The most important result of the 2026 Los Angeles Mayoral race may be that the Republican Party no longer accepts the legitimacy of electoral defeat. This reflex has spread up and down the party, to everyone including the next candidate, Spencer Pratt, and the president of the United States, who were furious when Meet the Journalists moderator Kristen Welker contradicted her denial of the choice that she left the interview set in the middle.
The refusal to accept the prospect of a Republican defeat in LA is remarkable and revealing. The race has not been called, but at the end of the week, when most votes were counted, Pratt fell to third place. Republicans believed that LA’s struggle with public order would open up an opportunity for their candidate. Right in the middle Click Free published seven hopeful stories with headlines like “Inside Spencer Pratt’s Viral Video Machine” and “Heidi Montag Is Already LA’s First Lady.”
The problem is that the city’s electorate is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republican candidate is a reality TV star with a penchant for pseudoscientific theories and nothing resembling a run for office. Pratt tried to get the GOP credit in LA, but Donald Trump nixed the plan by describing him as a “big MAGA guy.”
The first batch of ballots counted showed Pratt in second place, a position that would have qualified him for a runoff in November against the leading candidate, incumbent Karen Bass. But with more votes coming in, Pratt has fallen behind City Council Member Nithya Raman; there are many more votes to be counted, and the final result is still unknown. This is a predictable trend for the state’s voting system; Late-arriving mail-in ballots routinely skew Democratic.
You might think that “Republicans tend to vote faster than Democrats” and “Government agencies in California run slower” are assumptions that conservatives, of all people, would have an easier time believing. Instead, they have decided that the election was rigged.
Conservative accounts on X exploded over the weekend with claims that Pratt was behind because of voter fraud. Claims were not made against extremists, attention seekers, or anonymous people; they also came out producers for major radio shows, Fox News columnistslean to the right famous peopleand sports enthusiasts.
By saying, Meghan McCainwho has at times joined the mainstream party on its MAGA wing, wrote, “For whatever it’s worth, people in my lifetime who have never talked about a rigged election on any occasion are now saying this about California.”
“This” refers to Trump’s interview with Welker, which aired yesterday. Trump slowly went into hiding. He began by answering questions about his proposed government fund for victims of government “weapons”. Trump’s deputies have said the fund is dead, but Welker wanted to nail down the president’s own position on the issue.
Trump used the question to repeatedly emphasize that he and his supporters were innocent victims of government retaliation, which he described as “violence” and carried out by “thugs” and “dirty cops.”
Welker let this blatant lie go unchallenged for nearly two minutes before pointing out that he had no evidence for these claims, and that many of the criminals pardoned by Trump had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers during the Capitol riots. Short-cutting the truth in Trump’s extraordinary speech seems to anger him. He began shouting that FBI agents on January 6 had infiltrated the Capitol. Welker politely noted that he had no evidence for those claims either.
Trump began insulting Welker and the media—”people like you; fake, dirty media; corrupt media.” He then linked his willingness to pay the rebels to his claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and linked that claim to his belief that the 2026 LA mayoral race was also rigged. “The election was disrupted,” he said. “It was a dirty election. And it’s happening again right now in California.”
Welker, noting that Trump was avoiding his attempts to clear his position on the fund, noted that he had no basis for his accusations about the LA election.
“Do you have evidence?” he asked.
“All I need to do is check,” he replied.
“But sir, that’s not evidence,” Welker replied.
At this point, Trump jumped off the handle, hurled a series of insults at Welker and the media and then left the set.
That a major figure like McCain would watch this conversation and walk away feeling that it was important for him to say that his friends also feel this way speaks volumes about the current state of the Republican Party.
Trump has been denying unfavorable election results for nearly a decade. He questioned the final tally of the 2016 election because he could not accept losing the popular vote, and instead declared that Democrats were involved in massive voter fraud in California.
Even if the Democrats could make millions of fake votes without being detected, it would certainly make more sense for them to plot this in purple mode. The intellectual rigor of Trump’s vote-rigging theories has not improved since then. If Bass wanted to steal the election in his favor, he would have an incentive to favor Pratt as the runner-up over Raman, a fellow Democrat who has at least a chance to unseat Bass in November.
One theory of why the Democrats claimed they rigged the election to remove Pratt, proposed by William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who represented many of the January 6 defendants, maintains that Pratt’s publicity campaign was so strong that the Democrats could not run the risk of allowing it to continue. “I guess they didn’t want to put up with another 5 months of Pratt’s political campaign that came out and pointed out that Bass’s Lib/Prog. Supervisor is corrupt and incompetent,” Shipley. he wrote on X.
That the Democrats carried out a massive criminal conspiracy, leaving no evidence behind, to keep the incumbent mayor out of the limelight is the kind of conspiracy theory that no sane person would touch. And for a period of time, many Republicans opposed this kind of nonsense. But Trump has driven many of those opponents out of the party, and has either drawn the remaining ones to his side through partisan gerrymandering or intimidated them into silence.
The party is now divided between Republicans who quietly tolerate Trump’s election and those who repeat it loudly. For Republicans of any stripe to admit that Trump fairly lost the 2020 election is now almost unheard of. The predictable result of this balance has been to produce a more vocal and more honest side.
Trump seemed to lose control of his emotions during his interview, and it’s possible that he did. But he also has a shrewd understanding of the blunt power contained within a great, compelling lie. This is the method he has used to defeat almost all opponents within his party, turning his ideas into principles. The real targets of his wrath are not journalists but fellow Republicans, whom Trump has understood he can bully until he delivers.
