For the past decade, the Democratic Party and its far-Left allies have engaged in grievance politics. They've pushed for 'criminal justice reform' and 'equity,' called for reparations, and pushed for legislation to protect mentally ill men under the guise of 'trans rights.'
The Left sees the world through a lens of oppressor v. oppressed, and — as we all know — the oppressors are always Whites, Christians, America, and Western Civilization. Anyone else is a victim of colonization, systemic racism, Islamophobia, or anti-trans bigotry.
In short, grievance politics has been their bread and butter, their key to winning elections and holding onto power. And they don't like it now that someone else points out legitimate grievances. This time, that's Spencer Pratt, who is running a good, if ultimately Quixotic, campaign to be the next mayor of Los Angeles.
Pratt, like countless other Los Angelenos, lost his house in the wildfires that swept the region in January 2025. Those fires killed at least 12 people, and were started by a Leftist lunatic who idolized Luigi Mangione (much to the disappointment of the climate change cult).
Were Pratt a woman, a minority, a socialist, or a member of some other grievance group, the Left would bend over backwards to validate his feelings, elevate his voice, and use his personal suffering as grounds for legislation and political change.
But he's a straight White dude, so instead of listening to his concerns, which also happen to be the concerns of countless other Los Angelenos whose houses are nothing more than a pile of ash, Pratt is a 'hyper-local version' of Trump and 'grievance politics.'
Spencer Pratt’s campaign for mayor of Los Angeles practises a hyper-local version of Trumpian grievance politics. Want our take on it? Register for free to read the story https://t.co/kVGvBHKLpD
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) May 30, 2026
Simply incredible.
Here's more (emphasis added):
Mr Pratt would not be gaining momentum in heavily-Democratic Los Angeles if things were going well. Unlike California’s other big cities, which have rebounded from pandemic population declines to varying degrees, Los Angeles lost more people than it gained last year. In 2024 the median sale price of a single-family home in the region was nearly 11 times higher than Angelenos’ median household income. Contraction in Hollywood and the collapse of film and TV production in Los Angeles has led to a 30% decline in entertainment jobs in California since 2022. City services are poor. It takes a year, on average, to replace a streetlight due to copper theft and staffing shortages. When a city repaves a street, the Americans with Disabilities Act often requires it to make costly wheelchair-access upgrades as well. So Los Angeles just stopped repaving streets.
Ms Bass is not arguing that things are rosy. “I inherited a hot mess,” she told supporters recently. Her main pitch is, essentially, that something is rotten in Los Angeles, and only a person with her experience and connections in Sacramento and Washington (she is a former state assembly speaker and congresswoman) can turn things around. That may be true, but it will be hard as an incumbent to convince voters that she is an agent for change.
Consider homelessness, one of the city’s most intractable problems. The mayor’s signature programme, Inside Safe, moves homeless people out of encampments and into shelter at great cost to the city. The number of people sleeping outside has declined by roughly 18%, to about 27,000, since 2023. Yet an analysis by the Los Angeles Times found that 40% of those helped by Inside Safe as of December were back on the street. At an event for the Los Angeles Business Council, Ms Bass seemed to admit defeat. “We don’t know where they are!” she said of those missing 40%. “Some of them might not even be alive anymore.”
I won't share posts here, because I find them deeply disturbing, but on Skid Row, the homeless abuse, trade, and sell dogs for drugs and other things. It's horrific and unsettling.
The Economist itself admits things are bad, and that the failed incumbent Karen Bass has a hard time convincing people she can fix things if they just give her another chance. When the fires broke out, Bass was too busy trying to elevate her career to a higher office to be bothered to care about her city burning. She was in Ghana, and when she came back and was questioned about her absence, she basically pleaded the Fifth.
Remember, also, that Bass was on Joe Biden's short list for VP in 2020. Her ambitions go far beyond, L.A. and — like many Democrats — she's hoping to fail her way up the political ladder.
But I digress.
The reason Trump won in 2016 is the same reason why Pratt is doing well in L.A.'s mayoral race: they actually recognized legitimate grievances from groups who have actually been marginalized and maligned. For Trump, it was listening to and speaking to voters who had been dismissed by Democrats as bitter clingers or a basket of deplorables. Trump also addressed concerns by Republican voters about a GOP that often promised big and failed to deliver, including nominating milquetoast candidates who refused to fight Democrats or, bluntly, lacked the intestinal fortitude to even try.
In L.A., families have been pushed to the edge. They've seen their parks and public streets taken over by homeless and drug addicts. They've watched crime go unchecked. They've looked at their bank accounts as taxes and cost of living skyrocketed. And then they were dealt a death blow: their entire world burned down. While the wildfires may not have been totally preventable, the wilful negligence of Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass made them orders of magnitude worse.
Most sane people would have a grievance or two after that, especially when the best Bass can offer them in a second term is making sure those meth-heads have really nice teeth, courtesy the taxpayers who can't get permits to rebuild their homes.
This is, in part, because solving actual grievances is not just foreign to the Democrats, it's anathema. Look at their pearl-clutching over Trump cleaning up the National Mall. Are we supposed to be scandalized by the fact that Trump used National Parks fees and budgets to pay for cleaning up part of the National Mall?
Because I'm not, and no one outside of the Left is, either.
They're just not used to getting results for our money, and they have to reflexively oppose anything President Trump says or does.
And they're not used to addressing legitimate grievances. Solving problems doesn't help them hold onto power, and it doesn't justify continued massive amounts of spending. So, suddenly, those grievances don't matter to the Left. They're grounds for mockery, dismissal, and sneering. They're 'Trumpian' and, therefore, irrelevant.
It just might lead to them handing L.A. to a Republican.