In the end, Spencer Pratt didn’t win the Los Angeles mayoral primary, as his boisterous fans on X had been loudly predicting he would for weeks, passing around A.I. slopaganda, podcast clips and betting-market screenshots as though they were divination tools rather than forms of reactionary wishcasting. Pratt didn’t even make the runoff, as you might’ve assumed he would not just from reading some of his fawning coverage. His candidacy didn’t mark a new era for law-and-order politics, in Los Angeles or elsewhere, and he did not introduce a new generation of social media populism. In fact, he did worse than Donald Trump did in L.A. in 2024, and worse than Trump did in 2020. And he did considerably worse than the Republican Rick Caruso did, in 2022’s mayoral primary, when he ran as a much more generic conservative at a time of considerably less frustration with the local Democratic machine.
None of this should have been too surprising to anyone even passingly familiar with the political landscape of Los Angeles, where frustrations with the current mayor, Karen Bass, have been running high since the fires last January but which remains one of the most liberal big cities in America. Throughout the spring, the campaign there looked less like a glimmer of the future than a vivid vivisection of American politics in 2026. There was the zombie Democratic-machine incumbent, so unpopular it seemed hard for many in L.A. to believe she was running for re-election; the outsider-populist social-media demagogue, Pratt, building an anti-establishment campaign out of fearmongering about social disorder; and the technocratic progressive, Nithya Raman, testing the popularity of Zohran Mamdani-style politics on the West Coast, if a bit more cautiously than the left-wing insurgent in New York to whom she was so often compared. The ultimate meaning of this race won’t be clear until the runoff in the fall, but we can now say for sure that it will tell us more about the course of progressive politics in the wake of social disorder — across the country, cities tend to be veering left — than it will about the arrival of a new New Right in the heart of liberal America.
For the last few weeks, since the campaign’s one debate with all three candidates, it was easy for a casual observer to think that Pratt was in the lead, given how his candidacy came across on X, podcasts or even cable news, each of which treated the former reality-show villain as a political phenomenon rewiring the partisan landscape of L.A., saying the unsayable about local governance and social disorder and forging a new coalition of voters too fed up with the status quo to stay in their ideological lanes. Pratt ran as a kind of burn-it-all-down outsider, powered by personal outrage and resentment, but won high-minded praise from conservatives at the Manhattan Institute as well as the “All-In” podcast bros. He got an additional boost from the incumbent mayor herself, who seemed to prefer a runoff with him to what will likely be a much more competitive one with Raman, so much so that allies of Bass’s campaign ran what appeared to be nominal attack ads against Pratt that were so persuasive in promoting his standing that his supporters cheered them on.
But this was all a kind of illusion, however convincing the Pratt surge looked to the average Angeleno. A decade or so ago, moderate political pundits often cautioned that Twitter was not real life. In the interim, we’ve come to live more and more on our screens, in ways that seem to blur the distinction between real and virtual life. But the algorithms are owned and operated now to even more explicit ideological purpose, and full of clip-farm content harvested from who-knows-where, so much so that New York magazine recently declared, “Your Feed Is the Product of a Stealth Marketing Campaign.” Since the arrival of generative A.I., certain worrywarts have feared it might easily sway the public by persuading them of disinformation. In this case, it seemed more effective in persuading outside observers that Pratt was winning than in convincing Angelenos to actually vote for him.
But this isn’t just a story about the hazards of internet politics — or, for that matter, a story about a charismatic blowhard who grabs the spotlight for a stretch and comes up short when the electorate judges him fundamentally unserious. There is something else at play, as well, with relevance well beyond Los Angeles — an emerging pattern of urban realignment that may prove to be among the most significant shifts in contemporary American political life (with implications, perhaps, for the whole shape of the post-Trump era).
Three or four years ago, it was conventional wisdom that American cities were in trouble, perhaps even in crisis, that the failures could be broadly attributed to the excesses and oversights of progressive governance and that reversing the tide would mean handing local government over to what passes for centrist strongmen in these liberal enclaves (as had happened in an earlier era with Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, for instance).
I was always skeptical of these narratives, since so much of what was being described as social disorder looked to me like fallout from pandemic turbulence, which, I suspected, would prove temporary. In certain ways, it proved truly evanescent, with homicide rates across most of the country’s major cities not just declining from pandemic peaks, but often hitting record lows. Homelessness is down, too, though only slightly. Drug overdoses have fallen pretty remarkably as well, though it seems as if the harrowing spikes of the past few years were at least partly driven not by more drug abuse in the first place, but by the arrival, within a given community, of more lethal drugs. Trump has mostly stopped talking about American cities as hotbeds of disorder, and prominent academics have begun publicly wondering what local politics will look like in when crime is no longer an issue.
In Los Angeles, some of these crises have lingered longer than in other parts of the country. But what is striking to me about these past few years is that voters in many of the country’s largest and most high-profile cities appear to have responded to signs of urban decline not by shifting right, as many expected, but left, as so many insisted would be impossible in the aftermath of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and “peak woke.”
In San Francisco, Daniel Lurie was elected and has governed as a Bloomberg-style centrist, and done so to great acclaim — probably, he is the most popular mayor in America. But in New York, Mamdani looks like a generational political talent, registering large policy wins and extending his post-election honeymoon at least as far as the N.B.A. finals. In Boston, Michelle Wu first ran on a local version of the Green New Deal and was racing so far ahead in her re-election campaign that her challenger dropped out and she ran unopposed. In Seattle, the democratic socialist Katie Wilson toppled an incumbent mayor on a campaign built around the rights of renters and the importance of investing in public transportation. In Chicago, there’s Brandon Johnson, who was for a time mocked as the poster child for the failures of progressive urban governance but has rebounded since to a pretty normal-seeming level of unpopular (at 10 points underwater, he’s about as popular as Rahm Emanuel was at the end of his term there as mayor).
I don’t know what will happen in Los Angeles between now and November — don’t know whether Raman can actually close the gap with Karen Bass and win a runoff in which no Republican candidates are present. But in head-to-head polls taken before the primary, Raman has bested Bass, and with Pratt out of the race, she has what looks to be a more natural, and commanding, lane to victory as a liberal-minded alternative to a tarnished status quo. And if Raman does prevail, it will mean that the three biggest cities in America will all be governed by leaders so progressive that they would have been national outliers in previous eras — as Boston and Seattle are today.
Not all of these mayors are the same, and neither are their cities, their ideological styles, their constituencies or governing challenges. But together they form a coherent portrait, in which many of the country’s largest and most visible cities are now high-stakes experiments in explicitly progressive governance, heralding a new era as striking as the years of Bloomberg-style centrism that spread across American cities beginning two decades ago. This was not what anyone outside of the Democratic Socialists of America would have predicted in 2022. So why, exactly, did it happen?
One answer is simply that cities are very liberal, by American standards, but while that’s true, it has been true for a while, and is somewhat less true at the moment (depending on how you read the results of the 2024 election, in which many cities swung at least a few points toward Trump). A related possibility is that the national Democratic Party has lurched leftward, so that the Overton window has moved, as well — though most observers would probably tell you that the party has moved to the right since Joe Biden’s election. And a third might be that cities are already responding to crime declines by spending that “peace dividend” on more expansive social spending — even if most of these races were fought in part over law and order, without much acknowledging how much better things seemed to be getting.
But another possibility is that the country’s overall vibe shift rightward has been overstated, particularly on social media, and that while the country did re-elect Trump in 2024, its cities were never actually heading to some dystopian right-wing future of rampant disinformation and fearmongering. Americans may also like the idea of sewer socialism at the local level, even if they’re not ready to elect warriors for Medicare for all to national office — perhaps particularly while Trump is president, with the liberals everywhere looking for leaders who announce themselves as fighters. And it may also be that certain drivers of so-called Gen Z socialism are especially pronounced in cities, where the cost of housing is most crisis-like, and where many professionals feel squeezed into natural ideological coalition with the urban working class. If politics is now about affordability, it may well be that voters in cities, at least, seem to prefer a progressive solution set to that challenge over anything being offered by the center-right.
But there is one last ingredient I would add to the list: It is in cities that voters most routinely encounter, and thereby come to value, public goods. Much of the American social fabric was torn up by the experience of the pandemic emergency, which prompted most of us to withdraw from one another, not to mention from collective experience and too often from mutual obligation and responsibility. That damage may have been most visible in cities, where there were fewer pedestrians and more obvious signs of social chaos, where the stores were all closed and the subways empty and the problem of homelessness and addiction more visible as a result. But the loss of those spaces, and of those experiences, also meant the most to cities and the people living in them, who didn’t want to live in permanent retreat from one another. In navigating back from that, they may have helped bring about a new political era for American cities.
“To me,” Raman said, “a city feels like the most impactful place — where you can make the case for progressive politics, where you can make the case for government working well because the impacts of functional government are so immediate and so real.” We were speaking earlier this spring, five weeks before the primary, both about what was to come for the city and about what Raman called the “hard, kind of tempestuous last few years” — large parts of the city destroyed by fire, others underfunded or even sabotaged by local politics, with social media and algorithmic engagement putting the population as a whole on a roller coaster and undermining its sense of deeper community. “I think voters do expect better.”
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