Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
So we’re talking about all of it with Gil Duran, a tech writer who’s based in California and tracks all this stuff. Good to have you on, Gil.
Sargent: So in two big races in California, the GOP candidates are struggling as the votes get counted. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Democratic incumbent Karen Bass leads, and progressive candidate Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place and a chance to go to the general election.
Duran: Sure. Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are right-wing D-list celebrities who are desperate enough for attention to run for office in California, where they have virtually no chance of winning. Both of them have backgrounds mostly as entertainers.
And he went from being a guy who was sort of what we would have considered a moderate Republican to being a complete right-wing lunatic during his time at Fox News. I know this because I actually met with Steve Hilton when he moved to the U.S. in 2014 and he was a totally different guy than he was a few years later on Fox News.
Sargent: Just to be clear, what this means for Spencer Pratt is that if he gets edged out of second place by the progressive, Nithya Raman, then he doesn’t get to go to the general, correct? And so what’s really at stake here is, as the votes get counted, it’s really possible Spencer Pratt gets knocked out of contention. Is that what the situation is?
But the LA race is nonpartisan. And LA is heavily Democratic by voter registration—LA is 52 percent Democratic voters compared to 19 percent Republicans. So with Spencer Pratt running with the MAGA endorsements as the right-wing reality TV guy, it’s not a big surprise that he wouldn’t make the top two. In fact, the polls showed him in third.
Sargent: So that’s the context for Trump’s blowup with NBC’s Kristen Welker. Here’s what happened. Trump first lied his ass off about the 2020 election being rigged. She challenged that. Then he brought up the California races and said those are also rigged. Kristen Welker challenged that as well. She said, look, your candidates—meaning the two Republicans we’re discussing here—look, they’re doing well. And then Trump said, well, no, they’re not. They’re dropping fast. And Trump meant by this that they’re dropping fast as the votes are getting counted. Listen to how it went south from there.
Kristen Welker (voiceover): But that’s how they count the votes in California.
Welker (voiceover): What, do you have evidence to support—
Welker (voiceover): But sir, that’s not evidence. That’s how they count the votes in California.
Welker (voiceover): State and local officials acknowledge they are slow. They’re urging the votes to be counted quickly.
Welker (voiceover): To be fair, I’m not crooked, but—
Sargent: So according to Trump, Welker is crooked because she won’t simply accept Trump’s word that the elections are rigged. Note how Welker said, what evidence is there of rigging in the California races? And Trump said, all you have to do is look. In other words, he gets to dictate what reality is. He doesn’t have to show any facts or evidence. Your reaction to all that?
There was a very low likelihood that Spencer Pratt was going to make it out of the LA mayor’s race to the general, out of the primary. And Steve Hilton has a better chance of making it to the general in the gubernatorial race, but he has zero chance of winning the election, because the Republican Party is only 25 percent of California voters, whereas Democrats have like 45 percent. So you don’t really have a math that adds up to a Republican victory.
But he’s long been on this idea that the only reason California is a Democratic state is because of cheating. And there’s zero evidence of that, but they are continuing to push this mythology because the reality is too painful to face—which is that, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in 2007, the California Republican Party is dying at the box office.
Duran: The earliest returns are always the most conservative because conservatives vote on election day because they’ve been taught that vote by mail is evil. And so in the early returns, you always see a more conservative trend. But as the votes are counted—which in democracy you have to count the votes—those Republican margins slim down and the Republicans often fall into a much lower place.
He doesn’t believe it. I don’t think most Republicans believe it. This was also being pushed by Ron DeSantis and other Republicans. But they know that people in their audience will believe it. And that’s how they keep this flame of aggrieved Republican anger going—that everywhere they look, there’s fraud, even California’s being stolen from them. And it’s just completely bunk.
Trump (voiceover): Your elections in this country, we’re like a third-world country. Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked and Meet the Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided, crooked networks. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.
Duran: Definitely. That’s one of the 10 main points of fascism. It’s called unreality. You create a complete opposite reality for your followers so they don’t know who or what to believe. As Hannah Arendt said, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.
Now, they had been arguing before that about the weaponization of government. He was just angry that he wasn’t getting his way. But they clearly sought to create the idea on social media that the celebrity of Spencer Pratt—where he was being pushed by right-wing accounts with AI videos and tech billionaires like Sergey Brin and Joe Lonsdale, right-wing tech billionaires funding his campaign—that he really had a chance of victory, that he was going to win.
Sargent: You mentioned that Spencer Pratt is an enormous online presence and that he’s pumped really aggressively by the online right. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Renée DiResta, who’s a researcher on disinformation, laid out some of this on her Substack.
And so this is really a creation of the extremely online fascist MAGA right, isn’t it? He is a creation of these influencers.
Well, California has a lot of natural disasters. So do Republican states. You generally don’t see everybody blaming Republicans when there’s a disaster there, but in California, it always gets politicized. So he kind of made himself a political figure by dramatizing his own experience losing his home in the fire. And that was just enough to give him sort of enough of a profile to step into the void of being the right-wing sacrificial lamb in the LA mayor’s race.
What they find, however, is that being viral online is not necessarily the same thing as being popular in the real world. Twitter especially, and TikTok to some degree, create these alternate realities where you think these things are really big and everybody’s talking about them, but most people have very different concerns about their city.
And what they’re all going for really is the model that Trump set when he won. He sort of became the biggest character in American politics using Twitter, also came from a reality TV background like Spencer Pratt, and was able to become president. But just because you can do something once doesn’t mean you can always do it.
So they tried to make fetch happen. They try to create what DiResta calls the “red mirage”—this idea that a Republican’s about to win California. Everybody knows it because it’s happening on X and TikTok. But when the votes get counted, it turns out that virality is not the same thing as votes, and they lose. And so then they immediately pivot to calling it fraud because they are sore losers and big man-babies in reality.
So that’s what’s really going on here with this whole Kristen Welker confrontation, I think. It’s Trump’s bubble bursting and him wrestling with the reality that his candidate is not actually going to become the mayor of Los Angeles.
And if you remember 2020, I seem to recall Trump was arguing that the vote should stop counting at a certain time, like the day of the election, while he’s ahead. So he has a very childlike, corrupt view of what politics is. He should always win, is basically his fascist argument. And there are people who agree with him—a very small number of people in the country—but that’s the audience he has to keep behind him because other people are starting to peel off as it becomes more and more unpopular.
Duran: Definitely. We’ve seen this rightward shift in Silicon Valley—overt rightward shift. I would argue there’s always been some right-wing politics there. But whenever you get a spectacle like this of a right-wing type of person running for office, you can now count on the billionaires of Silicon Valley to throw in money and try to make it a real thing.
On the state level, a lot of the right-wing tech guys got behind the candidacy of Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, who was trying to run as a moderate. People weren’t buying that. So we can expect the right-wing tech money now to go behind Steve Hilton if he makes the general. Again, they’re not betting on victory, they’re betting on disruption and chaos and providing a beachhead where Trump can continue to make his claims about the obsolescence of the democratic process.
Duran: Definitely. Steve Hilton is almost guaranteed to lose to Becerra, who’s not a particularly strong Democrat, but California is so Democratic that even if Becerra were dead, he would still beat Steve Hilton in a general election. I mean, there’s just no path really for Hilton to win.
You don’t really hear people who want to be the mayor or want to be the governor say, I’m going to move out of the state. You’re supposed to act like, I’m going to stay here no matter what and continue to work to help my community, and then run again in four years when your challenger is unpopular if they win.
Although there was a piece in the Financial Times over the weekend where these three Brits said, it’s amazing that he’s the front-runner and he’s had this major political turnaround. These are people with no idea of California politics. He’s just simply the guy who’s desperate enough for attention that he’s willing to lose the governor’s race to get it. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
Duran: Thanks for having me.
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