La Dems Are Nursing A Post-spencer Pratt Hangover

LOS ANGELES — “Naked Zombies.” “Super meth.” “Coilers.” 

Spencer Pratt may be out of the Los Angeles mayor’s race after progressive Nithya Raman passed him for second place behind Mayor Karen Bass. But for many Democratic operatives who had fumed over his dehumanizing depiction of the Southland — “coilers,” for example, is a term for excrement — his exit brought only brief relief.

That's because the election pitting onetime allies Bass and Raman against each other is raising fears that a bruising, five-month campaign between the Democratic mayor and sitting City Council member could do more to fracture the Democratic Party in the nation’s second-largest city than any bludgeoning done by Pratt.

“No city should have to deal with someone who thinks of any part of this population as ‘zombies’ or centers their campaign conversation around feces, or ‘super meth.’ So, good riddance,” said Jeremy Oberstein, a Democratic strategist who has not yet supported either candidate in the runoff. “I'm ecstatic that we don't have to deal with that anymore.”

And yet, Oberstein said, “It's rare for a city election in LA to have this kind of tension.”

Call it a case of emotional whiplash.

“I felt a sense of relief. Then very soon after it’s: Oh God, we’re going to be in a fight between two people where we have friends on all sides, and this is not going to be fun,” said LA Forward Executive Director David Levitus, a progressive leader whose group recommended voting for Raman to block Pratt from advancing to the November election.

“Yes, I’m relieved that Spencer Pratt will be out of the discourse,” he added. “That said, it’s not like the next five months are going to be so fun; they're going to be difficult in different ways.”

This isn’t the first Los Angeles mayoral race to feature two Democrats — far from it. In 2005, Jim Hahn was the incumbent mayor when he lost to then-City Council member Antonio Villaraigosa. And Eric Garcetti, then a City Council member, defeated City Controller Wendy Greuel in 2013.

But neither of those contests featured a candidate who endorsed his or her rival before filing to run at the eleventh hour. Raman’s surprise late entry into the race rocked Los Angeles political circles.

Mike Bonin, a former LA City Council member who knows both Bass and Raman well, acknowledged feeling anguished. “It’s always hard when two people that you know and like are running against each other,” said Bonin, the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs executive director who previously endorsed both candidates in other races, but is not endorsing in this contest. “It’s even harder within the more finite universe of City Hall. For the people who are inside the building, that’s just really difficult when you have to look at both of them a couple times a week.”

Raman’s supporters, predictably, were ecstatic about the outcome. Reclaiming the political spotlight after Pratt gobbled up most of the media oxygen, she said in a statement, “An overwhelming majority of Angelenos just voted to replace the current mayor because they’re sick of the status quo — and so am I.”

For Bass and her allies, though, it’s been more of a rollercoaster. The mayor was beaming at her election night party, when initial returns pointed to a stronger-than-expected showing and her spot on the November ballot was secure. (Victory, however, was relative: The fact that she, as an incumbent, is facing a run-off at all is a sign of her wounded political standing.)

Pratt’s eventual loss put an asterisk on Bass’ good night. Despite being subject to his disparaging nicknames and dystopian portrayal of her city, Bass and her allies not-so-secretly hoped to face him in the general election. In deeply Democratic Los Angeles, the math would have been overwhelmingly in her favor; the latest Berkeley IGS poll indicated she’d have a double-digit lead over Pratt in a head-to-head matchup. Against Raman the race will be much tighter — the same poll showed the council member with a slight lead over Bass in a two-person race.

Some of the mayor’s supporters, such as the police union, tried to elevate Pratt to a spot in the run-off. Now they’re bracing for a more competitive intra-party battle.

“There’s definitely a sense of, ‘OK, we’ve got to dig in and work hard now.’ It’s not going to be the easy campaign, it’ll be the tougher one,” said Areen Ibranossian, a strategist who works with business groups that have backed Bass. “That doesn’t mean it’s less winnable, but it’s going to take more time and more money and more effort.”

In a statement, Bass campaign strategist Doug Herman touted the mayor’s primary victory and said she would win “the same way” in November because “she built an unprecedented city-wide coalition that can actually deliver change for Los Angeles.” And then he took aim at Raman’s politics, saying her “votes and policies represent a return to the failed status quo of the past by allowing dangerous and long-standing homeless encampments near schools while she votes to cut the police force and make the city less safe.”

Then there’s this: Pratt, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment, hadn’t conceded as of Thursday. Nor has he sought to lower the temperature among his online followers pushing unsubstantiated claims about election integrity. Pratt supporters furious about the results have increasingly sought, without evidence, to muddy the waters — someone hired a plane on Sunday to pull a banner reading “Stop the Steal! Help us Trump!” over Santa Monica Bay. And among some Democratic operatives, there is a sense that Pratt’s coarse campaign has cheapened the discourse in and about the city. Even though he lost, in their view, Los Angeles lost something, too.

All of it left several political professionals wondering whether Pratt would honor his pledge to leave Los Angeles if he lost the race — and whether the contest could now take a more constructive turn. But, even if he did leave, they were far from certain it would.

“Maybe,” Oberstein said, “Spencer Pratt will move out of Los Angeles as he promised, but let’s move on now, and let’s figure out what this campaign can look like, and not resort to our most animalistic instincts here.”

This reporting first appeared in California Playbook. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every weekday.