MAGA Has a Playbook to Steal the Midterms. They’re Using it in California
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/06/california-election-conspiracy-theories/
MAGA Has a Playbook to Steal the Midterms. They’re Using it in California.
As Democratic candidates surge, the president and his allies baselessly cry fraud.
Republican Spencer Pratt has lost his bid to become Los Angeles' mayor.Jonathan Alcorn/Zuma
“No way this could have happened,” President Donald Trump wrote on TruthSocial early Monday morning. “Rigged Election!”
While he could reasonably have been referring to any number of elections he’s deemed “rigged” over the last decade, in this instance, Trump had turned his bleary eyes to the Los Angeles mayoral race, where a progressive challenger, city council member Nithya Raman, has pulled ahead of reality TV heel-turned-crystal-enthusiast-turned Republican candidate Spencer Pratt. Raman is now set to face incumbent Karen Bass in the general election; her lead over Pratt came from mail-in ballots, which always take a long time to count in California, in part because of stringent verification processes.
But Trump, naturally, smelled something foul. A few hours later on Monday, he posted that it was “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections! Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS.” (Trump has, of course, regularly waged attacks on voting by mail, even though he’s done so himself.)
As the president indicated, votes in the California governor’s race are also still being counted; the Republican candidate, conservative commentator Steve Hilton, is still ahead of Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer in a battle for second place. Whoever wins it will face former Biden HHS secretary Xavier Becerra, the top finisher.
Apart from his ongoing fulminating on TruthSocial, Trump also stormed out of an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that aired on Sunday after Kristen Welker pushed him to substantiate his claims that the California gubernatorial elections were “rigged.”
“You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” he told her, shortly before walking off set. “You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”
Ever since California’s June 2 primary election, the president and his supporters have pushed conspiracies about the still-unfolding results. “The level of fraud here is mind-blowing,” Elon Musk tweeted, linking to supposedly suspicious results in the mayoral race proffered by an X user calling himself “Gays for Trump.”
“We don’t trust your elections… Deal with it.”
“This is blatant fraud,” echoed the account End Wokeness, which has nearly 4 million followers. “The Democrats Have Publicly Stolen The LA Mayoral Race From Spencer Pratt!,” blared a headline on Alex Jones’ post-Infowars website. In a demonstration of how loud the fraud allegations have become, the X account for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk was compelled to publicly reprimand a MAGA content creator who posted chaotic photos from Detroit’s 2020 ballot count, sarcastically misrepresenting them as current pictures of “L.A. polling centers.”
“This is deceptive and feeds misinformation,” the RR/CC account replied.
While pro-Trump forces decrying an election result they don’t like as fraudulent is nothing new, this time, key members of the federal government made it immediately clear that they would turn those suspicions into action. On Friday, Bilal Essayli, the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, claimed on X that there “is evidence of election fraud in California,” adding that “more investigations are underway.”
He also linked to a tweet about his office’s case from earlier this year against Brenda Lee Armstrong, an LA County woman who recently agreed to plead guilty to charges related to paying homeless people to vote. According to her plea agreement, Armstrong, 64, had worked intermittently for the past 20 years collecting voter signatures for ballots and referendums. She began paying unhoused people in L.A.’s Skid Row neighborhood between $2 and $3 to both register to vote and sign petitions, sometimes listing her own home as their address. Far-right video maker James O’Keefe has boasted that his company’s sting of Armstrong led to her being charged. Essayli quoted O’Keefe’s tweet when he announced Armstrong’s indictment on May 18, adding, “California’s lax attitude towards voter registration endangers our democracy. We won’t stand by when ballot box corruption threatens the foundations of our republic.”
It’s not just rehashing the Armstrong case—over the weekend, Essayli also fueled an atmosphere of suspicion in the wake of Election Day by accusing the state of “blocking a federal audit” of voting rolls, adding, “If California genuinely wants voters to trust its elections, it should open its records, not fight to keep them closed. What are they afraid of?” (The Department of Justice previously sued California to compel the state to turn over its voter rolls, a case that was dismissed; the federal government is now appealing before the Ninth Circuit.)
One candidate joined in the conspiracy theorizing themselves. Pratt posted a tweet on Sunday night that read, referring to Rahman’s lead: “A net swing of more than 43,000 votes since Tuesday..43,000, huh? Where have I seen that number before…? Probably nothing.” Below, he included a screenshot of an article saying that there are about 43,000 homeless people in Los Angeles, seemingly implying that homeless people were paid to vote for Rahman. “Remember everyone…we are still in the lead, and we’ve got allllllll the way til July 6th to keep counting,” he wrote earlier in the day. “They’re not the only ones who know where to find votes.” Alongside those words he attached an image of Rahman in tears on election night.
For his part, Hilton, the conservative candidate for governor, has yet to allege voter fraud, but instead went on Fox News to trash California voting officials for a lack of pace, saying that there are “millions” of uncounted ballots “sitting there right now in boxes not being counted because the people in charge have no energy and no pride in getting this done quickly. It’s typical of California under Democrat rule.”
Essayli was also far from the only pro-Trump officeholder to announce they were ready to distort election law to get the president’s preferred results. Other right-wing elected officials responded to the California elections by renewing calls to “federalize” state elections; that is, allow the federal government to administer voting and impose the standards they believe guarantee a fair outcome. This combination—persistent, baseless fraud allegations and Trump loyalists in power willing to act on them—would seem to be a combustible one.
“It’s clear, California is incapable of running free and fair elections consistent with our Constitution that guarantees a republican form of government for states,” Arizona Congressman Abe Hamadeh tweeted, linking to voting results that showed Raman pulling ahead of Pratt in Los Angeles. “Federalize the election.”
A glimpse of what could happen after November’s midterm elections emerged from a conversation between Trump cheerleader Benny Johnson and Will Chamberlain, editor in chief of the far-right publication Human Events. Chamberlain is also a senior counsel at an outfit called the Article III Project, a conservative legal advocacy group that says it fights “lawfare” against President Trump and promotes “constitutionalist” judges. In their conversation, Johnson and Chamberlain suggested that in the future, the Republican controlled-House could simply decline to seat members from California who the majority decides were fraudulently elected.
“The way these elections matter the most federally is in the House,” Chamberlain told Johnson. For “contested House races” that are “close-ish,” he added, “Mike Johnson and the Republican House Caucus in November should look at the results and say, ‘If you’re a California representative and you weren’t ahead on Election Day, we’re not going to seat you until we do a full investigation of your specific election and you prove you won.’ I think that’s the simple way.” That would, Chamberlain added, “wake up California.”
“We have the right to say to Democrats, we don’t trust your elections,” Chamberlain added. “And so we’re not going to trust the results of your elections… Deal with it.”
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