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GELFAND’S WORLD - Most of us thought we were done thinking and talking about the California elections for a while, and we were also hoping to give a rest to the topic of Donald Trump. The events of the week – and particularly of the weekend – caused that view to change. But first, we have to acknowledge some actual breaking news about the Los Angeles mayoral election.
In the later hours of Saturday afternoon, the numbers from the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder showed something remarkable. Remember that at the end of election day and for most of the rest of the week, it looked like Karen Bass had a solid first place lead and that conservative Spencer Platt was solidly in the runoff, ahead of third place Nithya Raman by quite a bit.
We also had a lot of preliminary results from the California Governor primary suggesting that Republican Steven Hilton held a lead over Democrat Xavier Becerra.
These results caused a lot of pundits and commenters (including in the pages of CityWatch) to write rousing statements that California voters were in open revolt. I’d like to think I was a little more restrained, but it is hard to downplay the fact that an incumbent mayor got hardly more than a third of the votes.
And of course we were anticipating 5 months of hearing from our own home-grown L.A. version of Donald Trump in the form of Spencer Pratt.
And then came those Saturday results, which show Nithya Raman jumping into a 3 thousand vote lead over Pratt, which, if maintained, will put Pratt out of the runoff entirely.
We cannot say for sure because there are votes left to be counted, but the trend is going towards Raman. That trend depends on the more slowly counted mail-in ballots being slightly more for Raman than Pratt which implies – all other things staying equal – that we will see a Bass vs. Raman runoff.
Let’s take a brief detour and contemplate the November runoff for California governor. If you simply add up the Democratic votes from all candidates and then compare that number to the Republican total, you will see – assuming that Steyer, Mahan, and Porter voters come home to the Democratic Party -- that Becerra will win easily. There may be some uncertainty over where those Steyer votes are going, but if Xavier can hold onto perhaps two-thirds of them, he wins going away. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Hilton wins. The state is just too different compared to when Reagan, Wilson, and Schwarzenegger were elected.
But, going back to the mayoral race, a runoff between the liberal-left Bass and the further left Raman is going to put some stresses on the voters. It’s reminiscent of a joke told by Ronald Reagan after he was no longer president: “Sometimes the right hand didn’t know what the far-right hand was doing.”
Yes, Reagan could tell a joke, and this one represented an uncomfortable truth. We now have a mirror image joke when it comes down to the mayoral runoff. Our voters will think that they are making a choice between the left and the far left.
Here’s one likely result: There will be an attempt to put together a write-in movement for Los Angeles mayor. The attempt will probably be directed towards the fourth-place finisher Adam Miller. Since Miller finished at less than four percent of the vote, the mathematics of such a movement are dubious. The more likely result (assuming for the sake of argument that Raman does make it to the runoff) depends on where Pratt’s voters decide to go. And they currently represent almost 27% of the votes cast, only about 8% below Bass herself.
The Trump response and the growing concern
Trump has built a story about being cheated in the 2020 election and continues playing that tune, even though a massive load of evidence shows otherwise. In anticipation of the November beat-down that he has been told to expect, he is already building a case that the Democratic Party engages in electoral fraud. He opened up on California in midweek, even before the above-mentioned gains by Raman and Becerra.
You’ve got to wonder whether he really believes any of his own propaganda, because – if he actually does – then it is evidence that his thinking is out of whack. Whether you want to imagine that Trump is truly suffering cognitive decline or instead that he has always allowed his narcissism to override logic, there is something concerning about what we are now seeing.
And it is not going unnoticed by the rest of the world. After Trump walked out of an interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, there was a widespread response, for example this article. We’ll save for later any discussion of how the press itself reacts to being insulted routinely, but you have to admit that what was already chronic is getting to a higher level of abuse.
What numerous medical and behavioral professionals are pointing out is that the president is showing more and more loss of impulse control and more of what they call disinhibition. They point out that their observations are at least consistent with some sort of functional loss.
What we have to remember is that we are talking about two different things here: One is the ability to function as president, particularly in the international realm. The other is Trump’s known propensity for attempting to interfere with free elections within the United States. They are both serious. We have to concentrate on the latter for the next few months.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
