.
There is no universe in which Hilton was ever going to be governor — Becerra and third-place finisher Tom Steyer (both Democrats) took 50 percent of the votes between them, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one statewide.
The final Emerson College poll had Becerra at 28 percent, Steyer at 22, and Hilton at 21, which would have locked the GOP out of the November governor’s race as well. But Republicans nonetheless cited the vote tally as further proof of Democratic chicanery.
On Sunday, Trump went on Meet the Press and told anchor Kristen Welker that the results were “crooked just like you’re crooked,” insisting “there’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence.”
When Welker her pressed, he stormed out, snorting “you’re either crooked or you’re stupid. I’ve had enough. Thank you darling.”
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” Trump ranted Monday on Truth Social. “Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS, according to officials.”
Mediate catalogued the chorus of howls from Republican media influencers about the supposedly obvious fraud in the Golden State.
As election law expert Richard Hasen points out, the shift toward Democrats as votes were counted was entirely foreseeable. That’s because California mails out ballots to all 23 million registered voters, and roughly 80 percent of the ones who cast a ballot do so outside of election day.
Thanks to Trump’s constant screeching about the dangers of mail-in ballots, Republicans tend to vote in person. And since same-day votes are tallied first in California, before the canvass of absentee ballots even begins, Republicans are always overrepresented in early tallies. The disparity is exacerbated by the state’s (small “l”) liberal policies of accepting ballots postmarked by election day, even if they arrive a week late, and allowing voters to come in and cure defective ballots.
This phenomenon is not theoretical. It was confirmed by a 2021 Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project paper analyzing more than a million individual voter records from Orange County across multiple elections. The result was even more pronounced in precincts with high numbers of young and non-white voters, who tend to return their ballots last.
Past is prologue
All of that is familiar — not to say triggering — to anyone who followed the 2020 election.
Biden led in every swing state poll and was heavily favored to win both the popular vote and the electoral college. Every news outlet in the country (including the publisher of this newsletter) predicted a “red mirage” and “blue wave,” particularly after Trump’s bungling of coronavirus made showing up to breathe on your fellow voters a MAGA cultural signifier. And still, as Trump’s election night margins surrendered to arithmetic inevitability, he and his supporters pointed to supposed “vote dumps” as evidence of massive fraud.
This outrage, too, was predicted. A week before the 2020 election, Steve Bannon told a room full of supporters that Trump would preemptively declare victory before the votes could be tallied.
“At 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that,'” Bannon boasted.
Of course, that’s exactly what happened, and six years later, the lie that the 2020 election was stolen has become an article of faith among Republicans.
And so it’s worth paying attention when Trump and his supporters start making the same provably false claims about the upcoming midterms — particularly because the guardrails that stopped Trump from succeeding in his coup in 2020 are now gone.
Six years ago, Attorney General Bill Barr quit rather than launch unfounded investigations of vote fraud as Trump demanded. He was replaced by Jeffrey Rosen, who, along with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, deputy AG Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, refused to weaponize the Justice Department to overturn the election.
But now those positions are held by: Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche; David Warrington, who filed baseless election challenges on behalf of the Trump campaign in 2020; Stanley Woodward, the former lawyer for Trump’s co-conspirators in the stolen documents case; and T. Elliot Gaiser, who previously supported the effort to get Mike Pence to discard swing state electoral votes in 2020 and who currently churns out legal memos justifying everything from murder on the high seas to destruction of government records.
At the state level, Trump was thwarted by honest prosecutors. In Georgia, he pushed out US Attorney Bjay Pak after the prosecutor said there was no evidence of vote fraud in the state. Pak was replaced by another Republican lawyer, Bobby Christine, who agreed that there was nothing to charge. Today, First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli, who was never confirmed by the Senate and yet still runs the US Attorneys Office in the Central District of California, insists that there are "multiple election fraud investigations underway" and points to California’s slow tabulation as evidence of criminal activity.
This is more than a little ironic, since Republicans’ proposed solution for election “fraud” is to hand count the ballots. The only proof of concept they can point to is the recount in Maricopa County, Arizona after the 2020 election. It took six months, and a subsequent audit revealed that the methods were so shoddy that the result — finding a few additional votes for Biden and confirming his victory — was essentially meaningless. (With a name like Cyber Ninjas, whodathunk?)
You gotta have faith
The beauty of election fraud claims is that the absence of evidence is no impediment.
Trump routinely claims to have won all 50 states, California included, “if we had an honest count.” Proof is irrelevant to a convenient dogma masquerading as civic concern, and of course, the point of this exercise isn’t to prove anything.
Voter fraud is far more useful as a bogeyman running riot, allowing Republicans to propose massive disenfranchisement as a needed corrective. After Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that “everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here” — pointing to belief in the conspiracy theory his party trumpets as proof of its veracity — he articulated the real goal: to allow Republicans to arbitrarily cut off tabulation and declare any outstanding votes to be invalid.
“What a concept!” he bloviated, with practiced sanctimony. “Let’s have an election the day of the election. That’s what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”
Presumably, voters in Louisiana would take just as much notice of election advice from a California politician as Gov. Gavin Newsom took of Johnson’s prescription. But with control of the House of Representatives potentially riding on a few close races in California, Democrats must push back hard against the rampant lies about fraud.
The good news is that this time Democrats are prepared for the fight. Litigation teams will be in place to fight the effort to steal the midterms. And while Trump’s second Justice Department would almost certainly go to court to advance bogus fraud claims, the public disintegration of the DOJ under Todd Blanche guarantees that courts will treat those claims with extreme skepticism. Put simply, courts are no longer willing to take the DOJ’s word for it — no matter what it is.
The solution is to be prepared, not panicked. Fraud theories that can't survive a Meet the Press interview will wither under cross examination. The fight will come, but we can win it.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
To describe this as 'much ado about nothing' isn't a term of speech. It's the cold hard literal truth...though perhaps 'much ado' understates the destructiveness and the volume of the Republcan's bleatings.
Democracy is a key part of what the USA is supposed to be about. Undermining it is tantamount to treason. It's pretty bad when you have a treasonous major party in power. The openly set about cheating by manipulating boundaries.
Opportunities to lie abound when you love to lie.