Knowing LA as I do, I didn’t dare hope that a guy like Spencer Pratt actually had a chance of winning and becoming Mayor. But I must admit, I let my guard down, and I began to care about how the race turned out. Well, now we know.

Pratt’s pitch was personal. It’s rare to see any candidate care that much, especially not his two opponents, Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, who will now compete against each other.

Raman is the real threat here, picking up the momentum on the Left from the socialist wing, following in the footsteps of Zohran Mamdani and perhaps Graham Platner. There’s no doubt that is where the energy in the party is now. The problem is that neither Bass nor Raman made any kind of case to the voters. They let the system win the election for them.

How do I know? They backed out of a planned debate with Pratt because they knew the more the public saw of them and watched Pratt hold them accountable for their terrible records, the worse they would do.

Call it the Biden Basement Strategy. The system is populated by energetic, cult-like fanatics, and they can win the election for you if ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots are in play.

For Democrats, the less they say, the better. If ballot harvesting really did decide this race, with Raman picking up the majority of her votes from mail-in ballots, then it’s more important to have a D by your name than to openly campaign for votes.

It shouldn’t be that way. Ballot harvesting should be banned. In California, they loosened the rules in 2016 so that anyone can pick up anyone’s ballot, and there is no limit on how many they can return:

In 2016, the law changed again thanks to Assembly Bill 1921. Now, anyone could return another person’s ballot and there was no limit on how many ballots a person could return.

This is why there is such an unsettling feeling about many of the elected officials on the Democratic side. You wonder, what are they doing there? They don’t really have to campaign because their voters are so determined to push through even the weakest of candidates.

Yet that is what democracy depends on: candidates make the best case to voters, and voters do the hard job of walking down to their polling place and voting. That’s how it should work, but on the Democrat side, it doesn’t have to.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Being a white guy running for Mayor in Los Angeles against two women of color was always going to be a heavy lift, despite his winning personality and great campaign. He was the only one of the three who cared about the dogs on Skid Row.

There will be many hot takes from the Left - Trumpism is over, Spencer Pratt’s campaign was limited to X and YouTube. None of that is true. The election for Mayor proves that the Democratic machine can often work wonders, especially with bland candidates about whom no one knows anything.

The world got a little less bright watching Spencer Pratt lose. He had a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington quality about him, going for the big win with all the odds against him, doing so because his house burned down due to the terrible management of Karen Bass.

But Pratt was hit with some dirty campaign tricks, with an overt smear campaign pushed out by TMZ - that he didn’t live in a trailer but instead at a hotel, or that he lived in Santa Barbara. They just needed to give voters a reason not to be swayed by his charm and brilliant campaigning.

It was fun while it lasted, but then the Democrats did what they always do: Suck all of the fun out of the room. The world just got a little less bright. Even still, Pratt has a political career if he wants one. Maybe not in California, but somewhere. That kind of talent is rare.

Now the contest will be between the moderate and the socialist. The way things are going, my money is on the socialist.