The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Spencer Pratt Is the ‘Wrinkle’ in LA’s Far Left’s Plans

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

The far left has enjoyed one-party rule in the City of Angels for decades, but now there’s a slight wrinkle in their plans as Los Angeles might finally get its first non-left mayor in years this Tuesday. Spencer Pratt, the nominally conservative former reality TV star turned political activist, is currently trailing by less than five points behind incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and is even closer to current City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, according to recent polling by UC Berkeley/The Los Angeles Times. Why? Twofold: Two far-left candidates may split the vote, and Pratt, for all the grief the Left bestows upon him, is not really identifiable as a MAGA Republican—the thing Los Angeles voters hate most—argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words. 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. How can working at your local Tims take you further? Sure, you can level up your teamwork skills. You also get a chance to receive a Tim Horan's scholarship award. Ready for what's next? Apply today at careers.timhorans.ca. Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Signal.

This Tuesday, June 2nd, there are many national state and local races throughout the country. Here in California, we're looking at the governor's races to see if Steve Hilton can pull off an upset against Javier Bacera and Tom Steyer and others. But especially the Los Angeles mayor's race. Usually we don't look at these races very carefully in California, or indeed any blue state because they're shoe-ins for a Democratic candidate. But this one's a little different for a variety of reasons. Right now, in this huge field, there are three candidates. One nominally Republican, or those at times he's been an independent, Spencer Pratt, with no prior political experience. He was a real TV star a few years ago.

And then there's the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, and a city councilman, city councilman Rahman. They're all polling variously between 25 and 21, which suggests the race now is among those three. Extensibly, again, ostensibly, Bass and Rahman have the advantage because Los Angeles has flipped from a once conservative city in the 1960s and 70s to radically left due to immigration and out migration. but there's a little wrinkle to it. Pratt's not really identifiable as a MAGA Republican, and he's not talking about national issues. He's local issues. So although he suffers from the reality that conservatives are not liked in Los Angeles,

he's running against two far-left candidates that may, in fact, split the vote. Now, the polls themselves are problematic because of two things. One, as we learned in the 2004 race, when the Harvard NPR or the Harris NPR poll, the night before the balloting began in person, said that Camel Harris would win beyond the measure of error. That would be 4%. And, of course, she lost by 1.5%. They were 5.5% off. We got the suspicion that many of those polls were designed to create momentum. So the polls that show Bass or Rahman, and ahead, I think, would show bias. But on the other hand, as you can see from some of Spencer Pratt's online commercials, there's a sense that it's sociably and culturally unacceptable in L.A. among many people on the left to say that you would even consider to vote for Spencer Pratt. In other words, if somebody calls you up on the phone and ask who you're going to vote for and given our suspicion of surveillance and intrusion of our personal data,

a lot of people won't answer the question, or they'll say that they're not going to vote for Pratt because it's socially unacceptable. But we do know one thing about the polls. Pratt was down 8 to 10%. Excuse me, he was down at 8% 10%, and now he's roughly equal with Rahman and Bass themselves. Why is that? Because Bass is an incumbent, and her record is unres.

utterly indefensible. She wouldn't allow people to clean the hillsides of Los Angeles right during the high wind period when the ground is dry and the winds are up from the ocean, and that's when fires take place. Where was she? She was in Uganda. Why, who knows, personal matter, a wedding of a friend, something. The vice mayor was being detained for phony nests. in a bomb threat. The water and power woman was incompetent. She had paid $700,000.

A reservoir that would have saved the palisides was empty. The fire hybrids would, I could go on and on. And when you look at the homeless problem that she spent billions of dollars, maybe as many as $85,000 per homeless person, it's got no better, if not worse. MacArthur Park is an open drug den. Housing is still unaffordable. The downtown has been wrecked. People are leaving offices, law firms, or leaving their offices. It's a mess. Everything about Los Angeles is a mess. And this was a vibrant city in the 80s and at the millennium where the downtown was reinvigorated. It was booming. And Los Angeles was eclipsing even San Francisco. And that has not happened. It's a mess. And that's what Pratt is running on. He's not running on the border. He's not running on immigration. He's not running on Iran. He's not running on

communism or not. What he's saying is these people are ideologues. He has two parts of his message. You cannot afford to live in Los Angeles. Gasoline is too high. Food is too high and especially housing, whether you own the house or you rent it is too high. Los Angeles is not a safe place. isn't not safe because until recently, the public attorneys, the district attorneys in L.A. County were letting people out without cash, bail, no cash, just get out. Police arrest them. They were returned, and that destroyed all deterrence. Taxes were too high, too many regulations.

So the Palisage has been burned for over a year. It's not even beginning to be rebuilt. Why? because either there's too many regulations in general or the left has had ideological dreams that this is a golden opportunity to take one of the most picturesque and beautiful communities in the United States before the fire and turn it into a social lab experience of high density, who knows, high rises, subway coming in or something. They have all these European ideas, how the Palisades would work under the rubric of

affordable housing. Something, though, is going on because the momentum right now, if the election was held in two weeks, Spencer Pratt would win, I think. I don't know if he'd get a 51% majority in the primaries, but he would probably beat Karen Bass. And why is that? Because they haven't heard any viable, logical, rational defense when she's on television or she tries to defend herself. She's worried about what? Meth people who ingest dangerous drugs might have poor teeth. And that's something that she's going to address, I suppose, when people who don't take meth and pay for their own dentistry don't have a house

or they're assaulted with impunity by criminals. She's not worried about those people. And remember, she was a person who a dozen or more times as a student and a young person went to Cubas Castro to show her. solidarity. But what's going on is people of all different stripes, Republican, Democrat, independent, are saying that this is a dysfunctional society, and it's a dysfunctional society because this blue state, blue city model doesn't work. This is not the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton. It has no familiarity, no resemblance to what the Democrats were saying at their

national conventions in 1992 and 1996. This is a dysfunctional dystopian city, and if we don't do something about it, even in the unlikely guise of a former real TV star, at least he is offering concrete solutions to concrete problems. Finally, there's one last tweak to this story. He has friends that are brilliant. I'm not suggesting that he's authorizing or paid for him, but the artificial intelligence commercials that are coming out have really revolutionized political campaigning. It's almost as if you don't have to pay a million dollars to cut a video commercial. You can get people in their garages with laptops that can do a much better job. They're funny.

They're caricatures. And they explain in large part his grassroots insurgent campaign. So besides his unorthodox. style and his eccentric idea that we're not going to talk about politics, we're going to talk about solutions. He's campaigning in a different way. And when he shows up in the inner city in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, that message resonates, resonates in a way that defies DEI conventionality. He's saying to the people, the subtext, I'm not a DEI candidate. The two DEI candidates play to racial or ethnic solidarity. I don't.

don't. I play to you as humans who share human problems with everybody, regardless of how they look. Who knows? That might be a winning message for a change. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.