For Republicans, the early round of election returns coming off Tuesday’s voting in jungle primaries for governor and mayor of Los Angeles are promising.
In the sense that actually getting Republicans into the runoffs in those races is an accomplishment. After all, California obviously went to a jungle primary format in hopes of submerging Republican candidates and offering voters runoff choices between Brand X and Brand X(1). But so far it doesn’t look like that’s working.
Yes, Karen Bass is comfortably in first place in the LA mayoral race, but Spencer Pratt has so far put up good numbers and is very much in contention, with momentum heading into the runoff.
Bass, at 34 percent as of this writing (I’m resting on a very shaky assumption that the final vote totals will look something like the current numbers when the vote counters in California decide to stop, which doesn’t happen on Election Night in California but instead some interminable time later, as mail-in ballots postmarked on Election Day will be counted when they show up), can’t be comfortable with a 4-point lead on Pratt. Yes, if you combine her vote with that of fellow communist Nithya Raman, it gets you above 50 percent. But it’s not a done deal that voters who chose Raman over Bass won’t choose Pratt over Bass — sure, they might be leftists, but they had a chance to vote for the incumbent and opted not to, and that makes some percentage of them true wild cards.
It ought to be remembered that while L.A. is certainly a blue city, Karen Bass only barely beat the very flaccid Rick Caruso four years ago. And it isn’t like she’s governed like somebody earning her way to a second term. Nor has she campaigned like such a somebody. Pratt now has five more months to satirize, skewer, lampoon and, lambast Bass as he’s already done with the benefit of an army of AI filmmakers who are making his ads for him, and it’s not impossible for that to move the Overton Window.
He’s already demonstrated that he’s far more interesting than she is, not that it was difficult to do so. Dryer lint is more interesting than Karen Bass. But Pratt is doing something most Republicans struggle to do, which is to pull the culture in his direction. That iconoclastic, fearless, and frenetic campaign of his has caught the nation’s imagination, and it’s an outstanding bet you’ll see it replicated across the country as we get into general election season.
Steve Hilton is also a considerable amount more interesting than is Xavier Becerra, though anyone who thinks California’s Democrats will hesitate to steal the governor’s race is utterly delusional. But Hilton, who with 58 percent of the vote counted in the California gubernatorial race was actually leading Becerra, might well force the Democrats to steal that race. We’ll see whether Harmeet Dhillon and the Trump Justice Department will put up with the usual shenanigans.
That’s going to be an interesting thing to watch. But what’s unquestionably true, assuming the current vote standings hold up, is that almost nobody is less interesting than Tom Steyer.
Here’s someone who spent some $220 million and change trying to get elected governor of California, and he couldn’t even make the runoff. This after spending some $340 million trying to get the Democrats’ nomination for president in 2020. His cost-per-vote numbers have to be the worst in American history at this point.
Live results from the 2026 California gubernatorial primary. Hilton leads with 27.8 percent as 57 percent of precincts report.
Yes, some 18,602 people have so far voted for Eric Swalwell. I know how bizarre that is.
More bizarre is Steyer, who’s an atrocious public speaker (with that yappy voice of his and his off-putting, silent-movie staccato body language) and incapable of independent political thought, or much of a message beyond eating the rich and blasting corporations after making all his money betting on them, whose self-funding arrogance has already been utterly repudiated in front of like-minded voters once, thinking this was going to be his moment.
There’s an old — I guess I’m old, given that this is now old — movie that has a great recurring line that I couldn’t help thinking of watching Steyer’s campaign sink beneath the waves as the votes are counted in California. The movie is A Knight’s Tale, starring Heath Ledger, Paul Bettany, and Rufus Sewell. It’s sort of an anachronistic medieval story about a squire who decides to impersonate a knight when his boss drops dead (yes, this is almost exactly the same story as A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms, but it moves faster, it’s less bleak, and it’s funnier). And Ledger, in the lead role, ultimately manages to win the tournament over Sewell, who’s an excellent bad guy with a similar dose of privileged arrogance to Steyer. That allows Ledger and his crew to repeat a line Sewell had used on the hero earlier in the story:
Somebody could very easily do some AI magic on that clip and drop Steyer’s face on Sewell’s character, and it would be an entirely accurate summation of his political career.
But Tom Steyer is not quite as gracious as Count Adhemar of Anjou was as he reclined in the mud. When it was obvious that he was taking a drubbing Tuesday night, here was Steyer, bitching about corporate money and power and bragging about how he’d taken the fight to the fatcats.
What a laughable, pathetic sucker of a failed politician.
Steve Hilton has the odds stacked against him going against Becerra, though Becerra is one of the least talented “name” politicians in America. If Hilton loses, California will suffer pretty terribly under a Becerra administration.
That said, California voters do get credit for rejecting Steyer on Tuesday, and presumably in the days or weeks to come as the votes arrive from movie sets, graveyards, and foreign lands. Giving this raving egomaniac with a penchant for setting his own money on fire power over his fellow man would have been a profound error; at least that appears to have been averted.
READ MORE by Scott McKay:
60 Minutes Is Burning. Bring Marshmallows.
Five Quick Things: Fidelito, At Long Last
Trump Is Blowing Up the Majority? What Majority?
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