Republicans Never Lose Elections, Apparently

The most important outcome of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary may be that the Republican Party no longer accepts the legitimacy of election defeats. This reflex has spread up and down the party, to everyone including the trailing candidate, Spencer Pratt, and the president of the United States, who grew so enraged when the Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker challenged his election denial that he left the set mid-interview.The refusal to accept the prospect of a Republican defeat in L.A. is bizarre and revealing. The race has not been called, but over the weekend, as more ballots were counted, Pratt fell into third place. Republicans had believed that L.A.’s struggles with public order would create an opening for their candidate. The right-of-center Free Press published seven hopeful stories with headlines such as “Inside Spencer Pratt’s Viral Video Machine” and “Heidi Montag Is Already LA’s First Lady.”The trouble is that the city’s electorate is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republican candidate is a reality-television star with a fondness for pseudoscientific conspiracy theories and nothing resembling qualification for office. Pratt tried to elide the GOP’s reputation in L.A., but Trump blew up that plan by describing him as “a big MAGA person.”The first batch of votes counted showed Pratt in second place, a position that would qualify him for a runoff in November against the leading candidate, currently the incumbent, Karen Bass. But as more votes have trickled in, Pratt has dropped behind City Councilmember Nithya Raman; there are more votes to count, and the final result remains uncertain. This is a predictable dynamic for the state’s voting system; late-arriving mail-in ballots consistently skew Democratic.[Read: The election deniers are winning]You might suppose that “Republicans tend to vote more promptly than Democrats” and “Government agencies in California operate slowly” are hypotheses that conservatives, of all people, would have an easy