Has surging Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt broken the code for defeating the slew of progressive activists backed for elective office by big-money outsider forces in American politics today? By doggedly keeping the focus on local concerns and refusing to engage in the polarizing national agendas of their opponents, Pratt has racked up numbers that suggest any common-sense political candidate can ensure a baked-in advantage to appeal to disaffected voters.
An example of the kind of candidate who may be vulnerable in the Pratt climate of 2026 is Mallory McMorrow, who is running for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Michigan in a primary to be held on Aug. 4. She may be easily characterized as a carpetbagger, moving to the Wolverine State in 2014 and almost immediately running for elected office.
McMorrow, who was born in New Jersey and lived in California, secured a Michigan state Senate seat by 2018. She has been pilloried for deleting some 6,000 social media posts during her current US Senate run, perhaps for good reason. Numerous posts expressed a contempt for Midwesterners and a West Coast bubble mindset that sees flyover country as trite and meaningless.
The Social Media Trail
“There are days like these that make me miss California even more,” one post read. “I had a dream that the US amicably broke off into The Ring (coasts + Can [Canada] + Mex [Mexico] + parts Mich/Tex [Michigan and Texas] and Middle America,” McMorrow reportedly wrote after Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016, The Washington Examiner reported. “I wish I never left California,” she lamented in a November 2016 tweet. Two years later, she was elected to the Michigan state Senate.
Even dicier for “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray” McMorrow is an investigation into whether she continued to vote in California elections after resettling in Michigan.
“Public reporting indicates that Ms. McMorrow may have voted in California, including in the November 2014 general election and the June 2016 Democratic primary, during a period in which she has represented – in her autobiography and again on Instagram – that she had relocated permanently to Michigan in 2014,” a letter from the Center to Advance Security in America sent to the District Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California states. “These reports further indicate that she registered to vote in Michigan very soon after voting in California (August 2016), raising questions as to her residency status at the time she cast ballots in California.”
McMorrow is positioning herself to be the latest anti-Trump progressive Action Hero on the national stage. That’s a pose that has worked for many a Democrat in blue or purple states since 2016 but is rapidly approaching its expiration date a full ten years later. And Republicans have caught on to the political value of platforming the staleness.
The Pratt Phenomenon
“What I know is it’s not enough just to win. It feels really good to kick these m’fers asses,” McMorrow vulgarly exclaims in a video clip summarized by the Republican National Committee in a single word – “cringe” – in a May 7 X post. Her campaign website contains perfunctory nods to local concerns about economic affordability, “kids and families,” education, and healthcare but is animated throughout by national Democratic talking points on hot-button issues.
In the progressive fashion that Pratt in Los Angeles is showing resonates less and less on the community level with each passing day, McMorrow presents polarizing national agendas as local remedies. How to have “safe communities”? Maybe get the homeless off the streets or repeat-offender criminals behind bars? McMorrow has other ideas. She lists six bullet points on gun control, including “Pass federal universal background checks and close loopholes that allow guns to be sold without oversight” and “Pass a federal assault weapons ban.”
She also wants to strengthen “national hate crimes laws and enforcement.” Abortion and “LGBTQ+” rights are central to her “Civil Rights” platform.
Picking through those thousands of deleted social media posts reveals a far less nuanced social radical. “McMorrow deleted dozens of social media posts in which she endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement, praised athletes who protested the national anthem” and “lauded ‘trans women,’” The Washington Free Beacon reports. Even she realizes these once-passionate beliefs are not in vogue today.
But here’s the key point. As the Pratt phenomenon shows, it’s not a matter of arguing against this loaded agenda. It’s more about effectively labeling the outsider who reveals her transparent lack of identification with the genuine local problems that voters are far more troubled by in a time of growing social and economic fragility.
“Mallory McMorrow from New Jersey and California may think that we’re backwards, but we certainly don’t,” Michigan News Source News Director Katie Heid told Liberty Nation News in an interview this month. “So, we want politicians representing us that believe in our values and believe what we stand for and [will] get Michigan back up and running because it’s been a little bleak under [Democrat] Governor [Gretchen] Whitmer, if you look at the numbers for unemployment and taxes and things of that nature.
“So I think Michigan is definitely interested in people who live here, who have roots here, and who are interested in making it a permanent home here. And if they’re elected to office, will make things better for their constituents as well.”
What an amazing way to frame a political campaign. Accentuate the local and leave the “sex work is work” (a core George Soros issue championed in the Democratic US Senate primary battle in Michigan) babble to your outsider money-fueled, increasingly out-of-touch opponent. It’s a winning formula that does not apply only to Los Angeles.
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