It Wasn't Fraud. It's Steyer $$$$.

LOS ANGELES, Calif - Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had a dream. She would spend the fall of 2026 tying Spencer Pratt to Donald Trump, winning a second term, and calling it a day. It would be less a campaign strategy than a victory lap because in a city where Republicans account for just 14.7% of registered voters and Democrats outnumber them by more than three to one, running against a Republican in Los Angeles does not really require a strategy, even up against a photogenic former reality television star looking for his Hollywood ending.

Instead, Mayor Bass is heading into November against Nithya Raman, which was not the plan, and Tom Steyer is responsible, which was also not the plan. 

The president of the United States spent yesterday on Truth Social declaring California a third-world nation because Los Angeles takes more than one night to count its ballots, which was not anyone's plan but has become a recurring feature of American political life.

California does count its ballots with the urgency of a relaxed DMV, but slowness is not fraud, a distinction the president has chosen not to observe.

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CNN's chief data analyst, Harry Enten, was insulted by the president’s analysis. 

"This is the dumbest conspiracy theory I have ever heard," he said, "because the Democratic establishment and Karen Bass wanted Spencer Pratt in the runoff. They don't want any part of Nithya Raman." 

Enten had the polling to prove his point: Mayor Bass would have crushed Pratt by 18 points. Against Councilwoman Raman, she trails by four. 

"She wanted to face Pratt. She wanted nothing to do with Raman. That's why these conspiracy theories simply put make no sense, people,” Enten said.

Nobody cheated. We will come back to this several times, because it apparently bears repeating.

To understand what actually happened, you first need to understand the beautiful simplicity of the California mainstream Democrat's preferred political reality. 

Natural demographics and Republican Party missteps have conspired for decades to hand Democrats an actual monopoly over California politics. 

Only 25% of California voters identify as Republican, well behind Democrats at 45% and actually trailing the 30% who have decided both parties are disasters and opted for neither. 

So it should come as no surprise that under Top Two, the Democrat-on-Democrat contests can be more competitive in November than Republican-on-Democrat contests in some races. 

Handicapped by a national party that, beyond policy mismatches, also denies non-partisan voters the right to participate in their presidential primary, Republican candidates running statewide in California start every general election with a mountain to climb that would give a Sherpa pause.

Democrats have a very specific prayer they say before every nonpartisan primary. 

Xavier Becerra said it in the governor's race: Please let me face Steven Glenn Charles Hilton, the Trump-endorsed Brit and former Fox News host who held a rally in Huntington Beach where the crowd chanted "USA" as if California were a foreign country they were trying to liberate.

Becerra, a left-of-center, mainstream Democrat with 35 years in public service and the effect of a man who has sat through a great many difficult meetings, would be the first elected Hispanic governor of California, a state with more than 15 million Hispanic residents and the largest Hispanic population in the country. 

His prayers were answered. Becerra will probably beat Hilton this November by a margin so large it will not be worth staying up on election night. 

The only potential speed bump was Steyer, who looked at the California governor's race and made a decision only a billionaire could make: he would spend more than $200 million of his own money on ads alone just to win it. Steyer seems to have really understood all the math; he probably just needed a little more time. 

Steyer’s strategy was to go in a completely different direction from the normal Democrats, and to plant his flag so far to the left that he occupied an entirely different zip code from the center of the party politically. 

Steyer tapped into that socialist lane by funding the far-left progressive infrastructure, sharing lists, financing liberal nonprofits, and supercharging get-out-the-vote operations with resources the socialists had never seen before. All of this while describing himself as "the one candidate who is pushing for real change on behalf of working people, against the corporate special interests that run this state."

But here is the thing about the DSA and Working Families Party that the MAGA election fraud crowd does not understand, or maybe does not want to understand: the progressives do not need to cheat because they have something better than cheating. They have doors. And the more money they have, the more people they have, and the more doors they can visit. 

In the dense urban neighborhoods of Los Angeles, DSA and WFP canvassers engage in ballot harvesting, which is, again, perfectly legal in California and involves organizing people to knock on doors, help voters complete their mail ballots, and collect them for delivery to the government for counting. 

The crucial detail, the one that explains everything about how Los Angeles Councilwoman Raman went from thousands of votes behind Pratt on election night to comfortably ahead of him five days later, is this: the canvassers only knock on doors they have pre-identified as friendly. 

No Republican ballots are being harvested in Los Angeles. Nobody working for the progressive infrastructure is knocking on those doors, which is why those votes came in at the normal pace. 

The progressive votes came in like waves, precinct by precinct, day after day, until Raman had washed Pratt completely out of the way, and even the President of the United States could do nothing about it except complain. 

These groups have always used slates to steer voter choices. So, a guy at the top of the ballot with incredibly high name recognition was also valuable to the slate, and is perhaps partly responsible for the rise of Jane Kim, the leader of the California Working Families Party and Bernie Sanders's former California political director, who is advancing to the general election for state Insurance Commissioner, against a fellow Democrat.

Four years ago, Rick Caruso led Karen Bass by five points on election night and lost by five. That ten-point swing was all DSA and WFP turnout programs. Bass was the beneficiary that cycle, lifted by the same machine that is now working against her with great enthusiasm and no apparent guilt. 

Councilwoman Raman climbed from eight points down on election night to second place, not on the strength of her vision but on the strength of a billionaire's checkbook that was pointed at her neighborhoods for reasons that had nothing to do with her.

A self-declared socialist is the accidental beneficiary of an uber capitalist's self-interest, the lucky winner who caught what fell, the political equivalent of standing in the right place when someone else's very expensive plan went sideways. 

The progressive infrastructure that spends considerable energy loudly opposing billionaire influence in politics has, it turns out, a menu and a price list. Our Revolution, the Bernie Sanders-aligned PAC, endorsed Steyer in April.

Its executive director conceded that endorsing a billionaire would have seemed "highly unlikely" a year ago before concluding that "the most energizing and ideologically aligned candidate just happens to be a billionaire." Just happens to be. Various other progressive groups endorsed Steyer with varying degrees of visible discomfort, warned darkly about the influence of the wealthy, and cashed the checks. 

Don’t worry, everyone found a way to believe they shared the same values. It is the most expensive exercise in motivated reasoning in recent California history, which is saying something because California has a great deal of both money and motivated reasoning.

All of this is legal. The question of whether California's rules, including no ballot ID requirement and unrestricted third-party ballot collection, create conditions worth examining is a legitimate and separate conversation that California would very much prefer not to have. California's rules give a structural advantage to groups organized at the community level, and the DSA has spent years building exactly that kind of organization. 

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This is also, not coincidentally, possibly why the head of the California Democratic Party, Rusty “If you can’t win, get out of the race” Hicks is quietly working to get rid of the top two primary system altogether. 

The establishment would much rather keep its internal arguments about socialism behind closed doors, settle it in closed primaries, and emerge united to defeat a Republican it can beat in its sleep. 

A top two system forces those differences about the economy into the open from June to November in front of everyone, which is sort of terrible for party unity but rather good for voters who would like to know what the people running for office actually believe. 

The establishment's position, essentially, is that democracy is fine, but perhaps there could be a little less of it.

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It’s possible that the DSA and Working Families Party are trying to run the same play inside the Democratic Party that Donald Trump ran inside the Republican Party, except that instead of MAGA rallies, they use canvassers, and instead of Fox News, they use clipboards. 

Trump used tactics to divide the Republicans and conquer what was left. The DSA might just be doing the same thing to the Democrats, cycle by cycle, precinct by precinct.

Last year, DSA darling Zohran Mamdani broke new ground by defeating former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo by 12 points in the New York City Democratic primary before going on to become the first democratic socialist mayor of the largest city in the country.

The traditional liberal Democrats probably watched it happen and called it a New York thing, which is what you say when the alternative is admitting it could happen anywhere. 

(Disclosure: Among those organizations supporting turnout efforts not connected to any candidate or party is the Independent Voter Project, which is also a significant funder of IVN.)