In Tuesday’s primaries in California, the outsiders were on the rise: Republican Steve Hilton vaulted to the top of the governor’s race with nearly 28 percent of the vote, ahead of expected front-runner Xavier Becerra. And in Los Angeles, former reality star Spencer Pratt looks set to finish second in the mayor’s race, edging out far-left city councilmember Nithya Raman and setting up a fight with incumbent Karen Bass. What do the results say about the state of the Golden State? That’s the subject of today’s Big Read, by Peter Savodnik.
Before you dive into Peter’s dispatch, we have two videos worth watching. In the first, Peter joins Free Press columnist Caitlin Flanagan and writer Michael Shellenberger to talk through what happened and why. In the second, Free Press video editor Austyn Jeffs goes inside the viral AI ad machine fueling Pratt’s unlikely rise, and meets one of the men behind it. — The Editors
In California’s jungle primary, it’s the Revenge of the Bourgeoisie.
With 62 percent of the statewide vote counted as of Wednesday afternoon, Republican Steve Hilton leads the pack of would-be governors, and with 69 percent of the city vote tabulated, Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt is closing in on Mayor Karen Bass and outpacing über-progressive Nithya Raman.
The message from a growing and very vocal contingent of voters is crystal clear: They want the crazy to stop.
The homeless encampments, the meth heads, the ancient infrastructure, the plummeting test scores, the stratospheric cost of everything—they’ve had enough. They hate that this place that they love, which was once the epicenter of the bold and the new, feels like a rusting, bloated, zombified shadow of its former self.
“It’s not just Republicans,” Hilton told me a few hours before the election returns started coming in last night. He was in Huntington Beach, just south of LA. “It’s a lot of Democrats and independents. Something’s happening in California. People are done with it. They’re done with the chaos and the crime and the squalor. There’s a level of rage that is very, very palpable.”
And they want a return to the old swagger, the old Ray-Ban cool, the California that imagined big and built big and knew that the rest of the world was dying to come here.
