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Popping the Filter Bubble
Part 1 of what may become an ongoing series
Before @seething_spendcel published their post on the Henry Nowak I had actually started writing a post of my own as it had been easily rank in the top-5 if not top-3 of culture war stories for over a week based on the amount of coverage it was getting yet there had been literally Zero discussion of it here. Now I see @Quantumfreakonomics talking about this being a "Slow news week" and how "The current thing is still Graham Platner" and I am suddenly motivated to bring up another top-3 culture war story that does not appear to have been discussed here.
So let's talk about Spencer Pratt and the Unburning of Pacific Palisades.
For those just joining us Spencer Pratt is an MTV Entertainment executive who got his start in reality TV. He lost his home in the 2025 Palisades fire, and he is currently running for Mayor of Los Angeles. His platform is simple, Karen Bass (the Incumbent) is both corrupt and incompetent. He claims that she has been redirecting funds intended to rebuild the burnt-out neighborhoods to her friends while championing policies that make life worse for ordinary Californians.
Those who pay attention to Right-Wing Twitter are no doubt familiar with the proliferation of AI generated ads like this, and the meme about Spencer Pratt contributing money to his opponent's campaigns so they could run more ads like this.
Anyway the important thing that you need to know is that over the last 6 weeks Pratt has gone from being a complete outsider with a snowball's chance in hell to being neck-and-neck with the incumbent, and then last week just days before the polls officially opened, a miracle occurred Google "Unburned" the Pacific Palisades restoring the Google Maps and Street View to their pre-fire state, now Google claims this is all a mistake but many, myself included, would like to know how imagery that was clearly pre-fire came to be labeled as having been taken in May of 2026. I might have believed a story about having to restore the servers from an old back-up even if the timing was a bit suspicious, but clearly pre-fire imagery being labeled as having been taken in 2026 would seem to go a step further than just "a glitch".
Speaking of "glitches". Californians are famously incompetent when it comes to anything involving voting be it Elections or the Academy Awards, polls in person voting was this Tuesday but with the majority of votes being cast by mail it's unlikely we will have an official result till next week and right-wing tweeters have noticed something interesting...
39.3% vote in…
Karen Bass: 117,579
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
42.4% vote in…
Karen Bass: 130,429
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
0 out off 13,000 votes for Pratt would seem to stretch credulity and Gov. DeSantis is calling Shenanigans
Pratt has run an impressive campaign and will probably make it to the runoff given the current margin with the DSA candidate, Raman.
He probably won’t win in the actual election, though. LA’s demographics would make it very hard.
Accounting for demographics, California's heavy Democratic tilt is entirely unsurprising. There's no need to postulate vote fraud (against Republicans, at least), because they're going to lose anyway because of demographic headwinds. You need some other hypothesis to create space for vote fraud, e.g.:
Each of California's demographics are more conservative than the country as a whole, and to get observed California results you need vote fraud to counteract California's demographics' conservative lean.
The country as a whole has levels of vote fraud similar to California, across demographics.
I don't know of anyone who'd argue 1. As for 2, you'd get people arguing for it, but it doesn't make sense then to focus on California; Republicans should instead focus first on states they have any actual power in.
What’s your explanation for why it takes California a month to count votes and later-arriving votes always favor Democrats? Do you think it’s suspicious that late-arriving votes are favoring neither Bass nor Pratt but Raman, the exact outcome needed to knock Pratt out? And do what do you think is a better explanation than fraud for a system that combines no Voter ID with a willingness to mail out millions of unverified ballots?
It's pretty unsurprising if mail voters vote Democrat.
Why? In this case late-arriving ballots aren’t just favoring Democrats but Raman specifically, which is very convenient!
Edit: and it’s the same for the governor’s race! Results have been called for Becerra at 26.72%. Hilton at 26.38% is uncalled although the next trailer Tom Steyer is at 21.03%. Apparently it’s possible that Tom Steyer will overcome the 300,000 ballot deficit he needs to claim 2nd place, but not the additional 20,000 he would need to claim 1st.
Perhaps because Republicans think that their votes won't count if they mail them in. Perhaps because Democrats put off voting more often in lots of different races.
Do I really need to explain to you that LA is full of pinkos who want to elect a socialist? Do you think it's sus that Mamdani won in NYC? Where did the phantasm of the Based Angeleno come from? I can assure you that Angelenos are not Based.
You’re missing the point: the question isn’t why they lean Democrat by why they lean Raman very disproportionately from how they leaned for bass in earlier batches.
You don’t just need to explain why late votes are Democrat but why they are a different kind of Democratic, and the exact one to bring 3rd place into 2nd to keep an R off the ballot.
If late votes leaned D, but with a propoetion
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This is not an explanation. Late-leaning ballots lean Democratic because Democrats vote late — therefore it can’t be because of fraud. But that’s indistinguishable from election fraud! That’s exactly what it would look like if it were fraud. Fraudsters would harvest late ballots that lean Democratic because that’s how they’re cheating.
Is there any reason for California to accept ballots weeks after the election?
Is there any other state on earth that conducts their elections this way?
Look, they’ve created a system where:
All it would take to steal an election is a political machine to harvest ballots, fill them out, and send them in the mail.it would take a few dozen people. This is literally legal in California because ballot harvesting is explicitly legal and there are rules about it. Ballot harvesters exist. They even have rules about “curing” ballots where you can chase down invalid ballots and have them fixed Ie the organization you would need to commit fraud already exists. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s the literal law. We simply trust, without evidence, that every ballot filled out actually touched the hand of a unique voter.
Come on! This doesn’t bother you at all? You don’t have any explanation at all, except that Democrats happen to prefer voting by mail? Which is exactly how it would look if democrats are using mail to commit fraud.
Ballots break for Karen Bass, right up until the day after Election Day, when they start breaking for Raman. I guess the more left-wing you are the more likely you are to fill in a ballot late. It simply cannot be the case that when millions of ballots are floating around without any security at all that someone is stuffing a few ten thousand into mail boxes. That the results benefit one party the same way every time is a statistical artifact. That no other country on earth conducts elections this way is just a stylistic choice. That the same people who would benefit are the same people responsible is a coincidence. There is no evidence of fraud. Is that really what you believe?
Very much an aside, but:
This seems entirely believable to me. At the extreme end, zero-covid loons would all vote by mail and would be overwhelmingly far-left. Very-online far-left agoraphobes would also exclusively vote by mail, which is not true of very-online far-right types (who wouldn’t trust it). More relevantly, far-left PMC types who can’t be bothered to go out to a polling station are more likely to vote by mail. Same for boomer-lib retiree types. Less charitably, dysfunctional zoomer-socialists with self-diagnosed mental illnesses are presumably very likely to send their mail-in votes at the last possible moment. Combine these and similar factors, plus the fact that actual republicans are likely not to trust vote-by-mail systems, and I could easily see a direct correlation between left-wing-ness and propensity for mail voting. I think this is borne out by surveys too, although I admit I don’t remember where I read that.
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